Or did Bush seem better than normal tonight? No stumbling over the words, no staggering incoherence, and just calmly putting out his case?

I guess maybe he has decided that he can not compete with McCain when it comes to mind-bending incompetence, so he just decided to play it down the middle. Alternate working theory- all the crazy Bush advisors are now with the McCain campaign.

At any rate, for the first time that I can remember, he seemed, well, somewhat competent.

*** Update ***

Shit. Fan:

Chinese regulators have told domestic banks to stop interbank lending to U.S. financial institutions to prevent possible losses during the financial crisis, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday.

The Hong Kong newspaper cited unidentified industry sources as saying the instruction from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) applied to interbank lending of all currencies to U.S. banks but not to banks from other countries.

Any informed commentary on this?

Discuss.

Had a nice drive, listened to the new Randy Newman and then Ice Cube’s greatest hits, and the weather is perfect. Sunny, blue skies, and cool. Great day for a trip on the highway. Some random thoughts:

1.) I listened to Limbaugh for about ten minutes, where I learned that Obama is a segregationist and, this is the term I loved, a “racist baiter.” We went to cd’s shortly after that crap.

2.) Move over invisible hand, now it is time for the invisible handout. The Paulson bailout could cost a trillion. Everett Dirksen is looking down from above and is giving us all the finger. At any rate, because the taxpayers are now on the hook for a couple trillion (if they say it is going to cost a trillion, double to triple that), the greedy bastards who got rich screwing us with the “free market” are reacting favorably. This seems as appropriate as ever:

As Atrios notes, the music stops, and you and I got left without a chair.

3.) Every day the travesty of GOP rule becomes more and more obvious. I still believe many of the same things I have always believed, whether it be about abortion, the death penalty, the use of the military, etc., but it just becomes increasingly clear with every day how bankrupt the conservative movement has become. I don’t think the Democrats are that much better, and have repeatedly stated that I came to the party pre-disillusioned, but they are, at least right now, better. That can not be argued. What galls me is the depths that some folks seem willing to sink to in order to keep power for the broken and corrupt “conservative” ideology. It seems to me that simply comparing where we are now as opposed to where we were at the end of the Clinton years really says it all. The GOP has failed, and they richly deserve a few years off.

4.) WVU football is in for a period of steep decline. The last two games give me no reason to think we can win even five games this year. Our offense is flat and predictable, our defense is flat-footed and unreliable (unless you count on them reliably being unable to get the opposing team’s offense off the field), and the play-calling was the worst I remember ever seeing. Our coaching staff is clearly in far over their heads, and I do not see any reason why quality recruits would commit to this mess. If what the past few weeks is any sign, WVU football is headed for a dark period that we have not seen since before pre-Nehlen days.

5.) Please stop calling what that jackass kid did to Sarah Palin’s email acount “hacking.” He didn’t “hack” anything. What he did was good old social engineering, much like how Kevin Mitnick exploited so many systems back in the day (although in this case, it was not even anywhere near as clever as Mitnick’s exploits). All he did was google where Palin met her husband, entered that, and he was in. Hacking, this was not.

6.) It seems that the first dude is refusing to testify in Alaska. That is right, folks. We now stand poised to elect a Republican administration that we know is corrupt, cynical, and has no respect for the law BEFORE they take office. Bravo, voters. If the McCain/Palin ticket is elected, I hope we, as a nation, get what we deserve and get it hard.

7.) Speaking of Todd and Sarah Palin, the lyrics in Randy Newman’s new song, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country made me laugh:

I’d like to say a few words
In defense of our country
Whose people aren’t bad nor are they mean
Now the leaders we have
While they’re the worst that we’ve had
Are hardly the worst this poor world has seen

Let’s turn history’s pages, shall we?

Take the Caesars for example
Why within the first few of them
They were sleeping with their sister
Stashing little boys in swimming pools
And burning down the City
And one of ‘em, one of ‘em
Appointed his own horse Consul of the Empire
That’s like vice president or something

That’s not a very good example, is it?

I think that deserves a “heh, indeedy.”

8.) Finally, it appears that nominating an inexperienced religious wingnut and unrepentant liar as your vice-president and then engaging in the “Lies Across America/Putting Lies First” tour has hurt McCain in the polls. Gallup has Obama up by five, RCP has him up by a few, and 538 has Obama in control of the electoral college again. All this can change, but still nice to see things trending in the right direction.

I have a bunch going on and may or may not be back later tonight. If you have some time, take this study, and if you are so inclined, throw Obama a buck or two:

Be cool.

Fear can be useful with respect to decisions like, say, whether or not to chase a bear with a stick, but for higher-level thinking the frightened state of mind blows goats. People do irrational, stupid, senselessly violent things when motivated by fear.

Naturally fear has its political uses. Steering a frightened public towards a stupid policy is, so to speak, frighteningly easy. When terrorists attacked America a normal leadership would have gone out of its way to reassure people and calm nerves. The GOP went the other way, maybe disgracefully, but in naked terrorist fear Republicans found a winning meal ticket at a time when national polls put them on the wrong side of virtually every issue.

Anyhow, on the topic social science that we should probably leave alone but due to some personal flaw just can’t, here are two more editions of science revealing what we already know.

First, an unpleasant surprise frightens conservatives more than liberals.

[Subjects] were attached to equipment to measure skin conductivity, which rises with emotional stress as the moisture level in skin goes up. Each participant was shown threatening images, such as a bloody face interspersed with innocuous pictures of things such as bunnies, and rise in skin conductance in response to the shocking image was measured. The other measure was the involuntary eye blink that people have in response to something startling, such as a sudden loud noise. The scientists measured the amplitude of blinks via electrodes that detected muscle contractions under people’s eyes.

The researchers found that both of these responses correlated significantly with whether a person was liberal or conservative socially. Subjects who had expressed a high level of support for policies “protecting the social unit” showed a much larger change in skin conductance in response to alarming photos than those who didn’t support such policies. Similarly, the mean blink amplitude for the socially protective subjects was significantly higher, the team reports in tomorrow’s issue of Science. Co-author Kevin Smith says the results showed that automatic fear responses are better predictors of protective attitudes than sex or age (men and older people tend to be more conservative).

To be honest this result is so un-novel that it’s almost a tautology. One basic definition of conservatism is a negative reaction to whatever is new and shocking at a given point in time, whether the problem du jour is interreligious marriage, interracial marriage or gay marriage. Social progress generally involves accepting things that shock most people who see it for the first time relatively late in life. The liberal deals with his shock and gets over it where the conservative internalizes his discomfort and transforms it into a Kantian moral imperative. Finding out that unpleasant surprise impacts the conservative more strongly therefore beats reporting that the sun will come up in the east tomorrow, but not by much.

On the other hand, it’s curious to find that disproving rightwing lies only makes them believe it more.

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation—the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar “backfire effect” also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.

Now you know why Atrios calls them “zombie lies.” But on reflection ‘zombie’ still doesn’t cover the perversity of this phenomenon. In most movies a zombie will go down if you hit it in the head hard enough. Rightwing lies aren’t just hard to kill, they get stronger the more thoroughly you kill them. Wingnut rumors function more like that mythical critter that grew two heads every time Hercules cut one off, except even the hydra eventually died. By comparison about 29% of America continue to think that Saddam had a WMD program and sat down with bin Laden to plan 9/11. In that sense the hydra is a piker next to rightwing stupidity. There’s nothing like it.

The top news at memeorandum is the Palin email thing again, and that reminded me of a case from a few years back, but I can not remember the details.

Didn’t a prominent pol have his private cell phone calls about something get intercepted and recorded?

Or am I just making this up and thinking I am remembering it?

*** Update ***

Lot of suggestions, including the call in the movie Primary Colors, but I am sure it was the Jim McDermott/Newt Gingrich thing that I was thinking of.

I have no idea how this will play out in terms of electing people I like, regardless, this is still good news:

The Department of Veterans Affairs said Monday that it would no longer ban voter registration drives among veterans living at federally run nursing homes, shelters for the homeless and rehabilitation centers across the country.

In May, the department said such drives would violate the prohibition on political activity by federal employees and would be disruptive.

The reversal came after months of pressure from state election officials, voting rights groups and federal lawmakers who said that such drives made it easier for veterans to take part in the political process.

The previous rule made no sense (at least what I understood of it made no sense- there may have been aspects I was unaware of), as it seems to me that the general rule should be to make things EASIER for people to vote should they so desire.

Republicans are becoming more open to marriage equality and civil unions:

A CBS News/New York Times poll released Monday found that 49 percent of the delegates to the Republican convention support allowing same-sex marriages or civil unions. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

A CNN/Opinion Research Poll conducted in May found that nearly half of those surveyed supported either same-sex marriages or civil union. Twenty-four percent supported same-sex marriages, while 27 percent backed civil unions. Forty-three percent backed neither option. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points

Although, as an Obama supporter, I think that the Log Cabin Republicans should have sat this one out and endorsed no one, it’s clear that the work they and other gay Republicans are doing is having an effect. Half of all Republican delegates is huge considering where we were just a few years ago. That increase didn’t happen because Republicans were routinely called hate-mongers, homophobes, and bigots. It happened because gays have been increasingly coming out of the shadows. It’s happening because people are working with supporters within the Republican party to show them that being against marriage equality is not anathema to being a good Republican.

Mostly, it’s happening because John McCain spent 5 years in a prison camp and didn’t have any homosexuals to hate.

Media pundits are speculating that Joe Biden puts pressure on McCain to play for Pennsylvania and choose Tom Ridge. Who is pro-choice. Thinking of Joe Lieberman for a second, I get the impression that the media isn’t centrist per se but rather just likes watching a politician tell his party’s motivated base to go jump in a lake and shoot itself.

Then again, the religious right doesn’t love Mittens any more than Ridge, Charlie Crist has the gay thing following him around and Bobby Jindal could be a little quicker on his feet. Rudy Giuliani (yeah I know, not gonna happen) would amusingly reinforce McCain’s key points by adding another war-crazy egomaniac with bad character judgment who spastically repeats his one strong resume item at every sign of stress. It would be like the Tourette’s support group from hell. The only choice that worries me is Mike Huckabee. Huck would add a charismatic debater and solid conservative Christian who is enough of a political moderate to blunt McCain’s recent turn to fringe right crazytown.

Then again, McCain-Huckabee could put Rush Limbaugh back on the pills.

I understand what you’re saying. I hate to tell you this, but she’s not alone. I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party, it’s going to change it forever, be the end of it. A lot of people aren’t going to vote. You watch.

Heh. Indeed.

This is really quite sad:

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, is reported to have suffered an aneurysm and is not expected to recover, according to CBS affiliate WOIO in Cleveland.

WOIO also reported that the congresswoman is on life support at this time.

The station reported today that she was transported overnight to Huron Hospital in Cleveland after police found her in her car last evening.

The congresswoman’s office said in statement that she suffered the aneurysm while driving her car in Cleveland Heights, Ohio last night and that she “has stabilized and she is receiving the best care available.”

I was never much a fan of her politics, per se, but every time I saw her on television she was happy and enthusiastic. Even during the primary, when her unbridled Clinton enthusiasm was, well, crazy, it was still somewhat endearing. I remember watching her talking about how Clinton was going to win, even when we all knew that was not going to happen, and while laughing at her lunacy on the facts, cheering how enthusiastic and happy she was.

I am aware some of you will say there is no place for that in politics, and people in her shoes should be serious all the time and radiate gravitas, but part of me thinks (especially after reading the dour comments here every day and following the depressing news coverage every night) that we need a lot more people like her in this world.

I am so sick of this nonsense:

Doctors may not discriminate against gays and lesbians in medical treatment, even if the procedures being sought conflict with physicians’ religious beliefs, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday.

In its second major decision advancing gay rights this year, the state high court ruled that religious physicians must obey a state law that bars businesses from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.

If your religious beliefs keep you from treating your patients, find another line of work.

Get ready for the usual suspects to get their freak on:

A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC’s review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts – not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

Otero’s ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the university’s system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero’s rulings to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

This one has it all- California, liberal ivory towers, creationism, poor marginalized Christians, home-schooling, and activist judges. Get ready for the freak out, because you know it is coming.

BTW- Judge Otero is a Bush appointee.

T. Boone Pickens, oilman and swiftboat vet funder, in the WSJ:

How will we do it? We’ll start with wind power. Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean. Did you know that the midsection of this country, that stretch of land that starts in West Texas and reaches all the way up to the border with Canada, is called the “Saudi Arabia of the Wind”? It gets that name because we have the greatest wind reserves in the world. In 2008, the Department of Energy issued a study that stated that the U.S. has the capacity to generate 20% of its electricity supply from wind by 2030. I think we can do this or even more, but we must do it quicker.

My plan calls for taking the energy generated by wind and using it to replace a significant percentage of the natural gas that is now being used to fuel our power plants. Today, natural gas accounts for about 22% of our electricity generation in the U.S. We can use new wind capacity to free up the natural gas for use as a transportation fuel. That would displace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. Natural gas is the only domestic energy of size that can be used to replace oil used for transportation, and it is abundant in the U.S. It is cheap and it is clean. With eight million natural-gas-powered vehicles on the road world-wide, the technology already exists to rapidly build out fleets of trucks, buses and even cars using natural gas as a fuel. Of these eight million vehicles, the U.S. has a paltry 150,000 right now. We can and should do so much more to build our fleet of natural-gas-powered vehicles.

Now T. Boone has his own motives, as we have discussed before (although I can not find the post- maybe it is one I drafted and discarded- maybe I just linked it to Tim hoping he would write about it), as he has invested heavily in wind power, but it doesn’t hurt that someone is pushing a plan that involves something more than drilling for oil. I forget where I saw it, but someone noted that the petroleum-centric plans being currently offered (MORE DRILLING! MORE DRILLING!) are very much like a heroin addict realizing he has a problem and coming to the conclusion that the solution is more heroin.

I think that one thing that is interesting about this whole debate (what little we have had) is that at least one portion of our energy plan for the future must involve re-thinking how we zone and build our communities and a need for reliable and usable public transportation, and other than Matt Yglesias and Atrios I never see anyone talking about that. We need some serious changes in our energy and transportation policies, and we need them now.

Of course, I know I am failing miserably as a blogger when I bring this subject up, because I am supposed to be disowning Obama for his FISA vote. Sadly, I think the fact that McCain, on top of any number of issues, is wrong about this, is more important. If we elect McCain, we will get more of the same. The price of all of our food, all of our goods, all of our transportation strikes me as a touch more important than Obama voting against a bill that was going to pass anyway and that he had no control over and that could not even be successfully filibustered.

*** Update ***

I should probably add that there is also significant upside to this being raised by Pickens, as he is not a DFH. As such, the media will probably notice his plan.

This time on FISA:

A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.

The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Again, you all know what you get when I even get within a mile of an attempt at legal analysis, but this ruling would seem to dovetail nicely with yesterday’s Greenwald post in which he stated that FISA has no expiration date and there is no need for the FISA bill we have been fighting about for months. The willingness of this judge to recognize and adhere to the existing authority as laid out under the current FISA law would seem to back up that claim to me.

As a side note, this seems to be yet another example of the Bush administration simply doing whatever the hell they want anddaring someone to tell them no. This time, someone did. Only took seven years.

Via Yglesias, I see this piece from Col. Bacevich:

The burden of identifying and confronting the Bush legacy necessarily falls on Obama. Although for tactical reasons McCain will distance himself from the president’s record, he largely subscribes to the principles informing Bush’s post-9/11 policies. McCain’s determination to stay the course in Iraq expresses his commitment not simply to the ongoing conflict there, but to the ideas that gave rise to that war in the first place. While McCain may differ with the president on certain particulars, his election will affirm the main thrust of Bush’s approach to national security.

The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

***

This is a stiff test, not the work of a speech or two, but of an entire campaign. Whether or not Obama passes the test will determine his fitness for the presidency.

He should have been a General.

This Mark Murray piece seems to make a lot of sense:

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on the 2nd Amendment elevated an issue—guns—that hadn’t received that much attention until now. Remembering that the subject hurt Al Gore in 2000 and somewhat damaged Kerry’s image in 2004 (after his widely panned hunting excursion) will guns also be a problem for Obama? On the one hand, many of the swing states (actually check that, EVERY swing state) are places where the electorate tends to have pro-gun views and where the Mike Bloomberg position wouldn’t fly. On the other hand, as some have pointed out today, the Supreme Court ruling may actually help Obama because Republicans might no longer be able to argue that Democrats want to take your guns away. “The Supreme Court has said you can’t do that,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told the Washington Post.

Given that ownership of guns as an issue has been taken off the table by the Supreme Court, and that Scalia, one of the most conservative members of the Court wrote the majority report and affirmed almost every bit of gun control legislation short of outright bans in his opinion, it sure would seem that it is going to take some real creativity on the part of Republicans to get any traction on the issue of guns anymore. The only thing they could probably do is to lurch rightward, but then they run the risk of alienating the middle, who I presume favor many common sense approaches to gun control (not allowing them in bars, not allowing felons to own guns, etc.).

At any rate, this could be a major loss for Republicans in states like West Virginia, where the gun issue went a long way to defeating Al Gore. SCOTUSBLOG has a related discussion of the future of gun control here.

Another piece on the same issue here.

As most of you know by now, former presidential aide John Yoo wrote some of the internal memos that got the ball rolling on the unitary executive concept of presidential power. Today John Yoo met John Conyers.

Conyers: Could the President order a suspect buried alive?

Yoo: Uh, Mr. Chairman, I don’t think I’ve ever given advice that the President could order someone buried alive. . .

Conyers: I didn’t ask you if you ever gave him advice. I asked you thought the President could order a suspect buried alive.

Yoo: Well Chairman, my view right now is that I don’t think a President . . . no American President would ever have to order that or feel it necessary to order that.

In the universe of weak dodges, this gambit is so flimsy that you have to wonder how Yoo kept a straight face. During the Abu Ghraib scandal these same Unitary Executive buffs were often asked whether the president could freely order torture and other forms of prisoner abuse. But he wouldn’t do that, they responded. Of course John Yoo’s bosses certainly did order torture, so the question isn’t exactly academic.

Being an insider Yoo knows full well what the president ordered, which is why the question puts him in a bit of a bind. If he reiterates the ‘unitary executive’ theory in Congressional testimony he will discredit himself, his associates and the entire Bush movement. But if he rejects it then he sets up the next question: what should the penalty be for a President who knowingly breaks the law? Yoo is too loyal a soldier to get caught in that trap, even if staying out of it makes him look like a moron. As the saying goes, it’s better to stay quiet and be thought a fool and open your mouth and piss off Dick Cheney.

Fundamentally, the reason why Bush officials like Yoo and Addington show such total contempt for Congress is also the answer to the question that Conyers asked John Yoo: a rule without a penalty is no rule at all. If Congress won’t enforce the law when the President breaks it, then why should he pretend the law is there? For all intents and purposes it isn’t. Yoo’s answer to Conyers, then, is to lean back, smirk and ask what are you going to do about it?

Both sides of that conversation know the answer: nothing. Maybe Conyers will hold another hearing and invite another Bush official to crap on his desk.

***

It’s hard to put into words exactly how disgusted I feel right now with my party and its weasel leaders. Glenn Greenwald, riffing off a post by John below, comes pretty close. I would throw in the ecstatic rightwing support for police state government powers (and I’m not talking about the fringe – the line starts at Andrew Sullivan and includes every Republican Congressperson save one) to make a larger point. On the subject of government power, the reversal was so extreme that it was like watching the GOP step out of a bodysnatcher pod. It became obvious America doesn’t have a conservative party any longer. There aren’t even that many conservatives; if it was Jews most cities couldn’t form a minyan. In the late Bush era, if you count out the fringe parties we have on the one hand reformed ‘conservatives’ whose domestic and foreign policy amounts to stalinism minus the healthcare, and on the other hand you have Democrats.

The obvious problem with that formula is that Democrats aren’t that institutionally opposed to the kind of ideas that neo-Republicanism holds dear. After all, since the FDR era left-right alignment Democrats traditionally argued for more government power and Republicans, gummint haters that they were, acted as the counterweight. The danger is that with the counterweight gone (or scared crazy, as the case clearly is) the ‘middle’ will be redefined as something between New Dealism and stalinism.

The Democrats are now at a pivot point – they can implicitly endorse the new ‘middle’ by chasing it politically (read: Steny Hoyer) or they can reject it and reestablish a new ‘middle’ somewhere close to where it was when the nation reacted with horror at the Church Commission findings and enacted FISA (read: Chris Dodd). Thanks more to the tireless efforts of Bush, Rove, Bill Frist and Tom DeLay than their own good qualities Democrats will win a sizable victory one way or another. Thus Democrats have a uniquely free hand to choose their direction and, as the governing majority, the direction of the country.

The key person in this equation isn’t Steny Hoyer. A spirited leadership challenge in 2009 can put him someplace where his antiquated Gephardtism can do less damage, and if he lacks the confidence of a Democratic President it will probably succeed. Too bad Hoyer won’t lack the confidence of the President. Rather than reject it Barack Obama has explicitly endorsed the Hoyer bill in toto, and so that’s where ‘the middle’ will be as far as the two parties are concerned, somewhere between New Dealism and the USSR. Let me correct myself then – the Democrats aren’t at a pivot point anymore. We pivoted in the wrong direction. That sound you hear is Pat Buchanan pounding Wild Turkey and sobbing.

Me, I’ll still support Democratic candidates for the reasons that John already listed. But for enthusiasm I’ll watch the Steelers.