Link Banana

Bob Greene asks voters to say something nice about the man they’re not voting for in the presidential election. (This would have made a good video.)

(via Waxy)

Timothy Noah’s hardly the first person to claim that the Democrat’s go-to economic wise men, Bob Rubin, should have to shoulder a piece of the blame for the current financial mess. But his arguments are clearly laid out, and worthy of a perusal for anyone with a faint interest in the topic.

This shouldn’t shock anyone, but Slate’s staff is overwhelmingly pro-Obama. Bob Barr is getting as many votes from them as John McCain. And four times more people can’t vote as are voting for either of those two.

I’d love to see more publications try this out. I’d like to know the score at Time or The Economist.

An accurate predictor of the winner of the last seven presidential elections: Halloween mask sales.

On the topic of equality in America… Ross Douthat, on the heels of McCain’s attacking Obama for trying to speard the wealth around, agrues that it’s silly for conservatives to oppose all redistribution. 

In other words, a conservative welfare state would eliminate our current network of universal entitlement programs, and replace them with cheaper, means-tested programs that, well, spread the wealth - that spend your tax dollars to provide temporary assistance to the unemployed, underwrite health care costs for the aged and very poor, set an income floor underneath American seniors, and so forth, rather than taking money from the middle class with one hand and giving it back to them with the other. 

Robert Frank points to new evidence he was right all along:

According to a new survey by Prince & Associates, voters worth $1 million to $10 million are favoring Sen. John McCain, while voters worth $30 million or more are favoring Sen. Barack Obama. …

The reason? Taxes.

(via Ideas)

After having fallen asleep while watching the last two, I can’t really disagree with Mr. Keating (who wrote this before Wednesday’s debate. Yes, I’m behind.):

The “media elites,” as Sarah Palin would say, are hungry for the candidates to make news at the debates and seem perpetually disappointed when they just hear the same talking points they’ve been reporting for months.

As I wrote near the end of the Democratic primary, the candidate’s positions on nearly every conceivable issue are so well-refined and publicized at this point, that the only way to generate news at a debate is to go the George Stephanapolous route of asking pop quiz questions and emphasizing personal scandal. There’s really no way for Schieffer to win. If he asks good substantive questions, the candidates will recite their talking points and the debate will be boring. If he presses them on “character” issues and personal attacks, he’ll (rightly) be accused of descending into tabloidism.

So why have debates at all? What would we lose without them?

There’s also a follow-up.

David Brooks seems to have captured the essence of Barack Obama’s stage presence and what good or bad it might tell us about his presidency.

That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan.

This was not evident back in the “fierce urgency of now” days, but it is now. And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

Of course, it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island. New presidents are often amazed by how much they are disobeyed, by how often passive-aggressiveness frustrates their plans.

Elizabeth Dickenson has her list of campaign cliches she could do without. #1 is an ax I’ve been grinding myself.

1)  Wall Street to Main Street. I know the financial crisis affects me and that bashing bankers wins you applause. What I’d rather hear? A solid explanation of how the bailout will work (or won’t), how it will be paid for, and how it will affect government spending in the next administration.

I found Theodore Dalrymple’s argument against modern apologies for past wrongs — Kevin Rudd apologizing to Aborigines, Tony Blair’s apology to the Irish — to be fascinating and challenging. The most interesting paragraph:

In some case, it is a substitute for importance, or for a loss of importance. Europe (or at least its intellectual class) now feels more than ever responsible for Africa, precisely because its power over it has waned. If Europe cannot feel itself responsible any longer for all that is good and progressive in Africa, such as modern medicine, roads, railways, telephone, etc., it can at least feel responsible for all that is bad in it, such as starvation, civil wars, and so forth. For it is far better, from the point of view of self-esteem, to be responsible for great evil than to be completely or even relatively unimportant. If in the process of false apologizing the participants render Africans themselves inert and inanimate, responsible themselves for nothing, or nothing very much, that is a small price to pay.

(via Ideas)

While Democrats can always threaten to flee to Canada in the event of an election loss, where can conservatives flee to?

This may explain my feelings about Sarah Palin’s speech patterns:

Overall, because of the mixture of people and the large number of newcomers, Alaskan English is often hard to place, with both Westerners and Midwesterners thinking that it sounds oddly foreign; indeed, some Westerners have said that Palin sounds like a Midwesterner, and Midwesterners that she sounds Western.

I think Jason Kottke just won the award for my favorite liveblog of well… anything. In its entirety:

Two people I respect a great deal, Marc Ambinder and David Brooks, both think the failure of the bailout yesterday makes obvious the full-scale meltdown of the GOP. Here’s Brooks:

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the G.O.P. as we know it.

I think this chart gives the one mentioned here a run for it’s money. There’s nothing like a well-made graph to make reveal the utter silliness of many political issues.

Some people of some repute — Chris Bowers, David Cay Johnston, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur — think that there’s really no need for Hank Paulson’s $700 billion dollar proposal (or anything like it). I don’t know nearly enough to have anything intelligent to say, but i thought I’d note it.

(via @gruber)

UPDATE (20 minutes later): Also:

• An open letter from economists doubtful of Paulson’s plan.
• Felix Salmon and Ryan Avent answer David Cay Johnston (linked above). (via Yglesias)
• A chart to put the massive size of the proposal in historical context. (via Kevin Drum)

I like the simplicity of this site, which simply aims to count all the times the US presidential candidates, their running mates, and their campaigns tell obvious lie. Like all and sundry, their is likely to be dispute of the political truth, but the sites definition of lies seems reasonable:

When a politician makes a point that can be clearly refuted with non-partisan sources, or even better their own words, we call that a lie. Given the claims each campaign has made regarding their own competence and ‘readiness’, we don’t believe there is room for ‘mistakes’ of speech either. So we mark any and all wrong statements as lies.

(via Yewknee)

Passport has put together a list of 20. Jack Shafer has ten more.

And, somewhat related, Kevin Drum is sick of the lies about Ms. Palin and the Bridge to Nowhere and thinks the fact that the McCain campaign is still able to talk about it is an indictment of the press.

Today, in the regularly-provacative Ideas section of the Boston Globe, lurks a piece to warm the hearts of “tax-and-spend liberals” (and will no doubt lead to at least one smug declaration of “That’s what I’ve said for years”). A sampling:

Lindert’s work surveyed a century of data across numerous countries and found that high taxes and social spending did not slow the growth of productivity or GDP. Statistically speaking, Lindert found no relationship between the level of social spending and economic growth. High tax nations like Norway grow rapidly and produce high standards of living. Even the income per hour of work in nations like France and Germany is equal to or even exceeds America’s.

While most of America is still obsessed with what scandal will next be dug up about Sarah Palin, Foreign Policy offers an interesting list of Barack Obama’s ten worst policy proposals. It’s unlikely that you could ever find consensus on such a list, but it’s worth seeing what they’ve come up with.

UPDATE (9/2/08): As a counterpoint (or maybe just because I liked it), I offer a recent Op-Ed by Sarah Vowell.

UPDATE (9/10/08): Just noticed they have the same feature for McCain. That would have been a better counterpoint.