Light ‘em up

I just called my Congressman and urged him to give Big Hank Paulson the finger on his insane $700 billion to buy worthless assets. I strongly urge you to do the same. Some of the general points I made include:

• The administration is essentially arguing that the treasury secretary should have unchecked power to buy up garbage assets without any congressional oversight. This is completely unacceptable.

• The panicked way this administration is pushing Congress to enact this godawful rescue plan is akin to how it bullied Congress into voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Do not let yourselves be bullied.

• Given the bang-up job this administration has done in rebuilding both Iraq and the Gulf Coast, do you really want to give them $700 billion to play with? Could you please step back and think before you vote?

• If these Wall Street a-holes are going to be unloading their shitty debt onto us, I want them under an iron fist of regulatory power. In particular, I want the CEOs of all participating firms to have their salaries and benefits slashed as punishment for making us pay to keep their sorry asses out of the local homeless shelter.

This is a very big deal, peeps. While it may not have the immediacy of opposing the Iraq war, it will have very serious consequences to our financial futures if it passes as proposed. You can find your congressman by entering in your zip code here.

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Pitchforks and torches, my friends

William Greider ably lays out the stakes:

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: Dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses — many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public — all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics — exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

And that’s really what it comes down to.

If Obama agrees to this nonsense, I will not vote for him — it’s as simple as that. In fact, I will not support any Democrat who gets on board with this. They will have lost any goddamn credibility as even semi-responsible stewards of my tax dollars. Of all the shit sandwiches that Bush has force-fed us for the last eight years — from the Iraq war to the disastrous response to Katrina to deficits fueled by tax cuts to rich people — this may be the stinkiest and slimiest one yet. Bush is asking us to fork over $700 billion to purchase worthless assets just so his Wall Street friends won’t have to own up to the miserable decisions they’ve made over the past two decades.

Make no mistake, this massive bailout will slow economic growth for years to come and it will make financing much more important and worthwhile projects incredibly difficult. It will put us further in debt with China and will make us less competitive in the global economy. It will give the treasury secretary vast new powers with absolutely no checks and balances. Christ, even some of the dim bulbs at the National Review understand this:

I’m not an economist, and I wouldn’t pretend to be one, but just as an observer of Washington, and as someone who has worked on the Hill and at the White House, it is simply apparent from this draft that this program will get completely out of control very quickly. It gives the Secretary of the Treasury essentially unlimited power to use $700 billion to make purchases the scope of which is defined very loosely and vaguely.

If there was ever a time to stand athwart history and yell “EAT ME!!!” it’s now. Democrats, give Bush the finger on this bailout plan or you’ll completely lose my support. And then I’m going to start busting out the damn pitchforks and torches.

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Shorter Entire Right-Wing Blogosphere

The Democrats Did It

• We agree with Investors’ Business Daily, which says that the reason for the current financial crisis is that the Community Reinvestment Act passed by the Democrats forced banks to lend money to a bunch of shiftless darkies who couldn’t repay their loans.

Shorter Response: A study of CRA loans shows:

• CRA loans constituted only 23% of all loans and 9.2% of high-cost loans.
• CRA loans were twice as likely to be retained in the originating bank’s portfolio than loans made by other institutions.
• CRA loans were less likely to be foreclosed upon than other loans.

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It’s time to bring back the public stocks

Jesus Christ:

U.S. Stock Markets Soar on Financial Rescue Plan

The government’s financial rescue plan continued to spur a immense Wall Street rally today as investors rushed back to the market.

After shooting up more than 400 points at the opening bell, The Dow Jones industrial average was up more than 370 points, a 3.4 percent gain, by 2:30 p.m. That is on top of a 400-point gain late yesterday after news of a government program began to emerge and could bring the market to break-even for the week. The technology-heavy Nasdaq was up 2.5 percent and Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 3.7 percent.

Global markets also traded up on the news. European markets rose on the order of 5 to 9 percent, while Asian markets overnight added anywhere from 4 to 9 percent.

In what amounts to a further restructuring of the financial market, the government said it would take on the bad debts of troubled financial firms, prop up money-market mutual funds and temporarily ban short selling of financial stocks. After watching the demise of Lehman Brothers, the quick sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America and a $85 billion loan to salvage American International Group, investors appeared more confident that the government intervention could have a lasting impact.

“It’s a massive relief rally on the back of the comprehensive plan,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist for Merk Investment. “If you have hundreds of millions of mortgage-backed securities on your books that you cannot value — much less sell — you can now unload them to the U.S. government.”

In other words: the stock market is rallying because stupid rich people won’t have to suffer any consequences for the shitty investments they’ve made over the past decade.

It’s times like these where I start getting pitchfork-and-torches angry. Make no mistake, this bailout plan will have a massive opportunity cost. National health care just became that much more difficult because we’re going to be spending $1 trillion to bail out a bunch of irresponsible Wall Street assholes. The sheer amount of shit that the American taxpayer is about to devour cannot be calculated. Our choice boil down to:

• Borrowing a crapload more money from the Chinese and adding God knows how much to our national debt.

• Paying significantly higher taxes and getting precisely nothing in return except for the knowledge that rich people won’t feel bad about themselves.

It’s time to bring back the pillory stocks, my friends. I want Bush, Paulson, Cox, Bernanke and the heads of AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Fannie and Freddie locked up for years on end so that we may hurl vegetables and feces at them to our hearts’ content. Because hey, if we’re going to be sacrificing our Social Security and our health insurance to save the Wizards of Wall Street, we might as well get *something* out of the deal.

UPDATE: It’s a cold day in hell when I agree with Larry Kudlow:

The decision by SEC Chairman Chris Cox to ban short selling is a terrible idea. It is an encroachment on free-market principles. In extreme, the absence of short sellers would inflate stock market upturns, probably into bubbles. Short sellers keep the market honest. I know many in the short-selling community and most of them really do their homework. They are skeptical about puff pieces on companies and they are properly cynical about corporate press releases.

If anything, we should be thanking the short sellers for calling bullshit on a lot of these financial institutions. Now the SOBs will feel free to invest billions more into shit sandwiches and tell us how awesome they taste.

Goddammit I’m pissed.

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Feh. Indeed.

Ol’ Perfesser:

Why do hurricanes that hit Texas get so much less attention than hurricanes that hit New Orleans?

Ike should be getting more attention. That it’s not, maybe has something to do with stuff like this:

Covering the hurricane’s aftermath brought additional challenges. Literally adding insult to injury, Galveston’s mayor, Lyda Ann Thomas, “on Monday ordered all city employees not to talk to news reporters. She did not say when that order would be lifted,” according to an article by the Daily News’s Rhiannon Meyers …

But don’t bother the Ol’ Perfesser with details. He’s more interested in the meta narrative:

UPDATE: Another reader emails: ‘If you want to discuss lack of coverage, wasn’t the hurricane that hit New Orleans the same hurricane that nearly wiped the Mississippi gulf coast off the map?” Yes. Why did New Orleans get so much more attention? Is it because the media wanted to paint the Bush Administration as racially insensitive, or is New Orleans just the only place they could find on a map?

As a native San Franciscan, this touches on a detail that’s always bothered me. Why did the media focus so much on the devastion to the city from the 1906 earthquake and fire, and not pay as much attention to damage in lightly populated outlying areas where orders of magnitude less people were killed or made homeless? Why, the press of the time didn’t even say much at all about the actual epicenter of the Great Quake! In the context of Katrina, is Muscle Shoals the Mussel Rock of modern media failure?

Heh. Indeed. Read the whole thing.

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My dreams frighten me

OK, so I just had a dream where Barack Obama said something along the lines of “We shouldn’t be feeding Coca-Cola to our kids for breakfast in our public schools” and the wingnutosphere went into a full freak-out mode. Confederate Yankee, Ace and Jules Crittenden each conducted scientific “studies” purporting to show that Coke was too the most healthy drink ever concocted (basically, they amounted to Mr. Yankee snorting a whole two-liter bottle of Coke through his nostrils and writing “I ain’t dead yet, Obammy! Whatcher fancy books say ’bout that!”). Michelle Malkin linked to them and added a “snort” and then said, “Hey Barry, stop telling our kids to drink your fancy arugula juice!” The Ole Perfesser “heh-indeeded” like crazy and said something like, “Well, I’m not sure whether Coke is healthy for you or not, but Obama will regret insulting the millions of Coke-drinking Americans. Heh!” And then by the next day, Howie Kurtz had devoted his entire Media Notes column to covering “Soda Gate.”

And you know what the goddamn saddest part about this dream was?

Right after waking up, I went online to see if it had actually happened.

I need to stop reading right-wing blogs.

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Economy, Schmeconomy

Just think how much more awful this economic tailspin would be if social security had been privatized by Bush and McCain a couple years back. We’d have our retirement fund in the shitter along with Lehman Brothers right about now.

Luckily, Nancy Pelosi and the Dems led the Congressional charge in kiboshing that insanity back in 2005. Go ahead and make mention of that little fact on the campaign trail, Obama. You too, Biden.

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Dirty Tricks For Troopergate Dicks?

The media is dutifully reporting that Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was hacked by some malicious third party. The wingnutosphere has dutifully transmogrified the /b/tards into a partisan liberal affinity group, if not an official arm of the Obama campaign apparatus.

Thing is, we still don’t know much about who spread Palin’s Yahoo login and password around the Intertubes. And would it be entirely tinfoil-hatted to wonder a little bit about the convenience of Palin being victimized yet again, even as economic turmoil threatens to move the national narrative away from spunky, disrespected moose hunters to, you know, important stuff?

Or whether a governor whose email correspondence has been subpoenaed as part of an ongoing abuse-of-power investigation might benefit from some serious media fog being blown over said email correspondence?

To be fair, there’s probably no other way for the mainstream press to report this thing at the moment, other than to take the third-party hacker story at face value. And really, /b/tards being /b/tards isn’t exactly an implausible explanation for L’Affaire Lulz. At least the Em-Ess-Em doesn’t seem to be taking the wingnut bait to label Anoymous as a ‘liberal’ enterprise.

Still, you’ve got to wonder if more is going on here. There’s certainly the whiff of a Rovian gambit here.

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Sherlock Hoft and the Adventure of Black Peter

ABOVE: Sherlock “Jim” Hoft

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Sherlock Hoft, aka “The Gateway Pundit,” has broken out his detective cap, toy pipe and junior gumshoe magnifying glass and applied his super sleuthing skills to tracking down the malefactors who hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. And guess who he’s discovered behind it? The scary Negro, that’s who!

Quoting one of the geniuses at RightPundits, who is playing Watson to Hoft’s Holmes, Hoft has this to say:

According to an internet security expert located in San Francisco, Gabriel Ramuglia, the Palin email hackers were careless and left a digital trail. That trail leads directly to a server site in Chicago which happens to be the city where all of Obama’s men plot their daily moves.

Now before you say “big fucking deal, Chicago’s a big city,” let me remind you that Obama had Bill Ayers slip LSD into the Chicago municipal water supply, which turned everyone in Chicago into an Obamazombie, each of whom acts only according to instructions that they receive from Obama HQ. So if something happens in Chicago, Obama did it.

Sherlock Hoft and his trusty assistants at RightPundit clearly think that the hackers were in Chicago, but if you read the enitre interview with Ramuglia and not the portion that Hoft cites you’ll quickly see that either Hoft is functionally illiterate or he has turned his magnifying glass backwards. The missing part of the interview is bolded below:

Ramuglia got into the proxy business a few years ago, after schools began blocking access to an online game site he used to co-own. Pretty soon, people began using the proxy service to access YouTube, Gmail, MySpace, and dozens of other sites that are routinely blocked by IT departments.

To prevent abuse of the service - such as the occasional bomb threat or other illegal act that’s been known to happen - Ramuglia logs each user’s IP address, along with the time and web destination. …

The information at the moment is on a server at a Chicago colocation site owned by FDC Servers.

Yep. That’s right. The proxy service’s servers were in Chicago; the hackers could have been anywhere in the world where an Internet connection was available which is, you know, kinda the whole point of the Internet.

Coming up next: Sherlock Hoft proves that Obama personally engineered the stock market crash because Lehman Brothers has an office in the Chicago Loop.

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It’s Raining Moose, Hallelujah

Palin speak, you lissten:

During a quick stop at a diner in Cleveland, Ohio, Sarah Palin was asked for her reaction to the AIG bailout.

‘Dissapointed [sic] that taxpayers are called upon to bailout [sic] another one,’ she said.

Normally, I’d blame the siccage on the reporter, but with Palin, I’m not so sure.

‘Certainly AIG though with the construction bonds that they’re holding and with the insurance that they are holding very, very impactful to Americans so you know the shot that has been called by the Feds its understandable but very, very disappointing that taxpayers are called upon for another one.’

Maybe the /b/tards who hacked Palin’s email ran off with all of her punctuation and connecting verbs, too.

Told that her traveling press corps was getting lonely in the back of her campaign plane, Palin said, “Are you getting lonely? Gee, yeah, come on up then!”

Rowr!

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The Onion Pwns

Obama Promises To Stop Americaâ??s Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas

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Exclusive: Secrets of Pantload Punditry Revealed

ABOVE: Jonah Goldberg (left) and bag of cheetos
(right)

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Like many of us, you’ve probably always wanted Jonah’s gig. You know, getting paid to sit at your laptop all day, swilling down mocha frappuccinos, and posting your random thoughts, emails from readers, and links to time-wasting games. Well, even if you’re not Lucianne Goldberg’s son, you too could become another Jonah, if you just follow the few simple rules which have served Jonah so well and which we’re about to reveal in this Sadly, No! exclusive report.

To discover these rules, we need look no further than Jonah’s post on Westbrook Pegler, a nasty right-wing nutjob quoted by Sarah Palin in her “Gitten’ Ta Know Ya” address to the RNC. When Palin was criticized for quoting Pegler, Jonah started muttering “must protect, must protect” to himself and started typing away:

I’m not much interested in defending Westbrook Pegler. But I find this very earnest screed by Marty Peretz, in which he beats up Sarah Palin for a completely innocuous quote by Pegler quite amusing. … The line Palin used: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” And from that Peretz launches into a parade of horrible quotations from Pegler, some of which may well be out of context.

This clever rhetorical flourish, which we will dub the “flying reverse shuffle ploy,” is central to Jonah’s effort-free theory of blogging. You don’t need to know if the quotes are out of context. You just say that they “may” be out of context, thereby subtly shifting the burden of proof away from your own fat and lazy ass and onto your critics.

There are a number of possible uses of the “flying reverse shuffle ploy.” For example: “Jonah may well be unable to move around much because of gerbil bites inside his rectum” or “Jonah’s book Liberal Fascism may well have been made up in large part while Jonah was addicted to, and under the influence of, injected Oxycontin.”

Among the parade of horrible quotations cited by Peretz is a statement Pegler made hoping for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Pegler said he hoped “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.” Truly a loathsome sentiment, but Jonah has this covered:

While I don’t have time to hunt down the context of [the RFK quote], it might be kept in mind that Pegler often spoke in other people’s voices, often to mock them. In the 1930s … Pegler skewered the Klan with this literary device. If memory serves, he also pretended to be Jimmy Hoffa in a column attacking Bobby Kennedy. For all I know that’s where the gross Kennedy quote is from.

This is truly brilliant and contains a number of devices that you too can use in your quest to emulate Jonah. First, there is the “pre-emptive research diversion” — a standard device where Jonah claims to lack time to do research in order to divert the reader from the fact that Jonah does nothing but blog all day and has plenty of time to answer the question. By appealing to his overloaded schedule, Jonah cleverly disguises that he doesn’t hunt this down because (a) that would require work and (b) Jonah has already made up the context of the quote on his own. Then we have the faulty memory defense (”if memory serves”) deployed in order to allow Jonah to avoid being accused of making stuff up if in fact what he allegedly remembers — a Pegler/Hoffa/Kennedy column — never was written. And finally Jonah deploys, with a striking flourish, the solipsistic slam dunk — “for all I know” — which shrewdly allows Jonah to admit pulling something out of his ass while still claiming to have some basis for the statement. Another use of the solipsistic slam dunk: “For all I know, Jonah hasn’t seen his own penis without using a mirror for seven years.”

Now you have to stand back in awe and wonderment at what the Pantload has accomplished here. Without a single shred of evidence or research, Jonah has deployed these four simple techniques so that the RFK quote no longer represents what Pegler thought but represents instead what Pegler might have thought Hoffa might have said about Kennedy in a column that Pegler might have written about Kennedy in Hoffa’s voice.

And for those expecting an apology from me for impolitely mocking Jonah’s penis, I was just quoting, if memory serves, what, for all I know, K-Lo may have said about Jonah in a post I think she wrote, but which I don’t have time to find, after he rejected her invitation to come to a private “slumber” party at her house.

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Holy shit

Woof.

We’re looking at two 450-point drops in the Dow in the span of three days. That’s pretty goddamn bad. Hopefully, Americans will figure out that eating moose doesn’t qualify you to fix this bloody mess.

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Shorter Michelle Malkin

The book-banners Hollywood ignores

• So, she asked about banning some books. Big deal! You don’t want your kids reading about homos at the public library, do you?

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The Most Glibertarian Thing Ever Said

Megan McArdle:

The FDA is notoriously risk averse when it comes to new drugs, a legacy of events like the Thalidomide horrors, when pointless foot-dragging on the approval accidentally protected American mothers from limbless babies.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Megan is hostile towards the agency charged with tracking down inedible sludge advertised as food.

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An ad made of awesome

Sifu Tweety, take a bow:

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One-Man Peanut Gallery

Jimmy Carter really owns the inside of Jay Nordlinger’s skull*, doesn’t he? Why does the National Review continue to allow this weird time traveler from the Carter era to bore us all with his meandering, corny screeds?

I wonder whether any of the four candidates (Obama, Biden, McCain, and Palin) could define the Carter Doctrine. I wonder how many of Palin’s critics could. But they have a view on the Persian Gulf, and what this country’s interest is there. Yes?

Look, George Ball knew the lingo as well as anyone — he was the one Carter really wanted for secretary of state. (He couldn’t follow his heart, however, because Ball was simply too anti-Israel for the country to accept.) And would you want Ball at the levers of American foreign policy? If you’re a devotee of NRO, probably not.

Anyway, you get my drift …

Maybe they pay him in 1979 dollars.

*Talk about your sub-primes.

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On Your Earmarks, Get Set, Fail!

ABOVE: Cap’n Special Ed

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Special Ed, the blogger formerly known as Cap’n Ed Morrissey, has been spewing more bilge water to defend Sarah Palin from the earmark business. Rather than the resorting to the typical “blar blar blar POW sexist Democrats blar blar lipstick blar blar POW,” Special Ed has decided to go for the gusto with this argument: “Palin didn’t request any earmarks.”

Now you probably imagine that Ed is going to prove this vastly amusing premise by examining the fonts and kerning in appropriations legislation and claiming that they reveal that the Alaska earmarks actually came from the Governor of Connecticut. But Special Ed has decided to focus his keen intellect and kerning skills on the definition of “earmark.” You see, if you define “earmark” as an “earlobe tattoo,” for example, then it’s game over. Do ya see any earlobe tattoos on Palin? Huh? HUH?? Then she didn’t request any earmarks. So there, you silly liberals.

You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Sadly, no:

Earmarks are not equivalent to all federal spending … . If these requests did not come in earmark form, then Congress has the opportunity to vote directly on spending the money in Alaska based on the legitimacy of the projects. Earmarks, on the other hand, get slipped into bills without such Congressional scrutiny and are almost impossible to remove regardless of the uselessness of the project.

Palin didn’t ask for earmarks, but for federal funding for projects, which could have come from normal appropriations requests as well. The mechanism gets chosen by Alaska’s legislators, not by the Governor.

That is just out and out pathetic. Morrissey, who has less qualifications to talk about earmarks than Palin does to be a city sanitation supervisor, has, rather than drawing on any experience with the legislative process, shoved his stubby little fingers into his capacious posterior, pulled out a few dingleberries, and is waving them around as savory delicacies before, you know, eating them.

Although there is some disagreement around the edges about the definition of earmark, Special Ed has hit pretty wide of the mark. The Office of Management and Budget — which, by the way, is run by the White House and not by a band of deranged Palin-hating liberals — has the most concise and widely-accepted definition of an earmark.

Earmarks are funds provided by the Congress for projects or programs where the congressional direction (in bill or report language) circumvents the merit-based or competitive allocation process, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the Executive Branch to properly manage funds. Congress includes earmarks in appropriation bills - the annual spending bills that Congress enacts to allocate discretionary spending - and also in authorization bills.

Oops. Special Ed has indeed drooled on himself once more. An earmark is funding provided to specific locations without a request from the White House and without the ability of the White House to control or redirect those funds. They don’t occur in a special piece of legislation, as Ed apparently imagines (cf. “in earmark form”), titled “Earmark Appropriations” or some such. Funding headed to Alaska for specific projects at the direction of Congress are earmarks, whether or not they are in normal appropriations legislation or any other type of legislation.

Of course, Special Ed has a few concerns that perhaps he’s gotten things jumbled up and that his definition of earmark is a mash-up of things he learned watching Fox News and things he remembered from seeing late-night reruns of Gilligan’s Island, so he has a back-up plan:

Also, it’s pretty easy to miss the fact that Governors can’t earmark, because they aren’t members of Congress. Palin would have to rely on Ted Stevens, Lisa Murkowski, and Don Young to propose legislation for her funding requests, and none of these three have any hesitation to use earmarks rather than legislation.

Uh oh. The “technical” argument. Palin didn’t ask for the earmarks, the Alaska delegation did. Nevermind that Palin hired a lobbyist to ask the delegation for earmarks. Nevermind that (according to sources inside Lisa Murkowski’s office) Palin and her minions relentlessly called Murkowski’s office (and presumably those of Stevens and Young) on a near-daily basis to harangue them and ask where the money was. She didn’t “request” the earmarks.

This is a very useful argument, both for six-year olds and for wingnut bloggers. For example, Bush didn’t invade Iran Iraq, the soldiers did. Cheney isn’t responsible for torturing people, the torturers are. McCain doesn’t “own” three thousand houses, his wife does. I didn’t hit my sister, Mommy, the stick I was holding did.

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Always Bet On Blink

Sarah Palin’s America

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The Pantload is hedging like John McCain and Phil Gramm spreading the social security fund in dozen bets around a Vegas roulette table:

McCain Blinks

I think there’s something unseemly to scoring the financial crisis on political terms, but that’s apparently how everyone else is responding too.

I think there’s something unseemly about appearing in public with donut jelly dribbling down your chin, but … well, actually I just think that’s unseemly. The larger point, though, is that MCCAIN HAS BLINKED! Didn’t he get the message? Snowbilly POW McAmericavericks are NEVER supposed to blink … or the economists will win!

I saw the beginning of The Today Show this morning. Their set-up piece (by Andrea Mitchell, fwiw) made it very clear McCain is on the defensive on the economy again. Earlier in the day he said ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong.’ Obama seized on that, ridiculed McCain, cut an ad attacking him for saying it etc. …

McCain shouldn’t apologize for his initial statements. Indeed, McCain should stop being defensive about his political instincts in areas like this.

For once, I agree with Jonah. McCain should absolutely go with his gut on economic talk. And never, ever, under any circumstance, blink.

Obama wants this to be about ‘the economy’.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha … ‘the economy’! Is that even a real thing? Only to dirty blinking hippies!

McCain’s instinct is to make this about leadership in a crisis. That’s the right instinct. Obama sees nothing wrong with screaming that the sky is falling during a stock-market meltdown in order to score political points. McCain’s impulse was to argue for calm at the moment when it is needed.

Perhaps. Alternatively, McCain’s impulse was CYA with a dash of personal exposure in the developing investment bank meltdown. But what do I know? I periodically moiston the surface of my peepers via lipid secretions triggered by the relaxation of levator palpebrae superioris muscles affixed via tendons to thin folds of skin nestled in my ocular orbits.

Real leaders don’t even own meibomian glands! Before giving up ground so easily on ‘the economy’, McCain should remember that he is made of sterner palpebral stuff.

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Best Advice Ever

Cap’n Ed Morrissey on the Lehman Brothers fiasco and the ongoing death spiral of our economy:

Team McCain did a good job in getting in front of the issue, but today’s turmoil will likely redound to Barack Obama’s benefit unless they can start talking policy and how Obama’s tax and spending proposals will hurt the people most needed to return stability back to the markets. Now more than ever, we need low capital-gains tax rates to encourage investment and risk-taking in order to create more strength in the economy.

Good stuff. We need to encourage even more reckless risk-taking, not put the brakes on the regulatory free-for-all that led to this mess, much less figure out a way to incentivize fiscal responsibility in a nation with negative savings. Let’s go with this, McCain campaign!

PS: Please also talk a lot about how you still want to hand over social security to collapsing investment banks, that will get you lots of votes.

But who should be the face of the McCain ‘let ‘er ride’ platform? HotAir.com commenter ‘jp’ has a brilliant suggestion:

They need to run ads of just Palin, and her speaking to the Energy Inpedence issue and what she did in Alaska and can do for the rest of the country.

Oh, God, please make this happen.

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