Daily Archives: October 15, 2008

Third Presidential Debate: Live Blog

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First off, let’s stop thinking about a landslide. The remaining “undecided” voters are mostly older, less educated and white, I understand. It’s like a majority of them will move to McCain and tighten up the race in the last three weeks. No complacency.

Here we go.

Jeez, McCain is being friendly to Obama. The nice and calm McCain showed up tonight.

So far we haven’t heard anything new, except that McCain apparently has decided to be soothing rather than angry.

OK, McCain is back to taxes.

McCain indeed is planning to cut corporate taxes.

Class warfare! Yes! Grumpy McCain is coming back!

Why increase taxes? Because we’ve got a kajillion dollar deficit, you creep.

McCain the asshole is coming back. You can’t keep him down for long.

Does McCain understand what “spread the wealth around” means?

Invest in America. Yes! Obama said “Invest in America.” This should be a campaign slogan.

Wow, the moderator wants McCain to answer the question that was asked. That’s new.

John, we owe China a lot more than half a trillion dollars.

He can save billions by eliminating the tarrif on sugar from Brazil? I think I missed part of that.

Earmarks! Pork! boogaboogaboogabooga

Balance the budget in four years? That’s insane.

We’re going to balance the budget by job creation and energy independence?

I mean, is it me, or is McCain an asshole?

Here we go … say it to his face.

Town hall meetings? The negative campaigns are Obama’s fault for not doing town hall meetings?

Whine whine whine. Oh, McCain has not repudiated nasty remarks. He repeats them.

He’s not bringing up Ayers. Coward.

Yes. The American people are not interested in our hurt feelings. Perfect.

Comment about Chico and the Man — LOL! Chico and the Man in the Twilight Zone.

Yes, John, keep whining.

John is angry.

Oh, Obama brought up the “pal around with terrorists” line.

McCain didn’t take the Ayers bait.

Oh, yes, Ayers, ACORN, the whole thing. I think McCain is giving in to his temper. I wonder if this was the plan.

McCain is losing this debate worse than the other two. People don’t give a bleep about Ayers and ACORN.

I forgot about CNN’s squiggly lines. I just flipped to CNN.

At the name “Sarah Palin” the squiggly lines dropped like a rock. Flatline, folks. Oh, the “men” line is up just a tad. Well, men. You know.

Iraqis united? People are being killed for returning to their homes.

I swear, McCain is losing this one worse than the other two.

Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Very safe.

Easily eliminate dependence on foreign oil?

Obama is being realistic. Talking to the camera.

Does John think NAFTA is popular?

Community colleges have what to do with free trade?

I think McCain is right on the edge of blowing a gasket.

Oh, I love the split screen. McCain’s inner asshole is there for all the world to see.

Here Obama is presenting a clear and sensible plan for health care, even though it doesn’t go nearly as far as I’d like. Now McCain will lie about his plan.

Yeah, John, blame it on fat people.

He’s going to repeat the lie about fining small business again.

I mean, is McCain is an asshole or what? He’s not even making sense. The fine again.

That mean old Obama is going to make employers provide health benefits. For shame.

Oh, the gold-plated insurance that no one has. Yes, John, show us how out of touch with reality you are.

Senator Obama wants government to do a job. Well, yes.

Roe v. Wade. Somebody finally brings it up.

“Strict adherence to Constitution” = anti-choice.

“We have to change the culture of America.”

The “present” vote is a procedural thing in the Illinois Senate. It sounds weird but is no big deal, I understand.

Keep smirking and smiling, John.

We can’t have healthy mothers. “Health of the mother” is an extreme position, according to John.

“We have to work together” for John means abortion gets banned.

Make college affordable. It is a disgrace that there is such a barrier for people to get an education.

McCain begins to speak, the squiggly lines drop. “School choice” has not been “proven” in New Orleans, John.

“Competition” doesn’t help schools, John. Now he’s repeating the old right-wing canard that some of the best schools cost the least money. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Vouchers = yesterday’s issue. Even the wingnuts are abandoning it.

Sarah Palin has an autistic child?

Vouchers have not been proven. Where they’ve been in place a long time they haven’t done squat.

Almost over.

John, I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you.

Invest in the American people. I like it.

Sacrifice, service responsibility. We can do it. Work for you.

_______

I sincerely think McCain sucked at least as bad, if not worse, than he has in the other two debates.

David Gergen is saying that McCain got over-emotional and angry in the middle of the debate. Obama won the last half hour, he said.

I agree with Gergen. I think that when McCain would not let go of his personal hurt feelings about being insulted, he was losing big time.

I’m going to guess that this debate won’t change the trajectory of the opinion polls. I think the polls will tighten up at the end for reasons explained at the top of the post, but this debate won’t change the polls.

Just picked this up at Huffington Post:

Watch the eye roll.

I also am not sure the “I am not George Bush” line will help McCain much. Right now his biggest problem is that he is John McCain.

Ask What You Can Do for Your Country

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What can I do for my country? you ask. You can email this chart to everyone you know.

Accompanying text:

Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index* would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

You can also email this article titled “The Simple Arithmetic of Employment: Job Growth Is Always Higher When a Democrat Is In The White House.”

[Update: The email function for the above article seems to be busted. You can email this post instead; see “Email This” link at the end of the post.]

So why is it so many people believe Republicans are better for the economy? Because Republicans say they are. Over and over and over. With great conviction. I’m sure they believe it. But they are nuts.

For that reason, I think Harold Meyerson is jumping the gun a bit in his column “The God That Failed.”

Today, conservative intellectuals might want to consider writing a tome on the failure of their own beloved deity, unregulated capitalism. The fall of the financial system has been so fast and far-reaching that there’s been no time to fully consider its implications for the reigning economic theology of the past 30 years. But with the most right-wing administration in modern American history scurrying to nationalize the banks, the question cannot be elided indefinitely.

What exactly do economic conservatives believe now that their god is dead? What’s become of the glories of privatized Social Security? Of the merits of 401(k)s vs. defined-benefit pensions?

Meyerson assumes the ideologues pay attention to the real world. Although I think the True Believers will have a harder time pushing their unregulated capitalism privatization is best trickle down supply side swill in the near future, they will not lose faith in it. They’ll blame George Bush for this little glitch of a global financial crisis somehow, but say their theories are still correct, and Bush simply didn’t adhere to them faithfully enough.

Meanwhile, nearly 70 percent of Americans now want stricter regulation of the financial sector. From the Los Angeles Times:

“I always thought the least amount of government in people’s lives, the better,” said Bagley, 29, a poll respondent who was contacted in a follow-up interview. “But now you see what happens when you take it to the extreme.”

Exactly. The problem with wingnuts is that they can think only in extremes. Judging by their rhetoric, they think there are only two kinds of government — totalitarian communism or laissez-faire libertarianism. And they apply something like a one-drop rule to judge which is which — even one drop of un-laissez-faire libertarian policy renders a nation into a Stalinist gulag. For this reason, they cannot be worked with. Either vanquish them, or surrender.

So they cannot be educated. But, apparently nearly 70 percent of the American people can be educated, which is no bad thing. Now is the time for progressives like us to do everything we can to educate our fellow citizens about economic reality. It’s what we can do for our country.

See also:

“The death of the Washington consensus? Paul Krugman’s Nobel prize for economics signals the intellectual tide is turning against unrestricted free trade” by Kevin Gallagher.

“Misplaced Blame,” New York Times editorial

“Let’s Spend Money” by Dean Baker