Eric Weddle, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has an article on what local residents would like to hear during the Presidential debate. I got a quote in there:

Doug Masson, a Lafayette blogger who writes on state politics, doesn’t expect much from either candidate.

“The questions will be superficial and the responses won’t address them anyway and the candidates will mostly talk past each other,” he said. “But, maybe I’m just cynical.”

Aren’t I just a little ray of sunshine? The other folks seem hopeful about getting direct answers on a variety of topics such as Iraq, foreign policy generally, and food & gas prices.

If I’ve got this straight, basically, we’re going to give Chinese money to Wall Street investors and agree that our kids and grandkids will pay it back. I’m having trouble finding a flaw here.

Instead of $700 billion, why don’t we take a ground up approach to the foreclosure crisis for a mere $421 billion?* According to Foreclosure.com, there are 2,036,934 properties they show in some sort of distressed situation – “pre-foreclosure”, foreclosure, Sheriff’s sale, bankruptcies, and tax liens. As of August 16, 2008, the median home price was $206,500. For a mere $421 billion, the People’s Republic of the United States could own them all. There, I just saved the American people $279 billion. That’d be a great down payment on another war!

[*] Disclaimer: I don’t know any more about the economy than John McCain.

This is fairly obscure, I suppose, but the current financial turmoil makes me think of “The Crimson Permanent Assurance,” the short feature that comes before “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.” The premise is that an English insurance firm has been taken over by a Giant American corporation. The workers rebel and turn their modest old building into a pirate ship. In particular, the present financial carnage makes me think of this:

NARRATOR: And so, heartened by their initial success…
the desperate and reasonably violent men of the Permanent Assurance…
battled on, until…
as the sun set slowly in the west…
the outstanding returns on their bold business venture became apparent.
Once-proud financial giants lay in ruins…
their assets stripped…
their policies in tatters.

CAPTAIN: Full speed ahead, Mr. Cohen!

ALL: [Singing] Up, up, up your premium
Scribble away and balance the books
Scribble away, but balance the books
It’s fun to charter an accountant
And sail the wide accountancy
To find, explore the funds offshore
And skirt the shoals of bankruptcy
It can be manly in insurance
We’ll up your premium semi-annually
It’s all tax-deductible We’re fairly incorruptible
Sailing on the wide accountancy

NARRATOR: And so, they sailed off into the ledgers of history…
one by one, the financial capitals of the world…
crumbling under the might of their business acumen.
Or so it would have been…
if certain modern theories concerning the shape of the world…
had not proved to be disastrously wrong.

Here is the video:

Part of the human condition is a constant search for patterns, parallels, and metaphors. Our brains are constantly seeking to relate a present observation to a known, past situation in an effort to better understand the present observation. Often times this works, but frequently the metaphors we choose don’t really shed much light on the new thing. (Remember the “information superhighway”? Highways didn’t turn out to be a very good metaphor for the Internet.)

So, with the understanding that past history doesn’t guarantee future performance, it occurs to me that the Obama/McCain race looks a lot like Nixon versus JFK back in 1960. Young, attractive candidate of vision faces off against old, curmudgeonly candidate of the status quo. In particular, the issue of race this year struck me as having parallels to the issue of religion back in 1960. I wonder if Obama can do for blacks in politics this year what JFK did for Catholics in politics half a century ago.

One of the panelists at the story linked above said that, ideally, race should be irrelevant. And, I agree. But, it will be relevant until it isn’t; which is to say that, there is no chance of race being irrelevant to Presidential politics until someone who isn’t white wins the Presidency if only to demonstrate that it can be done. JFK’s victory seemed to result in a political landscape where the particular flavor of the candidate’s Christianity wasn’t relevant. If Obama wins, we can keep working on the woman President and the non-Christian President and all of those other personal traits which ought to be irrelevant to our choice in a candidate, but aren’t. Maybe in another 232 years all of this will seem quaint, as we debate whether a candidate’s status as a cybernetic life form ought to be relevant to its candidacy.

With financial times being what they are, can a resurgence of the Hobo Lifestyle be far behind? Get ahead of the curve, learn Hobo Signs (h/t Pete). These signs include such useful information as “kind woman,” “man with gun,” “worth robbing,” and perhaps most importantly given the circumstances, “town allows alcohol.”

I always appreciate a good reference to William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming.” Last night on Heroes Mohinder quoted the entire thing. Some days it seems more appropriate than others:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Lafayette Journal & Courier has an article on the format change coming to AM-1410, WSHY. The line up will apparently include Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, The Dennis Miller Show, and “Bill Bennett’s Morning in America.”

I for one am happy that there is finally a platform available for angry white men in America.

(Via Bloosier Hysteria). Evan Bayh referring to the current economic turmoil:

There’s a consensus that we have to do what it takes to avoid a catastrophe. This is economic triage; we need to stabilize the patient. Then we can come up with a long-term prognosis and steps that need to be taken for a cure. When you’re trying to keep a patient’s heart beating and they are on the table, you deal with that first. But we must also maintain the sense of urgency to address the long-term changes that need to be made. The way Congress too often works is that there will be tremendous urgency to act in the short run, then all of the different interests who have a stake in not changing their ways will start circling to prevent systemic reform. The taxpayers and homeowners who are paying their mortgages have a right to be outraged if that happens. This crisis shows that what goes around comes around. Times were good, greed triumphed over fear, people leveraged up trying to make all that they could, and now we’re paying for it.

Except in this case, the cardiac patient is demanding that we pay for his heart surgery while also demanding that we not come around later asking questions if he’s not exercising and spends the money on Cheetos and ribeyes.