Down in the polls and desperate, it looks like Mavericky John McCain is going to go the decidedly conventional route of flinging feces at his opponent to see if they stick. His advertising is apparently going to be 100% negative. Looks like they’re going to go with Murray Clark’s advice and see if playing Six Degrees of Barack Obama will work for them where it didn’t work out for Hillary Clinton.

So much for raising the tone in Washington. Maybe they’ll do to Obama what Bush did to McCain in South Carolina and start a whispering campaign about how Obama has two black children.

Just watched the debate between Biden and Palin. Biden knew stuff. Palin, not so much. But, she dropped her “g”s much better than Biden. And said “maverick” a lot.

Update

Here is an exchange that sort of shows what I mean:

IFILL: Governor, you mentioned a moment ago the Constitution might give the Vice President more power than it has in the past. Do you believe as Vice President Cheney does, that the Executive Branch does not hold complete sway over the office of the vice presidency, that it it is also a member of the Legislative Branch?

PALIN: Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the Vice President. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we’ll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation.

What does this mean? Let’s break it down to see if any content is trapped in there somewhere:
1. The Constitution is flexible about the office of the Vice President. — O.k., only if you mean the document is mostly silent on the subject. Chalk one up for a liberal construction of the Constitution.

2. I’ll cooperate with the President. — Umm, o.k. We kind of assumed that already.

3. More words, rehashing the non-content in the first two sentences.

None of which hints at an understanding of the crazy theories Cheney has advanced in pursuit of his own personal power and to avoid accountability.

Paul Campos has a great analysis over at Lawyers, Guns & Money with respect to the incoherence of Sara Palin’s response to Katie Couric’s question about Supreme Court decisions. Couric asks about whether Palin believes the Constitution protects a right to privacy and then asks, other than Roe, what Supreme Court decisions Palin disagrees with.

Palin’s response is mush: believes the Constitution protects a right to privacy, thinks Roe v. Wade should be decided at the state level, and in any case Palin wouldn’t be in a position to change any of this stuff anyway.

This response is a mess, for starters, because the right to privacy protected by the federal Constitution is the cornerstone of the holding in Roe v. Wade and, as such, has been attacked mercilessly by conservative analysts. Any time you hear legal analysts sneering about “penumbras” in the Constitution, that’s what they’re going after — they don’t see ‘privacy’ in the Constitutional text, so it’s not protected under the Constitution; is the rationale. While most folks shrug this off in terms of the abortion debate, their ears tend to perk up if the discussion moves on to Griswold v. Connecticut, the holding of which is also founded on a federal Constitutional right to privacy — the holding in that case was that this federal right to privacy prevented the federal government from criminalizing the purchase of contraception by married couples. In any event, Palin’s assertion that she agrees there is a federal right to privacy is inconsistent with most attacks on Roe v. Wade.

More fundamental, however, is her assertion that abortion regulation should be a state issue. How can this be reconciled with a belief that abortion is murder — so much so that, according to Palin’s position, women must carry even their rapists’ babies to term? If abortion is murder, then it’s ridiculous to allow states to decide that murder is permissible.

Update CBS asked Biden the same questions – the responses below the fold:

[Read more…]

The headline doesn’t exactly fit, but I really like Me First and the Gimme Gimmes a band that does some cool punk covers of non-punk songs. “Me First” is John McCain’s motivating force according to the case laid out by Frank Rich. I don’t know about the “Gimme Gimme” part – I’m sure I could strain the metaphor and come up with something, but I’m not going to bother.

Rich points out that McCain’s sudden interest in the economy came as his poll numbers were tanking. Prior to that, the economy was fine, according to him. So, he came up with the gimmick of claiming that his campaign had been “suspended” when he didn’t stop campaigning. Then, he parachuted into Washington in an effort to make the economic crisis about him; nevermind how it might affect the success of the efforts.

Rich notes that Palin had just recorded a disastrous interview with Katie Couric. He suggests that McCain’s decision to “suspend” his campaign at least as far as canceling on Letterman was an effort to get to Couric and upstage the Palin disaster. This backfired as Letterman discovered that McCain hadn’t suspended his campaign but was, in fact, going to do the Couric interview which, in turn, led to Letterman playing the feed from the Couric interview on his own show as he explained that McCain had falsely claimed to be “getting on a plane” to Washington to deal with the crisis.

It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet. By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.”

Letterman’s most mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign “suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!”

Rich also notes that McCain’s stunt came as his campaign manager’s intimate ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were coming to a head — not the kind of lobbying association his campaign wanted in the wake of those institutions’ collapse.

So, when you hear McCain’s “country first” slogan; know that he really means “me first.”

First off I’m an idiot — I’m up at 4:45 a.m. blogging about the debate just prior to going to attempt running in the Akron Half-Marathon. That out of the way, my initial glance of post-debate coverage was that Obama held his own in terms of substance, snap polls of independent voters favor Obama’s performance, and McCain is getting flack for a weird lack of eye contact with Obama.

For the portions I watched, my own sense was that both candidates delivered solid performance – which ends up being a net-loss for McCain since his debate experience was touted as being long and formidable and, more importantly, foreign policy is his bread and butter. For me, of course, what McCain says now about foreign policy isn’t half as important as things he did in the past such as voting to go to war with Iraq supplemented with a nice song about bombing Iran. I just don’t trust him to consider foreign policy in a deliberative matter rather than flying off at the handles when his pride is bruised.

When the candidates were going back and forth about The Surge versus getting into Iraq in the first place, I thought of Obama maybe saying something like “It’s like we were dealing with a wound – McCain wanted to apply a tourniquet at the scene; I wanted to get to a hospital. McCain’s plan seemed to stop the bleeding, though we may yet lose the foot. We don’t know if my plan would have worked. But, I submit that we shouldn’t have shot ourselves in the foot in the first place, and, knowing that, you don’t want to trust the gun to the guy who decided to pull the trigger.”

Now, off to the races.

Via Blue Indiana, Daily Kos, and the Politico are reporting that McCain, or at least RNC surrogates on his behalf are planning to use some resources in Indiana.

Defending ground that ought to be taken for granted has to be annoying.

Time recently ran an article on Indiana’s drift blueward from red to purple. (It’s great having a blog, just making up words like “blueward”.)

The key factor driving the desire for political change here is economic pain — even in traditional Republican bastions like Elkhart County, in the state’s Northeast corner, where the closure of several RV plants has pushed the unemployment rate to 9.3%. Even incumbent Republican governor Mitch Daniels is presenting himself as an agent of change.

(“Elkhart County in the Northeast corner?” “Forget it, he’s rolling.”)

If I had to bet, I’d bet that Obama does not win Indiana. But, the fact that Indiana is even close doesn’t bode well for McCain nation-wide.

Aaron Sorkin’s imaginary conversation between Jed Bartlett and Barack Obama via Maureen Dowd and Blue Indiana:

BARTLET: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

Katherine Seelye has an article in the New York Times about John McCain’s debating style. The lede just struck me as goofy.

Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, heads into the first debate on Friday with a track record as a scrappy combatant and the instincts of a fighter pilot, prepared to take out his opponent and willing to take risks to do so.

It’s calls to mind bad Top Gun dialogue (but I repeat myself).

“John McCain is writing checks his body can’t cash!”
“That’s right Obama, *I’m dangerous!*”

But, the article suggests that McCain will return to his tried and true P.O.W. gambit — an experience we’ve been told he is reluctant to discuss . . . again and again and again.

In any event, I guess it’s good for Obama if McCain’s debate expectations are set relatively high. Then at least we won’t get the Bush standard where it was something like “Hey, look! He didn’t drool on himself! He’s a winner!”

If I were Obama, I’d be trying to paint McCain as that guy with anger management problems and a rictus grin.

Disclaimer: I don’t understand the economy any better than John McCain. (Phrase gleefully cribbed from Lou). So, maybe that’s why my inclination is to just let Wall Street burn, metaphorically of course. That’s easy for me to say here on the near side of an abyss that’s speculative at this point.

But, the Bush administration is insisting on a “clean bill” which seems to be a Bushism for “Gimme, then go away.” That bill was floated called for unreviewed, unfettered discretion by the Treasury Secretary over $700 billion to basically give to the folks who have been profiting off this mess for years in exchange for toxic debts of unknown nature and quantity. They seem to be using the current turmoil to stampede the Congress into rash action. We’ve seen this play before – Iraq and the Patriot Act come to mind. We haven’t had a happy ending yet.

I wonder if these bail outs are analogous to the policy of the Forest Service in putting out all of the fires as they cropped up. This seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, fires are dangerous, and you don’t know who is going to get hurt. But, over time, this policy had the effect of creating a tinder box. When the fire did finally come, it was a mighty conflagration that caused an inferno which did a lot more damage than the smaller fires would have if they’d been allowed to burn. Similarly, perhaps letting the current economic fire burn would do less damage over the long haul. But, maybe I’m wrong. Like I say, I don’t know any more about the economy than John McCain.

Have you ever come across that guy who is just sure that he’s right? He doesn’t discuss, he proclaims. Sometimes, when you’re only kind of sure about something, this guy comes along and makes a bold proclamation, and you maybe back off a little bit? Then, by dumb luck, maybe you hear one of these proclamations on a subject where you really know your stuff. The guy is wrong, and you pound him with facts, and only after you present overwhelming evidence does such a guy back off even an inch. I’ve met a few. They really annoy me. But that’s just day-to-day life and can’t really screw things up on a world-wide scale.

We have learned that unfounded confidence is a dangerous thing in a leader. This recent post by Ed Brayton makes the case that Sarah Palin is possessed of that sort of dogmatic certitude that has gotten us into trouble over the past few years. And, as a bonus, a guy from Palin’s home town is claiming that, when pushed on the specifics of her beliefs on the age of the earth and creationism, Palin said that she believed the earth was really less than 7,000 years old and dinosaurs and people walked the earth at the same time. She’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.

I, for one, want the leader of our government to really embrace the notion that the scientific method is an excellent way to discover how the world works and that, if push comes to shove, and scientific observations contradict the stories of Middle Eastern Bronze Age shepherds; probably the scientific observations are where the smart money goes.

Briefly, the scientific method includes these characteristics:

To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.[1] A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.[2]

Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features distinguish scientific inquiry from other methodologies of knowledge. Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses. These steps must be repeatable in order to dependably predict any future results. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry may bind many hypotheses together in a coherent structure. This in turn may help form new hypotheses or place groups of hypotheses into context.