I’d just like to say that bashing McCain for his age is out of line.

There are certainly legitimate concerns to be raised about his age … for example, it makes sense for Sarah Palin to receive far more scrutiny than Joe Biden, since it seems more likely that John McCain might die in the next four years than that Barack Obama might die in the same time. That’s a legitimate point to be made.

Also, I don’t buy that referring to McCain’s campaign or policies as ‘confused’ is a dogwhistle attack on his age … his campaign and policies, after all, have actually seemed awfully confused, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to point that out.

But all that aside, I have heard an awful lot of liberals … not Obama’s official campaign flacks or anything, but just my buddies and folks online … attacking McCain’s age, painting him as Grandpa Simpson, and treating it as a matter for jokes.

I don’t think it’s funny. I think age discrimination is real, and I think the assumption that if someone is a certain age, they’ve therefore got nothing to contribute intellectually is an idea that is anti-knowledge, and therefore part of what got us to where we are now.

It’s closely related to ableism and a lot of employment rights issues, too, and those who mock John McCain because of his age are coming down on the wrong side of a whole host of issues, whether they realize it or not.

I don’t like McCain. I think his policies are wrong, wrong, wrong. But I think they’re wrong because he’s a movement conservative and warmonger with the good judgment of a fish sandwich, not because he’s old.

He’d be just as wrong were he 20 years younger, and he’d have more years in front of him to be wrong in.

Don’t comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

Here in California, the far-right has been pushing a constitutional anti-gay marriage amendment, Proposition 8, that will be on the ballot come November.

As far as I’m concerned, this ad is pretty much everything that needs to be said on the topic. It’s beautiful, and it made me cry.

Don’t comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

Post what you like, for as long as you like, with whomever you like. Self-linking is encouraged.

(If that’s too tiny to watch — which it probably is, unless you’re browsing with Google Chrome — then you may want to go here to watch it.)

Cab Calloway isn’t easy to upstage, but the Nicholas Brothers sure did it. The staircase sequence at the end of the dance was done in a single take (or so Fayard Nicholas claimed). Fred Astaire called this the greatest dance number ever filmed.

The clip comes from the 1943 film Stormy Weather, which had an all-black cast, including Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Ada Brown, Katherine Dunham, Lena Horn, and starred the astounding Bill Robinson. (This was Robinson’s final film.)

Robinson’s elegant, understated tapping was as opposite the Nicholas Brothers’ as it could be — but was equally astonishing. Here’s his classic step dance:

While clicking through Youtube watching classic tap dancers, I came across a video of Eleanor Powell — probably the best female tap dancer ever — doing a tribute to Robinson’s stairs routine while wearing blackface. Despite the top-notch dancing and filming (I love the shot from above, showing her shadow on the floor), the blackface ruins the performance.

I wonder what Robinson thought of Powell’s performance. By all accounts, Powell’s admiration for Robinson was genuine,¹ and it’s often claimed (I’m not sure with how much truth) that Robinson personally taught her the routine — but the racist context of blackface brings up makes it impossible to enjoy the light-hearted artistry of the dance. Robinson had an extraordinary career, but he was never as big a movie star as Powell was at her peak, and it wasn’t because he lacked talent — the opportunities for black dancers simply weren’t as grand. (Powell, in turn, would probably have been a bigger star if she had been equally talented but male.)

1. There’s a much-repeated story that MGM refused Powell’s request to be filmed dancing with Robinson. (back)

[Quoted from the Dollars and Sense blog. I'm posting this because I agree with much of it, and also because it shows how completely cut off the mainstream debate is; we here center-left, center-right and right-wing solutions, but left-wing solutions simply don't exist, as far as our media is concerned. --Amp]

A Gift for a Generation: A U.S. Financial System of Our Own

Last week, I posted ten points (that were by no means exhaustive) for Congressional action immediately in the wake of the financial crisis now gripping our country. At that time, the Democratic leadership of Congress was prepared to adjourn the current legislative Session to campaign, without taking any action at all to put policies in place that protect U.S. taxpayers and the global community that has accepted U.S. financial leadership. Those ten points, to be taken in conjunction with the Power to the People Committee’s platform available on the campaign website, are as follows:

1. Enactment of a foreclosure moratorium now before the next phase of ARM interest rate increases take effect;

2. elimination of all ARM mortgages and their renegotiation into 30- or 40-year loans;

3. establishment of new mortgage lending practices to end predatory and discriminatory practices;

4. establishment of criteria and construction goals for affordable housing;

5. redefinition of credit and regulation of the credit industry so that discriminatory practices are completely eliminated;

6. full funding for initiatives that eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in home ownership;

7. recognition of shelter as a right according to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights to which the U.S. is a signatory so that no one sleeps on U.S. streets;

8. full funding of a fund designed to cushion the job loss and provide for retraining of those at the bottom of the income scale as the economy transitions;

9. close all tax loopholes and repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the top 1% of income earners; and

10. fairly tax corporations, denying federal subsidies to those who relocate jobs overseas; repeal NAFTA.

In addition to these ten points, I now add four more:

11. Appointment of former Comptroller General David Walker to fully audit all recipients of taxpayer cash infusions, including JP Morgan, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG, and to monitor their trading activities into the future;

12. elimination of all derivatives trading;

13. nationalization of the Federal Reserve and the establishment of a federally-owned, public banking system that makes credit available for small businesses, homeowners, manufacturing operations, renewable energy and infrastructure investments; and

14. criminal prosecution of any activities that violated the law, including conflicts of interest that led to the current crisis.

Ellen Brown, author of The Web of Debt writes, “Such a public bank today could solve not only the housing crisis but a number of other pressing problems, including the infrastructure crisis and the energy crisis. Once bankrupt businesses have been restored to solvency, the usual practice is to return them to private hands; but a better plan for Fannie and Freddie might be to simply keep them as public institutions.”

Too many times politicians have told us to support the “free market.” The unfolding news informs us in a most costly manner that free markets don’t work. This is a financial system of their making. It’s now past time for the people to have an economic system of their own. A reading of the full text on the Congressional “Agreement on Principles” for the proposed $700 billion bailout reveals the sham that this so-called agreement truly is. Today our country faces an economic 9/11. The problem that is unfolding is truly systemic and no stop-gap measures that maintain the current bankrupt structure will be sufficient to resolve this crisis of the U.S. economic engine.

Today is my son’s birthday. What a gift to the young people of this country if we were to present to them a clean break from the policies that produced this economic disaster, the “financial tsunami” that former Comptroller General David Walker warned us of so many months ago and instead offered them a U.S. economic superstructure that truly was their own.

Power to the People!

Cynthia McKinney
McKinney/Clemente 2008
US Green Party

This is eerily close to the real thing:

UPDATE: Though police have already yanked it off YouTube, so go see it at HuffPo.

It seems that debates are won and lost of late not on the issues — the idea! — but on something meta, beneath the surface of the debate. In 2000, it was Gore sighing when Bush was behaving like an idiot. In 2004, it was Kerry correctly noting that Dick Cheney’s out lesbian daughter was lesbian. These were huge transgressions, far greater than anything actually said about substance, and these were the reasons that the press gave for giving Dubya victories.

This has not always cut against the Democrats, mind you; in 1992, it was George H.W. Bush looking at his watch during the town hall debate that caused people to sit up and take notice. And there was probably something in ‘96, though to be honest, that election was so boring that I have only a vague recollection of Bob Dole making an ad for Viagra, but I think that was after the election. I hope.

Anyhow, 2008 looks to be another year in which the meta narrative favors the Democrat. And that meta narrative is simple: John McCain is a jerk.

This is dominating much of the post-election talk. McCain wouldn’t look at Obama. Kept smirking. Sighing. Sucking in his lips. Flipping his papers angrily. Accusing Obama of “not understanding” basic points of foreign and domestic policy. We knew he didn’t want to be there. But he couldn’t keep his body language from signaling that he didn’t think Obama deserved to be there. As Marc Ambinder put it, “McCain did not filter himself, letting his frustration and contempt for Obama show; he wouldn’t let himself look at the challenger. He seemed to be channeling that famous Saturday Night Live skit featuring ‘Michael Dukakis’ who looks to the camera and says, ‘I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.’ Over and over, he adopted the pose of an impatient school teacher.”

Indeed, the McCain campaign tripped over itself to release a web ad — while the debate was going on! — criticizing Barack Obama for the sin of agreeing with John McCain. Which is…bad, I guess?

McCain was contemptuous and surly throughout the debate, he not only didn’t engage with Obama, he barely looked at him. It came across as disrespectful and supercilious, or perhaps a bit intimidated — but it certainly did not come across as presidential.

That’s the meta narrative today — that McCain was disrespectful, angry, bitter. And Obama was gracious. Yes, it would be nice if the media would instead focus on the fact that McCain distorted Obama’s record and prevaricated throughout the debate, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

I’m fascinated by the story of McCain saying he’s not attending the debate, because it’s such an obvious losing position for McCain to take. Either he doesn’t show up, in which case Obama will have an exceptionally well-publicized opportunity to look Serious taking questions from reporters or the public; or McCain shows up, in which case, McCain looks like he and Obama played “chicken” and McCain flinched first.

Some folks are saying McCain’s idea was to look presidential and non-partisan, but that’s too transparent a ploy to fool anyone but dedicated McCainiacs. Plus, the idea that Presidential candidates shouldn’t be expected to handle public speaking during a crisis doesn’t hold much water. (Diagram from indexed and via Matt.)

Are McCain’s advisors so deep in the game that they didn’t realize what a bad idea this was? Or did they realize that it was a bad idea, but couldn’t dissuade McCain?

It’s enough to make me speculate that McCain is having severe butterflies in his stomach about his debate performance — enough to be looking for an “out.” (Of course, it’s common for nervous debaters to shine once the debate begins, so even if that’s true I don’t take much comfort from it.)

I’m a fan of the presidential debates — politics is the closest our country ever comes to a national sport I have any interest in — but I’m not convinced they matter. At this late point in the process, there are only two kinds of voters: High-information voters, who already know who they’re going to vote for, and low-information voters, who still haven’t been decided, but won’t watch the debates, because if they were the sort of people who watched debates then they wouldn’t be low-information voters and they’d already know who they’re going to vote for.

So why the debates? Well, for me, it’s the entertainment value. But from the candidates’ perspective, I think they’re just hoping to get the media to repeat (over and over and over) a sound bite or narrative that makes them look good, or for their opponent to have a genuinely horribly and telegenic gaffe. If the media repeats it 50,000 times, then maybe enough of those low-information voters will hear about it so it’ll sway a tiny percent of votes.

So if the debates matter, it’s only because they can have a third-hand effect — the debates effect the media, and the media, maybe, effects low-information swing voters. But according to political scientists, even that is unlikely. Usually debates don’t have any detectable effect on election outcomes.

So maybe McCain and his campaign people aren’t making a mistake; maybe they understand, correctly, that there are weeks of new flash in the pan news stories to come before the election, and it really won’t matter if McCain attends this debate or not.

In a two-party system, it’s probably inevitable that elections are decided by low-information swing voters, because both parties have an incentive to move as far to the middle as they can without losing too much of their base, leading them to split the high-information partisans more or less evenly. So it’s the small minority of low-information voters who end up holding the deciding vote.¹

I have a fantasy of living in a society in which voters decide who to vote based on serious policy and moral debates. That’s why I like watching the debates, and that’s why I blog. But make no mistake, it’s a fantasy. Who wins the election does matter for substantial policy reasons; but those substantial policy questions don’t have any causal effect on who wins the election.

Does anyone know if low-information voters decide the elections in countries with multiple-party systems?

1. There are probably some people out there who are high-information non-partisans, or who are high-information but vote for third party candidates, but I think they’re a small enough minority not to matter. (back)

One question I’ve heard echoed several times since the announcement of the bailout plan is, “Why bail out the rich when we refuse to bail out the poor?” Why is the government rushing to help executives and not former homeowners? (Sure, there was that wishy-washy plan a few months ago, but that was nothing, in terms of speed and magnitude, compared to this.) Why the double standard? Why the blatant hypocrisy?

One argument has to do with trickle-down theories and chain reactions: if large companies like Fannie Mae or AIG go under, the effects will ripple throughout the entire economy. Better to save their asses and protect our own jobs. And while there are flaws in that logic, it’s an argument worth considering.

That doesn’t explain people’s attitudes toward the bailout, though.

When I explain how college administrations exploit me and my colleagues, the number one comment I get from conservatives is that I’m “whining.” I’m “complaining.” I should suck it up, accept what I’m worth, or get another job if I’m so unhappy. If the “market” mows me over? If I fall ill while underinsured? I deserve it! Maybe I’ll die! Good riddance! (Anyone who sees this paragraph as more whining is free to turn off their computer and go for a walk; don’t bother commenting, because it won’t appear.) I don’t take the attacks personally, though, because that type of rhetoric is par for the course. When a lefty type - or, even worse, a poor or working-class lefty type - asks for help, spit froths and teeth gnash. People get angry at that shit. They get dramatic. You’d think they were being asked to kill their pets or something. It’s almost as if - bear with me here, because I know this is wild - people take pleasure in punishing victims. Yet, throughout this new crisis, I’ve noticed a curious dearth of ad hominem attacks leveled at CEOs. Sure, plenty of conservatives are angry, but the vitriol I’ve seen is nothing compared to the vicious attacks routinely leveled at the poor and working class.

You’re probably expecting me to spend the next two thirds of this blog post complaining about what rotten people conservatives are. Actually, I’d like to talk about my fellow leftists. I’ve found myself thinking, over the past few days, about the ways people with class privilege approach the homeless. I know many people who like to offer homeless people food - bread, apples, lunch meat, whatever. Sometimes they carry it around with them in case they encounter someone begging; other times, they make a field trip out of it, hitting a grocery store and then taking the goods around a neighborhood. On the surface, this seems pretty noble - after all, those people need food, right? Fresh fruit! Protein! Good stuff! Surely they’ll appreciate it and eat it up and we’ll have done a good deed.

Except… well, first off, I’ve never personally witnessed someone doing this. I always encounter it in the form of a brief anecdote: this one thing that they tried this one time. And the punch line’s always the same. “I offered him a perfectly good nutritious apple,” the progressive says with a sad shake of the head, “…and he didn’t even want it!”

(The point being that all the guy really wanted was money for heroin and booze, and oh why should we even try to help these people when they’re too lazy to help themselves well I wash my hands of the whole thing!)

I hear the same hopeless condescension in discussions on the myriad addictions of the homeless. Why should I give him change when he’ll just spend it on drugs? Why should I help him when he’s spending his money on liquor? Or alternately: I only give money to people who are honest - the ones who just admit that they’re going to spend it on drugs and liquor!

If you’ll allow me a digression, let me explain why this reasoning doesn’t work. First off, the homeless do often have access to food; they’re not necessarily relying on your Red Delicious to stay alive. Soup kitchens, shelters, and nonprofit organizations work to provide the homeless with basic sustenance. Putting aside, for now, the question of drugs and alcohol, it’s actually a little absurd to decide that the only thing the homeless should ever desire from passersby is food or money for food. The average American spends around 10% of their income on food; why should the homeless spend 100%? If a person who has lost their apartment wants to purchase, say, a cup of coffee, why do we obsess over denying them that right? (There’s also the possibility that the guy to whom you’re offering food simply doesn’t like what you’re trying to give him. Perhaps he’d rather have the money to choose his own food. You could argue that he should just choke it down - but if you’re feeling so generous, why not give him the money instead?)

When you factor in people’s immediate assumption that if the homeless are not buying food, they’re obviously buying drugs, the attitude towards giving becomes even more condescending. Behind the assumption that the homeless are buying intoxicants lies the assumption that the homeless are uniformly addicted to intoxicants: that every homeless woman who buys weed is also a heroin addict, that every homeless man who buys beer is an alcoholic. Now, it’s true that a disproportionate number of homeless people suffer from addiction, and that addiction (in conjunction with health issues, housing costs, and other factors) is a leading cause of homelessness. But notice how we skip straight to the assumption that every homeless person we see, no matter how lucid they seem, is an addict? Do we check for slurred speech or needle tracks before we assume that they’ll “just spend it on drugs?” No. Often, we shake our heads at their alcohol use on our way to the bar. We deny them money on the off chance that they’ll buy something we don’t want them to buy, and then proceed to pay our government officials’ salaries. The assumption that the homeless must be kept away from harmful substances at all costs (to them, not us) is, when you think about it, an astoundingly patronizing double standard. We can be trusted to drink and smoke in moderation. They can’t.

So where am I going with this? Like I said, what I want to call attention to is the attitude that comes with giving. Because whenever I hear a leftist with privilege talking about that one time they tried to give someone a loaf of bread, I always detect a note of satisfaction in their voice. If this were truly a problem for people - if people with homes truly cared about the homeless and wanted to help them - we would scramble for other ways to accomplish that. We would engage with them, let them tell us what they need. We would give our money to shelters and programs. We would work harder to create safety nets. But we don’t. The people who moan about the futility of giving don’t really want to give. Instead, they go through the motions so they can get to that punch line: “There’s no point in trying, because they’re lazy and weak and thus belong where they are.”

Why are we amenable to bailing out the rich, but not the poor? It’s not entirely about economics. It’s not even entirely about stinginess or apathy. It’s about power. When I have money and you don’t, I’m more powerful than you are. And when I have a choice to make - dissolving that power by giving you what you need, or holding onto that power by putting you in your place - it’s much more thrilling to peck my way up to a higher spot in the order. That’s why it’s so satisfying, for so many liberal-minded people, to sigh over the incompetency of those who seem dependent on our kindness. The categories “we” and “they” solidify. “We” would never end up in that position, because “we” are better and smarter. The gap between liberal and conservative suddenly shrinks to nothing.

To many middle- and upper-class people across the political spectrum, the executives at Fanny Mae and AIG look much more familiar than the woman pushing a shopping cart down 5th street - or the family who took out a subprime loan. And even when those execs are forced to sell their private jets, we know they’ve still got power, and that thrill of subjugation is absent. The line between “we” and “they” is permeable, as the American Dream tells us it should be. Sure, some of us feel the vindictive pleasure of seeing the mighty brought down low - but that’s not the same as wagging our finger, smugly keeping our handful of change, and keeping our privilege (to drink without being judged, to spend our income how we please) in place. It’s hard to get angry when we can’t be patronizing, too. When the person in need is at or above our level, we choose to give, even if reluctantly. If that person is below us, we choose - gleefully - to withhold.

Notice how I can’t help but describe it in terms of up and down? Notice how much we cling to this hierarchy - even when we tell ourselves we’re trying to level it?

And notice how I’m the twenty gazillionth person to say this, and nothing whatsoever has changed?

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot)

I do not think it means what you think it means:

So, what does a “suspended” campaign look like? As it turns out, it’s eerily similar to a regular ol’ campaign.

What have we learned since McCain suspended his presidential campaign?

* McCain campaign offices in battleground states are open and operating, just like yesterday.

* McCain’s television ads are on the air, just like yesterday.

* McCain media flacks are all over the news networks, just like yesterday.

* McCain’s campaign staffers are working, just like yesterday.

* McCain’s campaign website is up, soliciting contributions and promoting McCain’s message, just like yesterday.

* For the big White House meeting today, Barack Obama was told not to bring any campaign aides, so he’s bringing a legislative assistant from his Senate staff. John McCain is bringing a campaign advisor.

Of course, it’s just Johnny Maverick being Johnny Maverick. Most people, when suspending a campaign, would suspend their campaign. But not John McCain! When he suspends his campaign, he keeps campaigning! Maverickly delicious!

The results need to be replicated. Still, this is really interesting.

Men with egalitarian attitudes about the role of women in society earn significantly less on average than men who hold more traditional views about women’s place in the world, according to a study being reported today.

It is the first time social scientists have produced evidence that large numbers of men might be victims of gender-related income disparities. The study raises the provocative possibility that a substantial part of the widely discussed gap in income between men and women who do the same work is really a gap between men with a traditional outlook and everyone else.

The differences found in the study were substantial. Men with traditional attitudes about gender roles earned $11,930 more a year than men with egalitarian views and $14,404 more than women with traditional attitudes. The comparisons were based on men and women working in the same kinds of jobs with the same levels of education and putting in the same number of hours per week.

Although men with a traditional outlook earned the most, women with a traditional outlook earned the least. The wage gap between working men and women with a traditional attitude was more than 10 times as large as the gap between men and women with egalitarian views.

The study writers discussed two possible causes of the disparity: Either traditional men are better negotiators than everyone else, or employers discriminate against women, and against nontraditional men. The way the article wrote about it made it sound as if these are mutually exclusive possibilities, but I don’t think that’s true; if anything, they could be mutually reinforcing possibilities.¹

The study writers also speculated that since there’s very little disparity between the wages of men with egalitarian attitudes and women, the more men have egalitarian attitudes, the smaller the wage gap will become.

1. For instance, if class A learns that harder negotiation tactics don’t bring results (discrimination), that would lead class A to negotiate less hard than class B does. Class B’s greater pay would then be partly due to “better negotiation.” (back)

UPDATE: Check out the comments! Amongst other things, there’s a comment from Jenn, who played the bride; and a very full report from the Oregonian’s society columnist.

UPDATE 2: Added a link to Gisho’s photos.

UPDATE 3: Culturepulp!!!!!!!! Woooo!

A good time was had by, if not all, then at least by all who have spoken to me about it.

Above photo of Margo and Michael (played by Dylan and Jenn, respectively) by B. Zedan.

You can find photos of the wedding (including some cute shots of Sydney and Maddox, like this one) on the web:

• here
• here
• here
• and here.

Also, Bill has posted some video. I’ll update with further links as I find about them.

Below the cut, some random recollections of favorite moments (and I apologize in advance for not knowing everyone’s name — if you know names, help me out in comments!). Also, in the comments, I’ll post the playlist from the reception.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are 40 days and 40 nights remaining in the 2008 presidential campaign. And with 40 days remaining, I am projecting that Barack Hussein Obama II will be the next President of the United States. I base this projection on the demise of the John McCain campaign, which occurred this morning at 12:35 AM EDT.

The McCain campaign was done in by its own too-cute-by-half spin on the economic crisis, when it claimed that things were so dire, so urgent, that John Sidney McCain had no choice but to wing his way back to Washington immediately, so he could tell everyone to knock off the bullshit and fix things. As part of his urgent urgency, McCain tried and failed to cancel both Friday’s presidential and October 2nd’s vice presidential debates, and begged off from an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman.

Unfortunately for McCain, he was not, in fact, winging his way back to Washington:

No, McCain was being interviewed by Katie Couric. That is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Couric is a major network anchor, McCain should be sitting down with network anchors. But in one fell swoop, McCain showed just how phony his “gotta run back to Washington” schtick was. After all, McCain evidently didn’t have to hurry back to Washington that quickly — he had time to sit down with Couric. And if he has time to sit down with Couric on a Wednesday night — and he does — then why can’t he debate Barack Obama on a Friday night? What will be different in two days?

McCain’s ploy was always cynical, all about trying to reposition himself, not about truly fixing anything. But now we see it was a lie — McCain is not needed in Washington immediately, and he evidently can be outside of Washington without the economy imploding.

Tonight, McCain became the subject of ridicule on Letterman. Meanwhile, his vice presidential candidate was unable to name a single attempt McCain has made to regulate Wall Street, which for once is not Sarah Palin’s fault — McCain hasn’t done anything to regulate Wall Street, and he’s been lying about that fact for two weeks. Palin is stuck having to repeat the lie, and under questioning from the aforementioned Katie Couric, Palin did her best to repeat the McCain line that McCain is a mavericky maverick with maverick-like tendencies. The fact that the line doesn’t mean anything isn’t Palin’s fault, it’s McCain’s.

McCain isn’t needed back in Washington, though both he and Obama probably should be there for the meeting with Bush tomorrow. But on Friday night, there’s no reason John McCain shouldn’t be in Mississippi. And if he can’t be there, then in the spirit of bipartisanship, let me endorse Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Yankee’s proposal that Palin go in his stead. That’s change we all can believe in.

The decision by John McCain to call for canceling the Friday debate is a cynical, foolish ploy to try to change the game somehow. And it’s not helpful.

Now, look — I actually think suspending the campaign for a few days is a good idea. I think it’s fine for Obama to do so to. And kudos to McCain for suggesting it — that’s a good political move. But there’s no reason McCain can’t fly down to Ole Miss on Friday night and still be involved in “leading” on this issue.  He can fly back up to DC that night. He has his own campaign plane, and if that’s in the shop, his wife has a plane, too.

The fact is that the debate is a chance for the candidates to challenge each other and speak to the American people. Now, maybe on Friday night at 7:00 there’ll be a whole bunch of big meetings going on that John McCain and Barack Obama just can’t avoid. But given that the markets will be closed Saturday and Sunday, I’d say those meetings can probably be pushed back to Saturday morning without hurting anything.

No, there’s no reason John McCain and Barack Obama can’t sit down and talk for a few hours, and let the American people hear from them. The fact is that what McCain’s doing here is the opposite of leadership — he’s going back to Washington, where he’ll hide from Americans, while trying to change the conversation from our collapsing economy to McCain’s mavericky tactical moves. Well, there are big issues out there, my friends, and America needs to hear from the men who want to lead our country more than the Senate needs 2% of its membership for a few hours on a Friday night. Kudos to Barack Obama for saying the debate needs to go forward. And shame on John McCain for trying to change the subject.

America should demand the candidates debate. And Obama should be there on Friday, whether McCain shows up or not.

You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say the Bush administration might be attempting to mislead the country in order to ram something through Congress. Not that they’d ever do something like that, of course! Still, this does make a guy wonder:

[Deputy White House Press Secretary Tony] Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough.

So…um…this, uh, emergency plan that was pulled together because of this emergency that nobody could have predicted would happen was in the pipeline for months.

Huh. It’s almost as if the Bush administration is using the façade of an emergency to force through a plan that they’ve been prepping for a long time, hoping that by cranking up the perceived threat level to neon pink, they can force Democrats in Congress to take a politically risky stand right before an election, to benefit the GOP. When have I seen this before? When indeed?

It’s a trap. No deal without the GOP equally on the hook. These are their buddies. Let them take the risk.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think the Democrats need to hit the brakes on the whole $700 billion bailout. It’s pretty clear that the GOP has no intention of behaving honorably here. They’re going to demand their trillion for their buddies, and let the Democrats take the blame.

So screw ‘em. Unless the GOP commits to getting on board with the bailout with a majority of their members, including John McCain, then walk away. Tell ‘em that they can dig themselves out of the hole. They can come up with their own bailout plan. They can take the political hit. They can be the “responsible” ones.

If this is the huge, huge crisis that King Henry says it is, the GOP will cave. They will go along and they will work with the Democrats to fix it, because it’s the responsible thing to do. And if the GOP won’t go along and won’t work to fix things, then to hell with it.

Worried about how to survive the coming depression? My good friends at Schadenfreude have some helpful hints:

Surviving the New Depression: Tip #94 from Steve Delahoyde on Vimeo.

Heya, all.

I’ve had a hard time finding much of anything funny lately. I think this may be common these days among those of us on the left.

I don’t know if it’s because the campaign seems like a bad joke all on its own (“I can see Russia from my house!”), or because of the ongoing financial apocalypse or what, but even the jokes I find funny are funny in an “oh god make it stop” kind of way.

My current favorite?

Asking the people of America to bail out the crooks who swindled them is ridiculous!  Why, that would be like asking a rape victim to finance their own rape kit!

Funny, eh? No? Yeah. Me neither.

Anyway, this coming Sunday, the 28th, I’ll be taking a break from it all and going to the San Francisco Comedy Day in Golden Gate Park. It’s free, it features 30 different comedians, and it involves lying on a blanket on the grass and laughing really hard.

If any of you are in the SF Bay Area and are so inclined, you’re certainly invited to join me! I’d love to meet more ALASers, and the way I figure it, we could all use a break and a laugh.