Check out his thinking, and a very optimistic EV map that we hope will be blazing across TV screens on the evening of Nov 4th. But we have lots to do before then.

Excerpt (read rest at link): The core of the issue isn't even solvency. It's the way in which the debt causing the banking insolvency distorted, distended and hollowed out economies around the world. It caused a huge misallocation in the English-speaking economies into real estate, and into consumption that could only seem to make sense to people drunk on the appreciation of property prices. It caused a less huge but still significant misallocation elsewhere; I think we will see that a lot of what was being produced by Europe and Asia's vibrant export industries were products that the United States and Britain will find they can do without, or with much less of.

Kristoff at the IHT (the international version of the NY Times) on how this summer's decision by the Bush administration to name birth control pills as a form of abortion is playing out in Africa. Remember that US help in third world countries for abortion is against the law. So the extra mouths to feed that could lead to backroom abortions and other dangerous situations cannot even be prevented. You have to ask why the religious right feels a need to overpopulate the world so that more living children will die. Are they hoping for more wars which would need more soldiers with which to fight them?

Excerpt: John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. And he has been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater. Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man.

Excerpt: So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured. Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative. Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.

There is really a Maverick family. No they don't live off Dixie Queens. Well not according to this report. Nor do they ramble through smaltzy exclamations of how much you know I'm suffering, which claiming you'll go to Hell to get bin Laden or promise a mortgage relief program you have no intention of really creating. But they were known as rebels, progressive ones, from fighting for the rights of the indentured to protecting draft resisters. And one of them did refuse to brand his cattle, making their family name synonymous with being unbranded. Excerpt: Considering the family’s long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Maverick insists that John McCain, who has voted so often with his party, “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.” “It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

Kristof says that people aren't necessarily racist, but tend to favor their own kind without knowing it. I hope he's wrong. This article was based on information that he acquired from a poll at Stanford University. It seems to me that the good news would be that a person who doesn't know he or she is a bit racist doesn't have to lie to pollsters about it right? So that 'nonracism' should be already factored in, and in fact some of Kristof's words seem to indicate that to be true.

Excerpt: She dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and also — “also” is her favorite vamping word — uses verbs better left as nouns, as in, “If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them,” or how she tried to “progress the agenda.” Poppy Bush dropped personal pronouns and launched straight into verbs because he was minding his mother’s admonition against “the big I.” Palin, by contrast, uses a heck of a lot of language to praise herself as a fresh face with new ideas who has “joined this team that is a team of mavericks.” True mavericks don’t brand themselves.

Would the Republican Right convince a John McCain to step aside for the testosterone flush Sarah Palin for the good of the part (er) country? Frank Rich has succeeded in frightening me again. Unfortunately Rich usually does know what he's writing about. Read it and see if you don't feel in your gut that the scenario is possible.

Sarah Palin really really likes the kind of power Dick Cheney has. Thinks it's constitutional.

Excerpt: Those Wall Street financial alchemists who turned garbage into gold must have helped John McCain prepare for his debate with Barack Obama last Friday. Senator McCain’s insistent claims that the US is winning the war in Iraq thanks to his "surge" strategy are the military-political equivalent of the junk securities that Wall Street’s shady financiers have been selling around the globe.

Oh yeah, you could see whenever you checked donations for any candidate, some of the top donors would be from and/or Merrill Lynch nearly 100% of the time and the rest of the top 8 banks would usually be some where in the top 20.

Excrpt: Accomplished Googlers can probably find the original talking points off which dozens of conservatives made essentially the same case: The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the financial crisis. For example, a Wall Street Journal editorial lumped CRA together with far more plausible causes of the meltdown. This liberal-inspired law, it complained, "compels banks to make loans to poor borrowers who often cannot repay them." In fact, the CRA had about zero to do with today's problems. Its accusers are "know-nothings," Aaron Pressman writes on BusinessWeek.com. He says the law "was actually weakened by the Bush administration just as the worst lending wave began."

Ms. Palin rightly dismisses looking back since the Bush/Cheney administration looks a bit too much like a prelude to a McCain/Palin administration.

Don't Mess With Oliphant. There are toonists, there are good toonists, and then there's Oliphant. I even have to admit he's good when I don't agree with him.

Pretty good explanation gets goings right after the exposition on the New Jersey Insurance plan bailout (which may be necessar for some.

Excerpt: Obama made big gains after his first debate with McCain, according to the new Quinnipiac University poll. In a survey after the debate, Obama leads McCain, 54 percent to 39 percent. He led McCain 49 percent to 43 percent in a survey before the debate. "Obama clearly won the debate, voters say," said Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. Polls indicate that voters believe Obama would be the best candidate to handle economic issues. The post-debate survey included 832 likely voters from Sept. 27-29. The pre-debate poll surveyed 1,138 likely voters from Sept. 22-26. Both polls had a margin of error of about 3 percentage points.

He has a compelling case. I've been loathed to link and cite all the pro bailout stuff that is flooding the news papers, since they get so much of their advertising from banks and expensive property developers. But Kristoff has a good argument here.

Excerpt: ...these two sides of McCain make it hard to discern how the politician who boasts of delivering "straight talk" would govern from the Oval Office. It is unclear if a McCain administration would be led by the small-government crusader who claims President Reagan as his touchstone, or the energetic regulator who once advocated a new federal agency to license professional prizefighters.

Excerpt: Although he is frantically trying to distance himself from President Bush, Mr. McCain, by his own accounting, would be more Bushian in foreign policy than even Mr. Bush is now. While Mr. Bush has been forced to accept more sensible policies in his second term, Mr. McCain has become steadily more of a neocon in the cowboy role that Mr. Bush played in his first term, prone to solving problems with stealth bombers rather than United Nations resolutions.

Excerpt: "[Community Organizer]Bonny changed the way Anchorage thinks and plays in such a positive way," a city official said when Sosa died in August at age 50, just a few days after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Only a few weeks after her death, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, ridiculed Sen. Barack Obama for his days as a community organizer. She and other GOP operatives belittled the very idea of such work...

Personally, I'm beginning to like lame duck leaders. They tend to become more reasonable. Excerpt: Israel will have to give up "almost all" of the West Bank areas it occupies and accept the division of Jerusalem in order to take advantage of a rapidly closing window of opportunity for peace with the Arabs, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Monday.

Excerpt: Then there’s the frightening Mr. McCain — more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago. We’ve known for a long time, of course, that Mr. McCain doesn’t know much about economics — he’s said so himself, although he’s also denied having said it. That wouldn’t matter too much if he had good taste in advisers — but he doesn’t.

Excerpt: [George] Will mocked the Republican standard-bearer as a veritable Queen of Hearts (a la "Alice in Wonderland") for demanding the head of Christopher Cox, a former Republican congressman who is chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist argued that such impulsiveness sows doubts about McCain's ability to apply "calm reflection and clear principles" to important decisions. He ended his broadside by all but declaring McCain unfit for the Oval Office.