After the 2010 Congressional election at least one third of the current members of the House of Reps will no longer be in Congress.
Obama (if he is elected) is going to have to raise taxes and abandon his spending plans as soon as he gets in because of Paulson’s folly. This will lead to a massive GOP landslide in 2010.
(Moore) wisdom from the mouths of fools
“EVERYBODY NEEDS TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH, CALM DOWN, AND NOT LET FEAR RULE THE DAY. Turn off the TV! We are not in the Second Great Depression. The sky is not falling. Pundits and politicians are lying to us so fast and furious it’s hard not to be affected by all the fear mongering. Even I, yesterday, wrote to you and repeated what I heard on the news, that the Dow had the biggest one day drop in its history. Well, that’s true in terms of points, but its 7% drop came nowhere close to Black Monday in 1987 when the stock market in one day lost 23% of its value. In the ’80s, 3,000 banks closed, but America didn’t go out of business. These institutions have always had their ups and downs and eventually it works out.” - Michael Moore
Now, as readers may have gathered, I am against the bailout. This is on mostly right of centre grounds (it’s an unecessary intervention, will waste American taxpayers money and British taxpaers will end up paying for it if Obama has his way) combined with some left of centre grounds (it will tie up money that could be used for universal healthcare). However, the annoying thing about being against the bailout is having to admit that for once, and once only, Michelle Malkin, Ron Paul and now Michael Moore are speaking more sense that the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, though some of their solutions (including Michael Moore’s) are almost as bad (or worse) than the Paulson plan.
The annoying thing is that this was unecessary. The PPI (the economic wing of the DLC) had some good advice and Charles Schumer had a good plan. But because Nancy Pelosi has neither the spine nor the political common sense to do anything than capitulate to Bush, America (and the rest of the world if Obama has his way) is going to have to pay. Even more annoying is the fact that Malkin, Paul and Moore will use the fact that they correct on this one issue to try to legitimise all the racist, pacifist and plain nutty garbage they spew out (Sullivan and NRO do not fall into this category).
Up is down, day is (unfortunately) night
I never thought I’d be taking the side of the anti-war website The Daily Kos, the right-wing NRO and Andrew Sullivan, but I have to admit that these articles hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, McCain still doesn’t get it. McCain had a chance to do the right thing and boost his electoral prospects - unfortunately he looks like he is going to flunk it. The only symbolic thing McCain could do is to persuade/allow Lieberman to vote against the bill, which would at least be a symbolic gesture that a McCain administration might do the right thing in future.
If the bill is so filled with pork - might this be a strategy to give McCain cover for voting against it?
His numbers started tanking before the bailout
The conventional wisdom has been that McCain’s response to the bailout has doomed his campaign. While I think that he made a very big judgement of error in the way that he has tried to take every conceivable side of this argument, the polling evidence is clear that since his numbers peaked on September 7th. From then on, there has been a consistent movement to Obama, which the various twists and turns in the bailout have done little to disrupt.
This is demonstrated in the above chart since Obama received his nomination bounce. It can be clearly seen that during the summer McCain began to gradually catch up with Obama, to the extent that he was on track for a 2-3% victory in the popular vote. Given that Obama neither received a bounce from his selection of Biden nor during the Democratic convention, McCain did not need to gamble and could have selected Tim Pawlentry or Lindsay Graham instead. Of course, he same argument could be used against the selection of Lieberman (although it would have been a worthwhile gamble), the evidence is that although Palin’s speech gave McCain a short term boost, her selection has created a trend against him.
This is not surprising. While I may have been a little harsh in my comparison of her to Incitatus, her responses to Gibson and Couric have not inspired any confidence in her abilities to lead. At the same time there is clear evidence that, not only is she even more right-wing than Obama is left-wing, but that her personal life is just as corrupt as those politicians she railed against. While some of the allegations that have been made against her are probably false, it is hard to dispute Buchanan when he claims that she was a ‘brigadier’ for him in 1996.
Ultimately, the fact is that, even if she manages to get through Thursday’s debates, she is not fit to be Vice-President, especially to a seventy-two year old cancer survivor - and believe that average voters are starting to move away from McCain/Palin in response. I still think McCain has about a 30-35% chance of victory, because I think that the markets are undervaluing his chances. However, part of me hopes Palin goes down in flames tomorrow - not least because the unique atmosphere created by the crisis means that McCain has at much chance winning without her as he does with her.
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