Approximately 11 percent of the civilian work force (including marginally attached workers) is unemployed. About 9% of all mortgage holders are late on their payments. These are probably overlapping sets of individuals; presumably many who lose their jobs or can't find work then can't keep up their house payments.

If these unemployed have to sell their houses, they are selling into a down market where they will obtain little equity from the sale, in all likelihood, or they may find that they cannot obtain a high enough price to pay the mortgage they can't keep up payments on.

The Congress seeks a stimulus package. What is its purpose? What is its ideal shape?

"This week, seven key witnesses informed Mr. Branchflower through their attorneys that they would not provide depositions. Their depositions, which had been agreed to and scheduled earlier with Mr. Branchflower, were cancelled within the last 72 hours."

So isn't there anyone with investigatory power, or even just lawyerly or reportorial skills, who could inquire into exactly how all these witnesses to "troopergate" happened to obtain lawyers and then all follow the exact same tactic in the same 72 hours? Who are their lawyers; who is paying their lawyers? And many other questions that follow.

It was fascinating to see the top Republicans struggle with the concept of community organizers this week. After all, these people would never turn to a community organizer. When they have a problem they just call one of the politicians they own.

Suppose they own an oil company and want higher profits. They just call the Bush White House or their friends in Congress and ask for more tax breaks. Suppose they run Halliburton or Blackwater. They call over to the White House or their friends in Congress to get some sweetheart no-bid contracts. Do you think the top executives in major corporations have any use for a community organizer?

Those people who get upset by celebrities attacking hard-working and low-paid community organizers may want to sign the petition demanding an apology.

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(Note: this item is cross-posted from The Democratic Strategist)

This issue isn't important in the larger scheme of things, but as a longtime Democratic convention worker, I did want to comment on the strange technical difficulties that seem to have bedevilled some of the biggest speeches at the Republican Convention.

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The last night of the Republican Convention was probably the most vivid exercise of George Orwell's theory of Doublethink, in the modern political era. As Orwell wrote,

If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

As the hall monitors from The War Party handed out the Peace signs, the lines from Orwell's 1984 sprang to mind.

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.

In 2004 when Karl Rove was able to get George Bush reelected, a certain cynicism descended over the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. The belief that Americans could be sold any lie if was packaged correctly. "War is Peace". "Surveillance is Freedom".

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Avi Shlaim's biography of King Hussein, which I review at length in the current issue of The Nation, is about to be published in the United States. The book should stimulate, not only a reevaluation of what advocates of "peace process" have (and have not) accomplished during the past 40 years, but the generally underappreciated role of Jordan in Israel's and Palestine's future.

The king was an advocate of peace and dignified compromise for more than a generation. Jordan, meanwhile, has itself become a kind of miracle in the desert, a commercial hub of regional business, an early example of the kind of economic development that the globalization of intellectual capital makes possible. Dubai, now, is the poster-child of this kind of development, but Hussein is among its pioneers. This economic development is far more consequential to the slow process of democratizing the Arab Middle East than neocon-inspired military adventures.

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By the way, have you heard that John McCain was a P.O.W.?

I've decided I don't like Republicans. In grad school I rubbed shoulders with plenty of conservatives, and some became my friends. In D.C. and on the Internet I try to establish civil relations with those conservatives who mostly avoid vilification of me and my ilk. But the inescapable fact remains: the leadership of this party, backed by no small number of adherents, is jingoist, racist, homophobic anti-working class scum. I mean, look at 'em. I couldn't watch these bastards. I may have seen less than 15 minutes of their vile convention.

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Like Dwight D. Eisenhower, John McCain has seen more than enough of war to have risen above the testosterone-stoked macho that some young men rush to prove in war - any war.

My father, who served in Europe in World War II in the 277th Battalion Army Combat Engineers, told me that it's those who haven't proven themselves who keep on touting militarism. "The biggest blowhards at the American Legion are the ones who spent as much of the war as they could at the PX," he said.

There was so much of this in the Republican Party last night that, at one point in his speech, McCain looked annoyed.

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Greetings Folks --

As I'm sure a lot of you have seen we've had some problems this week with reader blogging and comments, principally delays but also server errors and the double posting that can result from the combination of the two.

So I wanted to take a moment to explain what's going on and what we're doing about it.

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The New York Times asks the question this afternoon--"why did the stock market crash today?"

Speculation focused on fears about the direction of the economy, though it remained unclear why anxieties that have been around for months would suddenly take hold.

I have another theory--Wall Street doesn't like war, and last night as the chants of "USA, USA" rumbled through the RNC convention hall, while Sarah Palin assured the crowd that John McCain was willing to "fight for you" against all enemies, I think it occurred to the big investors that these martial warriors might actually capture the White House. For two days Lieberman, Thompson, Guiliani and Palin have made it clear that the Republican Party is the War Party. As any investor can tell you, eight years of war have helped few firms except Halliburton and Exxon. If you put all of your money in an S & P 500 index Fund on the day of George Bush's Inauguration, you would be down about 12% after almost 8 years. This is why Obama and the Democrats have actually raised more money from the financial industry than the Republicans.

The market doesn't like the War Party any more and they were scared silly by the pit bull with lipstick.

Charming. Plain spoken. Good looking. Earnest. Angry.  Sort of a wild youth, but settled-down, family.  University, but no intellectual, thank God.  Early career in sports. Knows how to cheer.  TV dinners, when necessary.

What the Bible prohibits (well, what the New Testament prohibits) are sins. "Choice" is a liberal's way of dressing up what's immoral. Thinks government should prohibit what's immoral.  Yet sees government as too big, intrusive, and tending toward corruption.  Thinks only an intellectual could notice a contradiction.

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She has a son going to Iraq; Joe Biden has a son going to Iraq. She has a baby with Down's Syndrome and is raising it with love; Biden lost a wife and daughter and raised his sons as only a truly loving father could have done.

She drives herself to work; he takes Amtrak home at night, not a chauffeured car. Her state is small; his is just as small -- even smaller. She is a staunch supporter of the war; Biden was the only Democratic presidential candidate to reject rapid withdrawal and to insist the situation is more complicated.

Yet if you didn't sense last night how deeply Sarah Palin channeled some of the country's deepest, most powerful currents of pent-up indignation and yearning, you don't sense the trouble we Democrats are in.

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Joe Klein is smoking hot on a current McCain strategy in this important Time post, oddly headlined "Angry Amateurs." It's really about Vicious Professionals--McCain's. You know the old advice to lawyers: When you don't have the facts, cite the law; when you don't have the law, cite the facts. The McCain campaign's corollary: When you don't have either, bash the press. Let's call this Schmidting, after McCain's Rove-apprentice chief strategist, Steve Schmidt.

During the years--years--when McCain was holding reporters enthralled, the right-wing crusade against the "liberal media" was muted (with respect to him), and for good reason: the sweet talk was mutual. (Recall McCain's affectionate-sardonic gag about the press: "my base.") Now, either because McCain's campaign is thrashing, or because some reporters have had enough and jumped off the Straight Talk Express, or because the pack got bored with the old reverence, or for whatever combination of reasons, the Rovian Steve Schmidt has decided to call up the press-bashing drums.

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As Cliff's book, The Real McCain, amply demonstrates, the reality of John McCain's person and career is somewhat different from the carefully constructed persona that has been presented through the media for the last fifteen years or so. The question of the moment is whether now, with only two months until election day, there is a change afoot in the long love affair that is John McCain's relationship with the press.

It appears that the McCain campaign is falling back on that old Republican standby, whining about the media. McCain's campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, is blasting the press for asking tough questions about McCain's running mate, whom virtually no one had heard of just a week ago. When Campbell Brown of CNN grilled a McCain spokesperson about Sarah Palin's qualifications, the McCain campaign responded by canceling an interview McCain had scheduled with Larry King, no doubt with flared nostrils and a loud "Harumph!" As a parent of small children, I am well familiar with this kind of behavior.

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Standing approximately 35 feet away from Senator Joe Lieberman as he delivered his speech at the Republican National Convention last night I turned around at one point to get a good look at the delegates seated in the hall. As I surveyed the crowd, I had an overriding thought: 'This place is really white.'

Now I know it's a bit of a cliché to suggest that Republican conventions are largely white affairs, but the contrast between the extraordinary diversity of Invesco Field and the veritable sameness of the demographic make-up at the Xcel Center in St. Paul is perhaps the most striking feature of the two conventions.

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My friend Sam Bahour, one of Ramallah's grittiest entrepreneurs and consultants, a Palestinian-American man-of-the-world (who got his Kellogg School MBA at Tel-Aviv University), knows more than most how important economic reciprocity and development will be to building peace. But he also knows their limitations. Israelis or Americans who think economic advance will be a substitute for a political process that changes borders and governance and makes room for refugees--that Palestinians will be silenced by the hope of material gain--do not understand their future.

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I'm afraid you bourgeois simpletons still do not appreciate the revolutionary potential of Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin. I have previously detailed her record of expropriating the satanic oil companies on behalf of the proletariat of Alaska. But there is oh so much more. She and her hubby are in solidarity with the Alaska Independence Party, which aims to separate the state from the imperialist U.S.A. and establish itself as a kind of white Saudi Arabia, albeit with snow instead of sand. And she does not shy away from armed struggle, as no doubt many an unfortunate moose or wolf could attest, if they could attest to anything. Besides contributing to the movement her person facility with firearms, she is also commander-in-chief of the Al-Aska Martyrs Brigade (pictured below), which to the world goes by the cover of the Alaska National Guard.

(Hat tip to alciabades_mystery at DemocraticUnderground.com. As T.S. Eliot said, or maybe it was Jon Lovitz, great poets do not borrow; they steal.)

As Republicans are gathering in St. Paul, Minnesota, the gale winds of Hurricane Gustav are already casting a pall over the week's festivities -- an unfortunate reminder for the GOP of the Bush Administration's lackluster response to Hurricane Katrina three years ago this week.

However, while Gustav appears to be a far less severe storm, the selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the GOP's Vice Presidential nominee (on the third anniversary of Katrina) risks becoming the man-made event that will blow the party badly off course: evoking visceral reminders of Republican mismanagement and even incompetence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

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Hi TPM Cafers,

Thanks for having me here for the balance of the week and joining in what I hope will be a lively discussion on Senator John McCain. For some quick background, my book, The Real McCain, was released May 1, 2008. Due to some initial buzz it became a political and non-fiction best seller at Amazon. Which of course made my mom proud and shocked guidance counselors who have consistently written me off--with good cause--during each of my too many stops through academia.

After researching the man and writing the book over about 15 months' time, I came to a few main conclusions, all of which I think are evident in his recent pick of Sarah Palin to be his VP. First, he most certainly lacks the temperament to be President of these United States.

McCain, in both his personal and political life, has shown the kind of explosive anger, impulsiveness and Divine Right Of Kings type of certainty in his own beliefs (until, as with the cases of offshore drilling, abortion rights, foreign entanglements, tax cuts, balanced budgets, Creationism in science class, he changes them on a whim) that should very simply disqualify him from being the leader of the free world. My book quotes scores of Republicans on this subject, not even needing to dig very deep into what Democrats think of him.

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In the midst of the convention circus, TPMCafe slows down for a second to talk books. Cliff Schecter joins us this week for a discussion on his latest, The Real McCain. His first post will be up shortly.

We've been getting a ton of traffic lately, especially on the reader blog, and our server has been taxed by the massive load of posts. A lot of you have written in about getting server errors after submitting a new entry. Before going back and reposting, check to see if your entry has gone up -- more often than not, it will have been recorded even if you get the error. If you don't see it, wait about 5-10 minutes for it to process. If you still don't see it, try posting again. Please bear with us as we work out these issues.

If the first major judgement call a Presidential candidate makes is the Vice Presidential pick, then John McCain's judgement needs to be seriously questioned.

In Alaska, several state leaders and local officials said they knew of no efforts by the McCain campaign to find out more information about Ms. Palin before the announcement of her selection, Although campaigns are typically discreet when they make inquiries into potential running mates, officials in Alaska said Monday they thought it was peculiar that no one in the state had the slightest hint that Ms. Palin might be under consideration.

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When, in 1972, George McGovern had wrapped up the Democratic nomination very late in the process, he then turned to the question of the Vice Presidential running mate. He asked Ted Kennedy, as related by Rick Perlstein in his terrific "Nixonland." Kennedy turned him down.

Then McGovern asked Abe Ribicoff, and was turned down again. Time began to run out. Because of credential fights and general disorganization, the McGovern campaign hadn't vetted a large number of people. They loked into Leonard Woodcock, president of the UAW, but his Catholic credentials proved suspect when someone reported he had not been to mass in 20 years. They decided on Kevin White, mayor of Boston, but Ted Kennedy put the kibbosh on that. They moved to Gaylord Nelson, who said no but suggested Tom Eagleton. He had been in the Senate for three years but was almost unknown even to politically savvy people. Rumors reported that Eagleton had a drinking problem, but that McGovern's people did check out, and found no support.

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In my last post I asked, only half-rhetorically, if any decent candidate could be elected in a campaign dominated by what we call, out of habit, "coverage," especially the chatter of cable and network news.  I'm not the first to ask this question, or dread the answer, or be accused of elitism regarding political life, or defeatism regarding Obama's campaign. But my fears are not, as he would say, about him. They are about us. So I'll pursue the point one step more.

Spiro Agnew once said that the press was infected by liberalism. The problem, I think, is that it is infected by behaviorism. Day-in, day-out, we are talked about as bundles of "socialized" appetites, our freedom a matter of "preferences."  So what we think is either the product of "ideology" (i.e., of our "demographic") or a kind of impulse buy.  Our claims of fact (about history, society, etc.) are, by extension, seen as an expression of our material "interests" or, if we are deeply socialized, "values."  You get the idea.

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John McCain has made stamping out earmarks one of his main issues as a politician. Remember all the mileage he got out of opposing the $1 million earmark for a Woodstock museum?

Given his strong and longstanding opposition to earmarks it is especially impressive that he would be willing to pick someone like Sarah Palin for vice-president. As the Washington Post reports this morning, Governor Pallin managed to secure $27 million (as in 27 Woodstock museums) in earmarks for her little town of 6,700 back when she was mayor. That comes to more than $4000 per person.

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One key strategy for excusing evil and evil in American's history specifically is to treat it as an "unfortunate" inevitability, something to have sorrow over but nothing that could have reasonably been avoided-- so there is no point in making a moral judgment or seeing parallels with moral choices made in the present. In comments, offensivetoyou makes this argument in regard to genocide against Native Americans:

no government could stand against the land hunger of the people. ALL the people...Nor do you deal with the issue of disease, or of the impossibility of coexistance of two very different cultures, a problem which has existed all the time and everywhere.

Yet, of course, many contemporaries at the time DID stand against the supposed land hunger of the people.

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That few people in America even know the facts that Blackmon documents in my earlier post is astonishing--but this reflects a toxic "patriotic" denial of truths about American history that we see in contemporary politics today.

In fact, the core facts of continuing slavery in the South were repeatedly investigated and, for a short time starting in 1903, the federal government brought indictments over the issue with cases going to the Supreme Court--but the court proceedings came under such assault by southern politicians that they were shut down, all in a hail of denial of the problems of not just 20th century slavery but of the pre-Civil War version as well. The following quote sums it up:

As the twentieth century neared, though, the orthodoxy of southern patriotism was mutating virulently...The South now demanded in public forums an increasingly rabid level of absolute adherence to a baroque new mythology of the honorable southerner, the contented slave, and the tragically defeated secession.

In this, we see the same toxic DNA that twists any criticism of the government policy into hatred of government--and the metaphorical kissing of the flag that Michelle Obama was forced into.

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Howard Wolfson has a good piece in today's Post.

He explains how he, a devoted Clinton supporter, now understands Obama's appeal and is almost excited about him.

The "almost" is what makes the piece so good. Wolfson does not pretend to have fallen in love with Obama. Clearly his heart was broken by Hillary's defeat and it's still too early for him to ignore the hurt and embrace Obama with intensity.

He says as much. He also says that during the heat of the campaign, he never really looked at Obama. But now he has and he sees that the guy is special. He is almost excited by him.

It really is worth reading because it reminds those of us who have been crazy about Obama from the beginning that those Democrats who were on the other side may need some time to become enthusiasts and that, for now, simply being an Obama-Biden supporter is enough.

If Hillary had been nominated, I'd be just where Howard is. Biting my lip, a little sad, but supporting the ticket and marveling at her great acceptance speech.

Anyway, take a look. A good Democrat has come home.

Let us talk this Labor Day about slave labor in the United States. No, not the antebellum kind before the Civil War but the slavery that persisted well into the 20th century, the slavery that was integral not only to the southern economy but slaves owned by northern corporations and used to break strikes and keep the South a union-free reserve. And I don't mean some metaphorical slavery, but, as Douglas Blackmon writes in his recent Slavery by Another Name, the slavery of brutal forced labor, whips, death and sexual rape of black women--in many ways worse than that of the older form of slavery.

The author is not a leftwing journalist but Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, but what he documents is seven decades of a southern gulag- and I use the word "gulag" deliberately for what his story shows is that the U.S. had within its borders as brutal a regime of degradation as the worst that Stalin could dish out. This southern gulag involved millions of black workers enslaved through a combination of capitalist employers, farm owners and a legal system that promised a brutal fate for anyone defying their de facto masters. And it is a key story for understanding the ultimate weakness of the overall U.S. labor movement, since having a deunionized Southern region was an essential tool in disciplining Northern workers who feared loss of jobs to a region without labor rights. That is the story that Blackmon tells. I urge every person to go out and read the book, but the following gives the highlights (or lowlights if you will).

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From Brad deLong:

'Two things seem salient (i) she fired the state's public safety head for being unwilling to help her in her family's vendetta against her ex-brother-in-law, and (ii) she introduced herself to America by saying that she was against the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere." '

Both these strike me as Eagleton-like: that is, examples of inadequate vetting and impulsive selection that are sufficiently serious as to imperil the viability of the nomination. It is not clear that the Republicans will keep Palin on the ticket; it may be likely but it is not certain.

Moreover, the mainstream media, instead of going grossly gaga over the fact that a former beauty contest winner is on the national ballot, should raise now, and urgently, the question of whether a pending corruption investigation and a blatant, obviously intentional lie in the first press conference are disqualifying. It's pretty clear, isn't it, that if Obama had made this choice he'd be pressured by the cable shows to recant?

Nor should the MSM automatically deem acceptable Palin's views that creationism should be taught in public schools and that global warming is not necessarily a product of human activity. These two views are, respectively, contrary to the Constitution and nuts. How can she be expected to uphold and defend the Constitution or the viability of our culture in the face of climate change? Of course she could recant, scurrying away into ambiguous non-denial denials, but at least she should be interrogated, instead of merely photographed by an admiring media interested not in what she thinks but how she looks.

McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is not a weird anomaly. It's of a piece with his standard modus operandi. He's impulsive, erratic. Put him in a jam, he leaps from petulance to exuberant nose-thumbing. He may be old, but he's unseasoned--he's childish. He jumps outside the box and takes pleasure in his insouciance. Faced with a foreign policy problem, he thinks: Bomb. (Sometimes he blurts it out, as in: Bomb bomb Iran.) Faced with energy crisis, he thinks: Drill. Faced with Russia-Georgia-Ossetia, he thinks: Let's get the Cold War on. Bomb and drill, drill and bomb--this is not a steady hand at the wheel; this is a go-for-broke gambler playing the game as he loves to play it.

It would seem that there's also an element of this in his personal life. Matt Welch's book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, gives many examples of his flaming temper. He leaves his first wife and jumps straight into not only a second marriage but a political constituency. Famously (but not famously enough ) he blows up.

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