Politick

Palin Wins Debate .. With Katie Couric!

If you look at the debate from a TV perspective, the big winner was Sarah Palin, who out-debated her caricature.  From a political perspective, she also won - her performance will probably have more of an impact than Biden's on the campaign, by arresting the slide of McCain.  From a debate perspective, she lost - the winner was Biden, who figured out that the way to debate a woman candidate is not to, so instead he jabbed at McCain very successfully.  She was so intent on out-debating the Katie Couric interview that she got very few counter punches in. 

From a civic point of view, we all lost - this debate was rife with misstatements and outright lies.  McCain didn't vote twice on key bills with Obama - flat out lie by Biden.  McCain's health plan is not revenue neutral - flat out misrepresentation by Palin. Etc. Etc.  You can look it up on all the fact checking sites.  People tended to commend the moderator's evenhandness, especially given she wrote an adoring book on Obama, but she completely failed to call out the candidates as Jim Leher tried to. 

UPDATE: post-debate fact-checking pegs Biden the big winner, or we should say loser, for the preponderance of whoppers, with 14 big ones, including 7 lies in 60 seconds on Bush's Middle East policy.

Biggest loser: Hillary - a new gal in town for 2012!
Second biggest: Tina Fey - no new material for Saturday Night Live
Third runner up: McCain - Palin helped herself but did little for Mac other than stop the slide (maybe)

Maliki Manipulates Barry

The Press has made a big deal of a leaked memo from the prime minister of Iraq, Maliki, generally siding with a phased withdrawal ala Barack.  No surprise, with its US point of view and worship of Barack, the Press got the story backwards.  They have implied that Obama has persuaded Maliki to go with Barry's w/drawal strategy.  Instead, Maliki has manipulated Obama to go with Maliki's (and Bush's) plan.  Maliki is afraid that a Demo govt will do to him what Tip O'Neill did to the South Vietnamese - abandon Iraq at the point of victory and leave them to the mercies of bitter enemies.  So by floating this, he has moved Obama quite a ways from his earlier views on Iraq:

• 2006, immediate complete w/drawal
• 2007, 16-month complete w/drawal
• 2008 post Maliki, gradual w/drawal depending on conditions on the ground and a residual force of 50-80k to hold the peace.   Almost identical to the Bush plan!

Barry is quite a good politician - much better than Mac, and perhaps even better than Bill Cinton - and so expect him to shift focus away from Iraq and on to Afghanistan before the Press catches on. 

An Idea to Help Homeowners but not Screw up Markets

There is a lot of banter about saving families from their own worst instincts of buying a house they couldn't afford.  Even Top Gun "Maverick" John McCain has joined Hillary and Obama in coming up with a solution that meddles in mortgage markets.   Ever wonder why mortgages are 6% when credit card debt is 18%?  You can walk from ALL of your credit card debt but not your mortgage.  So the market prices in the excessively easy bankruptcy by jacking up rates. 

I think housing is only halfway down - it needs to fall again as much as it has to hit historical levels.  About 1mm homes (of 110m nationwide) went into foreclosure in 2007.  At current rates  another 2mm will go this year.  As prices drop again, another 5.5mm homes are at risk.  This will quickly become a huge problem. 

Walter Brusse runs a wonderfully carmudgeonly blog on Amazon.  He has come up with a fascinating alternative approach, to create a Rescue Foreclosed People agency to help responsible families out while keeping markets sound.  I lay out his thoughts (with a little editorializing) below the fold.  Worth a look. 

Explaining Tax Cuts With Beer

A really funny exposition of tax cuts.  As the Professor says:

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible

Worth reading. 

Hillary Jumps The Shark

In the debate last night, Hillary jumped the shark, meaning her show has stretched too far and is about to be cancelled. (The phrase comes from the last days of Happy Days, where to keep a dying audience they had Fonzy jump a shark on water skis.  Ludicrous.)  Hillary went for the colorful rejoinder ("You're no JFK" like) over the substantive response.  Someone must have advised her to be more dramatic, more colorful.  She raised the plagiarism issue, Obama nailed it in his response (the guy whose line he used works in his campaign and gave it to him) and she then threw in her prepared line: "that isn't change you can believe in, it's change you can xerox." It was met with scattered booing, and seems a bit inappropriate after his strong reply.  She missed other chances to rebut his vacuous statements with facts and substance, and at the end seemed to give her Valedictorial speech when she said how proud she was to share a stage with Obama.  Does she know it is over?

McCain's Silent Coup

An amazing political event is happening under the radar.  The Times broke the story of McCain's Amazing Bloodless Coup but it hasn't been picked up by the mainstream media over here.  Instead, the conservative talk show community has begun to discuss it - I first heard it on Rush Limbaugh late last week. 

John McCain has aligned with the Republican Governor's Association (as indicated by the long list of Governors who have endorsed McCain, from Georgia, California, Florida etc.) to take back the Republican Party from Rush Limbaugh and the talk-radio conservatives.

The battle lines are clear.  Conservative talk radio is venting hatred at McCain.  Mac is not inclined to go see Rush and make peace.  This is a huge fight for the future of the party.  And the mainstream media is clueless!  More below the fold.

A Cinematic View of This Election

Imagine how you would cast a film about this election?  A comedy of course:

Hillary = Yoko
Huckabee = William Jennings Bryan (the character behind the cowardly lion in Wizard of Oz) Kevin Spacey
Obama = JFK (young, dynamic) Chauncey Gardner (from Being There) who also spoke in vacuous platitudes
McCain = John Wayne
Mitt = Frankenstein (Hermann Munster, not the original)  Gumby, since he bends so much
Ron Paul = Mr Byrne (the guy running the nuclear power plant Homer works for in The Simpson's)
Bill = Bill.  He can play himself. Imagine him as First Lady!  Priceless
Gore = Doc (from Back to the Future).  "A rift in the Space-Time Continuum!"
W = Bonzo (Ronald Reagan's chimp in Bedtime For Bonzo) - the Chief Chimp
Reagan Rudy Guliani = Fred Thomson.  Works out better for Fred to play someone else

Hillary = Yoko

This one may take some context.  My prior post is about the Great Electoral Flip and how Huckabee = Wm Jennings Bryan.  The Dems lack their William McKinley.  It certainly isn't Edwards, another populist, nor Obama.  Could it be Hillary?  Conceivably, since Bill's politics were in line with Republicanism, even if his rhetoric wasn't.  Unfortunately for Hillary, her message is muddled; what does she stand for other than herself? 

Worse for her, the electorate remembers how she almost screwed the pooch for Bill in his first term, driving issues like gays in the military and nationalized healthcare which almost broke up his Presidency.  He was deemed irrelevant until a few breaks went his way (Newt Gingrich over-reaching, the Oklahoma bombings).  So Hillary had to be put on the backburner. 

Similarly, Beatles' fans all remember how Yoko broke up the band.  Worse, her caterwalling is heard on several of Lennon's post-Beatles tracks.  There is even a long forgotten story of how the boys met in LA a few years later when John had separated from Yoko, and almost got back together, but John went back to Yoko and Paul went back to making sappy records.  So Hillary is the one who couldn't let Bill be Bill, and almost broke up his Presidency.  Hillary = Yoko. 

Huckabee = Williams Jenning Bryan

The sudden rise of Huckabee means the Repubs may be about to complete the Great Electoral Flip that both parties fumbled in 2004.  I have blogged about this previously here.  The electoral map of 1896 is telling.  The last few elections, and especially 2004, mirror the race in 1896 - except that the Repubs and Dems have switched sides!  The Repubs have become the party of the South and Midwest, of Old Time Religion and Prairie Populism.  The Dems have become the party of New York, of Finance and Globalism.  What has been missing are candidates who reflect that flip.  Instead, in 2004 both party leaders muddied their messages.  But now the Repubs have found their Flip candidate in Huckabee.

Huckabee is Bryan redux: Baptist minister, great orator, full of ideas of how to bring Christian values to political issues.  His record as governor makes it clear he is no fiscal conservative.  Instead, his message is Populist, like Bryan's.  He hasn't quite said "Don't crucify us on a cross of gold!" but I expect him to rail against the evil bankers in New York if he continues to stay in the lead.  Of course he is in favor of easy money and relief for the poor folks who bought houses with subprime mortgages at high prices.  Subprime today = indebted farmers in 1896. 

Politicizing the California Wildfires

My wife and I watched a special show last night on the wildfires.  A horrific situation that has been well handled by the first responders in Southern California.  No Katrina here.  And yet I wake up this morning to hear the Demo leadership try to politicize this tragedy in a fatuous and dangerously irresponsible fashion.  What should be a story of how much we have learned and improved since 9/11 and Katrina is instead a boneheaded attempt to link this tragedy to Iraq and Global Warming.  Is this the leadership we want after the next election? Read on.