The entire debate made it clear that Obama is an entirely better candidate for the highest office in the land and that McCain, despite his age and passion for his work, is basically able. But, for that murky middle of voters who can’t seem to decide, all they should do is watch this:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8__aXxXPVc&hl=en&fs=1]

President Bill Clinton spoke to David Letterman tonight. With regard to the market collapsing, he said “there’s plenty of blame to go around.” He further elaborated that, if you multiply all of the houses that may go into foreclosure in the near future, you have a situation unlike any other. When Dave said, “It sounds pretty scary,” Mr. Clinton, in the most relaxed, gentle, and persuasive voice, said, “It doesn’t have to be. We can solve it. It doesn’t have to be.” And he smiled, calmly.
At that moment in time, I fully believed Clinton, despite everything. He was a full light in a dark room of lies and speculation and back-room, shady handshakes.
Clinton: “It’s a mistake to bet against America. We can turn this around.”
P.S. Chris Rock, on ten minutes later, jokes “Did he do everything he could not to mention Barack Obama?” And it’s true – a few mentions of “Hillary” and an almost weak-sounding endorsement of McCain and no mention of Bill’s younger and better successor, Mr. Obama.

This was just so dead-on, culturally astute, and well-acted that I plan on watching it again. And then cry.
http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/48cd3b64ddb82bd0/48cd0cf97d529c95/be940ef3

Today, my daughter came home today, explaining that she learned how to “Save As” at school on the computer there. Besides for the fact that kids are learning to make a duplicate of a file on a word processor, I thought it would be great to use “Save As” in our political predicament.
De-spite all of the gloomy stories, Gail Collins’s good piece and David Broder’s (weaker) piece today read Save As.
It was a pleasure to read that Obama, and the United States of America, has a chance.

Every day is a new post about politics in ‘Merica, as I say the word. Today’s is McCain talking.
Listen and weep and then laugh.

Okay, I couldn’t stay away any longer.
I realize I only have about 3 readers left. I’m embarrassed by my incredible absence these past few months. Forgive me.
But I’m called to write because the election in the United States is becoming a fatter and wider preposterity than even I could have imagined. Let me try to sum up the facts for my 3 readers:
John McCain, a man of incredible integrity and pride and love for his country, decides to allow his journeymen consultants to persuade him to accept, as his Vice President, a person with as much political experience as your average county clerk. He knows he’s old and jokes about it often but, with his focus on national security, he has no problem with putting the nuclear arsenal and the power and privilege of serving in the hands of a political neophyte, currently under an ethics investigation for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan.
Then, it turns out that the selected VP candidate’s daughter (bless her soul), is preggers at the ripe age of 17. It’s fine. Her daughter should not be part of the equation, because our values say that children offer us the world and life is not to be taken for granted. Except that if Obama had a 17-year old daughter with a baby, she’d be accused of irresponsibility, miscegenation, and being sexually deviant.
On top of this, we learn that the Republicans want to take off their elephant hats and put on their stars-and-stripes ones because people in levee-land are in trouble. But the display is entirely a FEMA show, put on by the Bush administration.
Worse still is that the media is just eating it up. They love a good story! And there’s nothing quite like seeing compassionate Conservatives helping out their fellows by not going to their national convention. The benevolence! The generosity! See!
I’m done. Except this: I typically don’t watch NBC or CBS U.S. national news. But when I tuned in this morning, my jaw dropped as the latter’s Bob Schieffer, a man who I had thought had some journalistic integrity, repeated to the television anchor the lie that Obama has as much political experience as Palin. There I said her name.

President Bush really is the Chance Gardiner of the 21st century. He spoke recently to Mike Allen, a writer for Politico, and, incredibly, it seems that the President has made golf a primary personal sacrifice during his war in Iraq.

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.
“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”

It occurred to me the other day that, with the war in Iraq now six years old, it’s lasted almost longer than the Second World War, during which over 70 million people were killed between 1939 and 1945. President Bush can kindly argue that at least that many people didn’t die on his watch because of this war.

Oil reached an all-time high today, at $122 per barrel, which is twice what it was one year ago.
A friend of mine introduced me to the unhappy world of Peak Oil and the suppositions that, soon, without oil, civilization will falter and fail. It’s a very unpretty picture that folks are painting but it’s not without its supporters (in government primarily) and those who believe it but can’t speak its name.
Anyway, if you’re at all curious, the one site that’s super gloomy but powerful is DieOff. I’m going to tread slowly on this territory but it’s interesting, to me, in particular because the signs of the related Olduvai theory are apparent. The bubble of reality that we all live in seems never so thin.
Postcript: I’m particularly curious about White’s Law, which Wikipedia argues:

For White “the primary function of culture” and the one that determines its level of advancement is its ability to “harness and control energy.” White’s law states that the measure by which to judge the relative degree of evolvedness of culture was the amount of energy it could capture (energy consumption). White differentiates between five stages of human development. In the first, people use energy of their own muscles. In the second, they use energy of domesticated animals. In the third, they use the energy of plants (so White refers to agricultural revolution here). In the fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In the fifth, they harness the nuclear energy.

The Clinton campaign apparently used stock video footage for her scary “3:00-am-who-do-you-want-answering-the-scary-phone” ad. Well, Hillary not only got called on the use of the stock footage (which is no crime) but it was done so by the child actor who was the actress in the footage eight years ago. And that child actor is a big Obama supporter. Doh. I imagine that there are a few creative directors in the Clinton ad campaign headquarters that are wishing they had hired a “real” actor to do the dirty work. Oy vey.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXmYVRIpu2w&hl=en]
P.S. I use stock for my clients. Everyone does. There’s nothing wrong with it, inherently.

Since the massive interest rate cuts by the Fed a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking that the economy is far shakier than we are being led to believe. It wasn’t from the numbers (which I can’t say I understand) nor from some ideological belief about market economies (which I generally like). Rather, my worries about what the Fed knows and can’t tell us stems from the fact that the Fed can’t seem to stem the tide. The Fed cannot continue to bail out companies like Bear Sterns constantly, every week or every few days. If lending is shut down entirely, we will enter a massively scary economic crisis that could make 1929 look like fun. It’s truly scary. The Fed’s lack of transparency here or willingness to provide true oversight of these massively over-leveraged companies, combined with Mr. Bush’s blind confidence in their capacity, makes for lots of worries. No Fed leader wants to say the word “recession” let alone “depression” but those two words came out today for the first time (to my ears) from a number of pundits on NPR.
P.S. This piece from my pal, V.S., via Jon Stewart: “If you want to do the Jedi mind trick, you have to be a Jedi.”