Let me see if I have this straight:

1. Banks are reluctant to lend to each other these days.
2. Lenders make more money when interest rates go up, and less money when rates go down.

Therefore,
3. The Fed thinks that they can improve things by repeatedly cutting interest rates on inter-bank loans, now to almost nothing.

Am I crazy to think that this is backwards? The problem is a lack of supply (of loans), and they seem to be taking steps that increase demand and reduce supply.

Of the three presidential debates this fall, the third one was definitely the most entertaining, though I'm not sure how enlightening it was. I did learn some things though, at least about John McCain....

( Read more... )

Forgot one!
11. He blinks secret messages to his followers, presumably in some variant of Morse code.

This guy scares me more than ever. Luckily he's unlikely to win -- as long as everyone votes and, when possible, contributes! (And even then, there could be trouble.)

Full debate transcript here.
Full videos here (in 17 parts).

The New Republic:
"Stop kidding yourself: John McCain is a pro-life zealot."

NPR had a story this morning underscoring the importance of the upcoming presidential election on the Supreme Court.

The introduction says it all: the upcoming presidential election will determine whether the Court will swing hard to the right, or not at all; it will definitely not swing hard to the left.

Currently the Supreme Court is divided between four conservatives (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito), four liberals (Stevens, Souter, Breyer, Ginsberg), and the moderate-conservative swing vote of Anthony Kennedy. Previously, moderate-conservative Sandra Day O'Connor was the swing vote, but her retirement and replacement by Alito put Kennedy in that position, and moved the center of the court a little farther to the right. Today's "liberal wing" was considered "moderate" a generation ago, but the court keeps moving to the right. (Note that only two of the nine current members were chosen by a Democratic president.)

The NPR Supreme Court reporter estimates that three of the four liberal justices are likely to retire in the next presidential term, starting with Stevens, who is now 88; Ginsberg is 75, and the 68-year-old Souter is apparently itching to leave. (The other liberal, Breyer, is 69, while Scalia and Kennedy are 72 and 71). On the other hand, the three youngest members (ages 53-60) by far are all conservatives.

John McCain has promised that his Supreme Court appointees would be along the lines of the current conservative wing, putting them strongly into the majority for a generation. To me, that's reason enough to make sure he does not win the election.

(The New York Times also talked about this last week, and a more precise numerical analysis was done at Daily Kos last month.)

(This is way later than I intended, but hey, the polls have only been open for half an hour!)

First things first: In the grand scheme of things, the positions of Clinton and Obama are pretty close. Despite what you may have heard, both have detailed plans on all manner of issues, those plans and their overall positions are fairly similar, and those plans will inevitably get modified if they ever even make it through Congress.

Each has a life history that prepares them for the global stage. Both are highly intelligent. If you're concerned about ability to accomplish their goals, Obama's legislative record is actually more impressive, writing and passing legislation on all manner of important issues. There's plenty of substance there if you care to look.

On the life experience issue, I should also note that Obama has (at least) as much life experience as Bill "The Man From Hope" Clinton did in 1992 (when he was the same age Obama is), and John F. Kennedy did in 1960 (when he was three years younger).

But my major goal in voting today is to make sure the Democratic nominee will win in November. The biggest reason for that is the Supreme Court -- in replacing Sandra Day O'Connor with Sam Alito, Bush has pulled the court to the scary-right, and there's no doubt that McCain would continue that. McCain is also the guy who wants to stay in Iraq for centuries and joked about bombing Iran, as well as somehow keeping an image as a "maverick" while staying in lock-step with Bush.

So the first thing I look at (both last time around and this time) was the polls vs Republicans. Yes, it's early and things can change, but many of the candidates are already well-known, so those polls haven't changed a whole lot (especially when you consider the margin of error). It's striking that, rather consistently, Obama has polled better against McCain than Clinton has.

Then I look at the way they run their campaigns. The Clinton and Obama campaigns look very much like the Kerry and Dean campaigns four years ago, except that Obama learned from Dean's mistakes. Clinton is running a swing-state campaign, ignoring the "red states", and taking for granted the "blue states". Obama is running a 50-state campaign, bringing voters over to his side not by shifting his positions to the right, but by framing his views in ways that appeal to people who normally vote farther right. The 50-state strategy not only gives a better shot at winning a lot of states we might not otherwise win, but also gives a better shot of helping Democrats win House and Senate seats in Republican seats. More Democrats in Congress means more chance of a Democratic president actually getting their goals accomplished.

In addition, Obama's campaign has shown a remarkable ability to plan ahead, while Clinton's campaign was apparently unprepared to go past Super Tuesday, and has repeatedly been caught by surprise by the quirky rules of various states (such as Nevada and Texas). When the rules that were in place from the start have turned out later to have unfavorable consequences for her, her campaign has even sought to change them after the fact. (Watch for the coming fight over Michigan and Florida delegates, despite everyone knowing the rules ahead of time, those states flouting the rules, and therefore everyone knowing that those contests wouldn't count.) We don't need another president who tries to change the rules after the fact.


It's probably too late to change anyone's mind, but for all these reasons and more I intend to vote today for Barack Obama. And in November I'll happily vote for whichever of the two is still standing.

I've mentioned a few times that I enjoy the writing of Amanda Marcotte (pandagon_amanda) at Pandagon (pandagon_net). She's an outspoken Texan feminist, liberal, music fan, atheist (yet leader and prophet of the Church of the Mouse and Disco Ball), heavily inspired in her writing by the late Molly Ivins.

A couple weeks ago she announced that she'd been hired as blogmistress for the John Edwards presidential campaign, and would (sadly) be reducing her Pandagon blogging in order to focus on this great new opportunity. She said she strongly supported his candidacy and his positions on the issues, and was looking forward to helping him win.

( Then the knives came out. )

So it was little surprise to me when I read Amanda's announcement today that she's resigned from the Edwards campaign. She said she had become a target that risked the Edwards campaign "every time [she] coughed", so she couldn't effectively do the job she was hired to do. And of course, being part of the campaign meant that she couldn't respond the the attacks herself, while being outside the campaign allows her to respond as only she can.

(Selfishly, I'm happy that I'll get to read the unfiltered Amanda again.)

This whole episode is relevant to all of us who live our lives partially online. If we're smart, we don't make public anything that we think could hurt us in our future careers, but it can sometimes be difficult to make that prediction. Maybe our future employers, like the Edwards campaign, will have no problem with (or awareness of) what we've written. But what about their rivals and competitors? Will some third party use our past personal writings to attack us and our employers?

As one blogger put it, "Blogger pelt season is now open."

This sort of thing will only get worse as more people put more of their lives online in various ways. Not just blogs, but other sorts of social networking sites, web forums, Flickr photos, all may make us vulnerable in some way we may not anticipate. Knowledge of this prompts many people to try to hide under varying levels of pseudonymity (complete anonymity online is nearly impossible without a lot of work), but a determined effort will eventually be able to break through that veil. Others of us just hope that being ourselves will be good enough, and that anyone who objects to that can be ignored; circumstances don't always play out that well though.

Luckily, most situations aren't nearly as cutthroat as political campaigns.

Updates:

1. Pandagon seems to be back up and running now.
2. Melissa McEwan, the other blogger involved in this controversy, has also resigned.
3. Neither Edwards nor the other candidates have distinguished themselves in this mess.
4. "We Are All Melissa and Amanda."
5. Amanda has written her side of the story, "Why I had to quit the Edwards campaign", over at Salon. (Linking to the article through Pandagon avoids having to watch an ad.)
   

This seems to be all over the blogs in the last couple days, but it deserves to be everywhere....

Saturday night was the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, in which the White House press have dinner with government officials from the President on down. The press reports afterward seem to have focused on Bush's comedy routine with a Bush lookalike, but the real highlight was the final speaker, Stephen Colbert. In his I-support-the-president persona, mercilessly skewered most of his audience, including Bush (sitting ten feet away), the Washington press corps in front of him, and some other government attendees such as John McCain. The audience reaction was somewhat muted, both because much of the audience was targeted and because they were amazed he had the guts to say what he did directly to his targets. As I watched it I was certainly amazed that he was saying these things to this audience.

C-Span has RealVideo of the whole event; Bush's routine is about 53 minutes into it, and Colbert's follows at about an hour and six minutes into it.

There are a few different sources of just the Colbert speech. Here's one: part 1 / part 2
And a transcript at dKos.

Update: Bush wasn't exactly pleased with Colbert's performance.


Meanwhile.... "President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution." This is the guy who hasn't vetoed a single bill in five years -- why risk the chance of Congress overriding a veto when you can sign the bill while declaring that you won't obey it? And he can have his government listen in on your phone calls without fear of a court stopping them. Because after all, it would certainly be easier if this were a dictatorship, just so long as he's the dictator.

OK, I'm all for universal health care, but can someone please explain to me the rationale for mandatory purchasing of health insurance, with noncompliance punished by tax penalties?

Or is the AP just spinning this negatively?

Update: The debate on this over at Daily Kos is interesting, once you get past the cheerleading. "Mandatory private health insurance" indeed.

Yesterday two political stories drew my attention.

First, Salon tells us about evidence in the case against Tom DeLay (a 318-page PDF) revealing the true Republican strategy to use their conservative "Christian" base as a tool to further their own agenda. DeLay's aide says in one memo,

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

Second, a Washington Post columnist tells us of President Bush's ill-fated trip to the historically Black Howard University last week for a "youth summit" in the campus dining hall. In this presidency, of course, this meant that only handpicked students got to participate, while the rest were locked out of the dining hall at dinner time. While the column's characterization of the school and its students may be disputed, the end result is, well....

But the visit went from bad to worse. On a day when the U.S. Senate passed a resolution paying tribute to civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who died last week, campus security guards were telling students that if they wanted to eat they'd have to come back when the president and first lady were gone, then go to a service door at the rear of the dining hall and ask for a chicken plate to go.

Pandagon/pandagon_net has been all over the John Roberts Supreme Court appointment. Apparently, he has expressed the (way too common) "strict constructionist" view that there is nothing in the Constitution about a right to privacy, so therefore no such right exists. Amanda posted a good article last night about what's wrong with that view.

On the other hand, apparently Roberts has done pro-bono work representing gay-rights activists, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But he seems to want to hide it.