The blogosphere is abuzz with rumors about a secret deal between John McCain and Satan. A contributor to popular political blog, TPM Cafe, first broke the story last week in a post entitled, Lady MacDeath - A Faustian Bargain of Sinister Deception. According to blogger TheraP, who does not quote any sources, Satan promised John McCain the Presidency in 2008 in return for sacrificing his soul and selecting Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

Oh things are going well my friends. This stock market crash could not have come at a better time. Just look at John McCain squirm. All we need are a few more major bankruptcies, and we'll have the election locked up. As a special bonus, the greedy bankers are getting screwed too.

Back in the doom-and-gloom days of...um...last week, there were a number of stalwart cheerleaders at TPM Cafe who airily assured us that Obama had everything under control. While I wasn't particularly concerned about the polls--I've seen enough elections not to get my knickers in a twist over weekly fluctuations--I had the sense that at least some of those cheerleaders would insist that all was well up to the moment of crushing defeat. The knowing assurances that Obama's hesitance to attack was part of his rope-a-dope strategy seemed the most suspect.

Ok, so I've admitted that the government probably had to do something to stem the financial crisis.

Now I'm going to talk about all the ways this bailout could - and probably will - go wrong (with the caveat that all the details still haven't been worked out).

with apologies to Sam Cooke

She don't know much about history
She don't believe in biology
She wants to change the science books
She wants to fire the White House cooks
But she does know how to speak on cue
And she knows if she makes fools of you
What a wonderful veep she would be

She don't know much about geography
She don't know much foreign policy
Don't know much about George Bush's war
Don't know what a VP is for
But she knows that one and one is two
And if McCain just tells her what to do

Those who know my writing here are aware that I have little love for Hillary Clinton. Had she won the nomination, I would have voted for her but not happily. But whatever her flaws, Clinton is extremely intelligent. She has a better command of public and foreign policy than any other candidate who participated in the primaries. Barack Obama, of course, is brilliant in his own right, as is Joe Biden.

A struggling economy. Rising unemployment. A crumbling housing market. Ballooning national debt. Disappearing social security and Medicare funds. Surging energy and food prices. Failing financial institutions. A looming environmental catastrophe. Increasing anti-Americanism. Burgeoning terrorist threats.

This is the reality.

No matter your political party or ideology, these are the issues that matter.

Sometimes I feel as if we're all participating in some kind of psychology experiment and that any minute now, an old guy in a white coat will peer down from the heavens and tell us that we can remove our armbands and go home. Recent political events seem designed to expose our rational failings and prove that in the end, we're all just rats in a maze.

Been away and not able to update the blog, but a lot has gone on in the past week. i won't have the time to do a full posting for a few days, so i thought i'd throw out a bunch of quick hits, in chronological order since I began my trip.

On the same night I wrote about the idealistic Sixties and how the eventual disillusionment that followed has continued to hold its grip on the American psyche,  Michelle Obama gave a stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention about not accepting the 'world as it is" but striving to create the 'world as it should be.'

This will be a very short post, but I don't understand how Lou Dobbs still has a job. Are his ratings really that good? He's turned a major primetime show on a mainstream news channel into not much more than a mouthpiece for his own personal jihad against illegal immigrants.

Thrilling swimming races and scary Cold War flashbacks have snatched our collective attention from the John Edwards affair bombshell, but before moving on completely, I just wanted to make a couple of quick comments.

First, Edwards is a sleazebag. But not so much cause he first lied about the affair and in the process slandered the writers who reported the news - his entire political career was on the line so it's easy to understand why he tried so hard to deny the story (and why he probably did much worse to keep the story hush-hush).

I was going to write tonight about John Edwards and his affair but that sleazebag can wait because I just got done watching the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics. And all I can say is ...

WOW!

From Greg Sargent at Election Central:

The McCain campaign triples-down on its "celeb" sneer, releasing a
third ad on the topic that hits the theme even harder than the last
two...Clearly, the McCain camp thinks this is working, and they're going to keep hammering away at it for weeks, if not months.

While growing up in a St. Louis suburb, a bunch of kids who lived on my street would often get together in my neighbor's backyard to play some soccer. Occasionally, the ball would be kicked too hard and roll into the yard next door, and sometimes all the way to the back of that house, which sat perpendicularly to our soccer field. This was always a dicey, somewhat traumatic moment for us, and we would usually argue for quite some time about who had to go retrieve the ball.

Many of my liberal friends and family (and since this is New York City, that means basically everyone I know) believe there is no way Barack Obama will win the presidency this fall. Partly, they feel conservatives will at the last minute find or fabricate some scandal that torpedoes Obama's campaign (tho I can't imagine how to top Reverend Wright), but mainly they are convinced that America is just not ready to elect a black man to the top office in the land.

Two month ago, John McCain challenged Barack Obama to visit Iraq, expecting him to decline, but Obama called the bluff. He saw McCain's Iraq and raised him Afghanistan, Israel, and three European nations. Never one to fold easily, McCain raised Obama right back.

According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, John McCain's recently released tax plan is very regressive "even compared with a system in which the 2001-06 tax cuts are made permanent." It provides "relatively little tax relief to those at the bottom of the income scale while providing huge tax cuts to households at the very top of the income distribution."

After a string of embarrassing election losses, Republicans have had enough. In a major address to the American people, Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the underrated Republican Study Committee, has declared that Republicans leaders are feeling sober.