I predicted that Obama would do as well with Jews as Kerry, Gore, Clinton, etc. Now Gallup confirms it.

The best news in this is that it is possible to view the Jewish vote as a microcosm Yes, Jews always vote Democratic. But the ebbs and flows tend to reflect the country at large. The two Democrat nominees in recent memory who fared poorly among Jews were Carter (45%) in 1980 and McGovern (65%) in 1972. (Note: Carter won a plurality of the Jewish vote. It was a 3-candidate race).

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The Washington Post reports today that the next round of bailouts will be for the insurance industry. The article tells us that we can expect similar bailout conditions for the insurance industry as were given to the banks that received capital from the government.

In other words, the insurers will be given government funds at far below market rates. This is a direct handout from taxpayers to the shareholders at these institutions, as well as the top executives whose incompetence brought them to the edge of ruin. While the Post tells us that there will be limits on executive pay, these restrictions were put in just to fool children and reporters, serious people know that they are a joke.

Let's stand up for Joe the Plumber and stop giving tax dollars to the incredibly rich.

Now that we're entering the Golden Age of Obamanian Socialism, we (you, actually) need some instruction on the concept of redistribution. The word is being thrown around loosely by addled minds on both sides of our political divide. As the only representative of the Spartacusbund on this hopelessly moderate web site, the task of providing enlightenment falls to me.

First we should note that our hero Karl Marx did not dwell on redistribution as an ethical policy to advance equity. For him the distribution of income over classes -- what most economists call the functional distribution of income -- was an analytical aspect of the laws of motion under Capitalism. Sure Marx supported obvious reforms such as a progressive income tax, but that was a subordinate feature of his work. Redistribution from rich to not-rich is a liberal and populist trip.

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Just wanted to drop a little teaser for next week's book club-- Eugene Jarecki's The American Way Of War. Check out a trailer for the book here.

A few final Friday thoughts for TPM Café Polls. Thinking about what each of us has had to say this week about the some of the hidden insides of the polling enterprise, we have to ask ourselves and everyone else: what's the carrot for the pollsters to change their ways and do the right thing: fully disclose all their methods of determining "likely voters" along with their turnout models, and turn over all the data; stop minimizing the "undecideds" in pre-election polls; stop manufacturing illusions of public opinion with poorly framed questions that offer no explicit opportunity to say "I have no opinion".

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It's Friday, so I'll keep this brief. Thanks again to those who participated, and thanks also to TPM Café for hosting the discussion.

I'm encouraged, in a dark way, that other commentators, like me, are pretty much stumped in terms of coming up with solutions to reduce the influence of lobbyists. People ask for hard suggestions all the time, and it's hard to give answers that aren't pie-in-the-sky. Of course, I'm discouraged for the same reason; the difficulty is figuring out what to points to the intractable nature of the problem and the way that lobbyists are so entirely interwoven into the political system.

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On October 3rd, Chales Krauthammer wrote that Barack Obama was another FDR, only better.

Kraut wrote: "Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a 'second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.. Obama has...got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president." He called the Palin pick "suicidal" and has repeatedly ridiculed her as unfit for high office.

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Well, it seems like we are all agreed that lobbying is under-regulated and does not receive enough scrutiny in the media. Ted, you specifically point to the dangers posed by a passive press. And of course, the big fallout from Ken's Harper's piece was not the story itself but the media reaction to it, and specifically the controversy over his use of under-cover techniques. So maybe that can lead us in an interesting direction. I had no problem with it, and in fact found it all quite thrilling and often hilarious (an under-appreciated aspect of Silverstein's work...). On the other hand, that is more or less a one-shot story. You can't cover lobbying regularly by going undercover or in any way misleading your sources - just like any other beat. So while it was an enlightening and entertaining to get into what can be a tired subject, it is not really sustainable. And when the press does cover lobbying, it is usually these odd scandals that are way off the norm and don't really tell you much at all - Abramoff's frauds (which really had nothing to do with lobbying, per se) and John McCain's indiscretions.

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Let me begin by complimenting my fellow commentators for their insightful reactions to Ken's excellent book. There is considerable consensus among us about the important and often negative role that lobbying plays, and I hope TPM readers are finding this conversation enlightening.

I'd like to make five additional points, mostly in reaction to Ken's original post.

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Having trouble staying on top of the various programs and initiatives the federal government has embarked on to combat the economic crisis? You are not alone. The plans, an evolving ad hoc amalgam comprising an alphabet soup are almost impossible even for close observers to sort out. Here is a review of major efforts undertaken to date.

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Folks who read my blogs regularly know that one of my pet peeves is the attention the media pays to celebrities, instead of to our troops. Every time the media ignores the Iraq War in favor of stories about wardrobe malfunctions and who's in rehab this week, I blow a fuse. So why am I talking about Kanye West, 50 Cent, Ludacris, Kid Rock, Fall Out Boy, Nelly, and Beyoncé?

Because today, I'm proud to announce that these celebrities have joined Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and MTV's "Choose or Lose" campaign to produce "A Night for Vets: An MTV Concert for the BRAVE."

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In this election campaign, "socialist" has become the new "Liberal." McCain/Palin have made the word socialist the new negative--without understanding what it means.

I wrote this piece for the weekend opinion section of Israel's Haaretz newspaper, in a country where socialism has a proud history (kibbutzim, union strength, peace camp, etc). and I want to share it with readers of TPM. For years, I had the honor of working with Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, two greater Americans would be hard to find--they loved this country to the bottom of their socialist souls and I have thought of them often throughout this campaign-and am delighted to have the chance to pay homage to them here--onward toward social solidarity....

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An interesting race is shaping up in New Jersey's 5th District, with the incumbent Republican Scott Garrett apparently increasingly antsy about his future, now that the Evans-Novak report and the GOP itself have put Garrett on the vulnerable list. Garrett has started to throw a very unkosher kitchen sink at his opponent, Dennis Shulman, who happens to be a Rabbi as well as a clinical psychologist.

Intriguingly, the line of attack that Garrett has taken against his Rabbinical opponent is to accuse him of being a terrorist-hugging, Ahmadinejad-appeasing, scary extremist. Check out this ad that Garrett is running, alongside mailings that depict Shulman and the Iranian President along with masked gunmen. If this is beginning to sound like the vile and counterproductive excesses of Minnesota motor mouth Representative Michele Bachmann, then that is not coincidental.

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Alan Greenspan has finally acknowledged that he may have made some mistakes in allowing an $8 trillion housing bubble to grow unchecked. (Look for rivers flowing upstream.)

This modest act of contrition should be welcomed, but analysts have been far too quick to describe Greenspan as a prisoner of his free market ideology and the current crisis as a story of the free market running wild. This is far too generous a description of Greenspan and the current economic situation.

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A look at the latest round of national poll results at Pollster.com tells us that all "likely voters" are evidently not alike. The "outlier" AP-GfK poll of likely voters reported yesterday shows a dead heat, with Obama leading by just one point! The GWU/Battleground poll also has McCain down by just a nose in the horserace (1 point). Meanwhile, at ABC/Washington Post, Obama's up by 11%; up by 4-6% in Gallup; and according to Zogby--who dissed the AP poll--Obama's up by 12% in the latest tracking poll and may be heading toward a blowout if present trends continue. A blowout?

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As each day provides fresh new evidence that John McCain and the Republican Party are headed for an historic defeat, the party of Lincoln has devolved into a spasm of self-parody, hypocrisy and frantic desperation rarely before seen in modern American politics.

Devoid of any serious policy ideas for fixing the country's economic woes, Republicans have instead made the tactical decision to trot out the GOP's greatest hits of negative attacks - throwing every nasty attack line ever used against Democrats at Mr. Obama and hoping that one of them sticks.

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My kids have always accused me of being just like Larry David, except without his money or talent. I am proud at the comparison. I love Larry David, or, at least the character he plays on CYE.

But now I know that he and I are totally in synch because neither one of us can stand this election anymore. We are nervous all the time. We can't enjoy reading the news, except those stories we carefully self-censor to avoid any possibility of scaring ourselves into worrying that maybe California or Illinois are slipping away.

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When historians want to mark the moment the hyper-libertarian economic philosophy died in America, they might take this morning's appearance by Ayn Rand's disciple, Alan Greenspan before the House Oversight Committee.

Mr. Greenspan said he had made a "mistake" in believing that banks in operating in their self-interest would be sufficient to protect their shareholders and the equity in their institutions. Mr. Greenspan said that he had found "a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works."Mr. Greenspan, who headed the nation's central bank for 18.5 years, said that he and others who believed lending institutions would do a good job of protecting their shareholders are in a "state of shocked disbelief."

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K-Mart has a new ad: Pick out your Christmas presents today, pay a little now and a little as you go along, then pick up your paid-for presents in time for holiday giving. If we needed evidence of the constriction of consumer credit, here it is. K-Mart is advertising the layaway plan that department stores used for decades before the free flow of credit turned the layaway plan into a relic.

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A theme underlying the discussion prompted by David Moore's post is the changing meaning of "undecided" across a campaign timeline. Starting way back in the primaries, an "undecided" person may not be able to choose among candidates seeking her party's nomination who don't vary in their policy positions very much from each other. This is a different circumstance than a person in the last three weeks of the campaign who is weighing the policy positions of the candidates but hasn't arrived at a choice yet.

These differences reflect, among other things, various stages in the process of crystallizing opinions with the passage of time in a political campaign. We don't understand this process or its effects very much because of a lack of empirical information. But George Bishop's proposal for more cognitive interviewing on the topic would be a good start.

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Is a lot of money. Is more than the average middle class family can expect to earn in nearly three years. Is a lot of money to have campaign contributors give you for clothes, haircuts, and make-up.

The story of Governor Palin's "lifestyles of the rich and famous" make-over is so astoundingly at odds with the narrative of her authenticity, her "hockey mom" self-depiction, her "Joe sixpack" affinity that it can't fail to stun even her admirers.

I'm sure it's not comparable but for the record my haircuts cost $15.

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David raises a number of important concerns about the way conventional methods allocate undecideds. In addition to David's suggestion that we consider more accurate ways to assess voting intentions, we might also consider how the campaigns themselves are likely to influence the accuracy of pre-election polls.

The final 72 hours leading up to the close of polls on election day will feature a targeted barrage of phone calls, door-to-door contacts, and emails meant to rally each party's likely supporters to voting booths in key battleground states. Depending on the outcome of what campaign professionals call the "ground game," survey predictions of state-level presidential outcomes could understate a candidate's likelihood of winning targeted states by failing to account for the way individual voters are targeted by the campaigns for special "get out the vote" (GOTV) attention.

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Lobbying is really the Washington issue that keeps on giving. There's a
dozen ways at least to approach the subject, and the previous posts have
hit on many of its most interesting points. Turkmeniscam is a great conversation starter about lobbying. But it also does one thing that is
really tough to do: provide the details, the intricacies, as Ari points out,
of the lobby business.

Almost all lobbying is fairly standard-issue stuff. You make your case to
the members or staff about your client's issue. End of story. It's only when
you reveal how people do that, the game plans they intend to use, the
parties they plan to sponsor, that the story gets really interesting.

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First off, thanks to the posters for your contributions. As you all point out, the influence of lobbyists is more or less institutionalized and fixing the problem is not going to be easy. Take a look at the headlines. "Even as he condemns special interests and refuses money from lobbyists, Obama has followed a fundraising model created by President George W. Bush, enlisting 561 people to "bundle'' donations from friends, family and co-workers," a Bloomberg story said yesterday. His biggest source of campaign money, said the story, was Goldman Sachs, and three of his fundraisers work for firms registered to lobby for AIG.

Then there's a new AP story, which reports: "Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse." The firm was DCI, whose chief executive, Doug Goodyear, had been hired to manage the Republican convention in September. He had to quit when it was revealed that DCI had formerly lobbied for the dictatorship in Burma.

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In case you've missed the hype, IOUSA is a documentary making the case that the U.S. budget is hopelessly out of control and that our current spending patterns will bankrupt our children. The film features such noteworthy characters as Alan "Bubbles" Greenspan, Robert "Don't Regulate Credit Default Swaps" Rubin, and former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

This film should be viewed as part of a larger effort to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, the country's core safety net programs. The reality is that our budget is essentially fine, it is our health care system that is out of control. But fixing health care would require going after the drug companies, the insurance companies, and highly paid medical specialists. But those folks are all powerful, so the IOUSA crew went after old people instead.

You can get CEPR's movie review here.

Imagine if Al Qaeda had endorsed Obama rather than McCain. Imagine if they had said that Obama is best for AQ because Obama's Presidency would destroy America.

That is all you would hear about! Instead, in a coded message to its supporters, AQ said that it favored a terrorist attack on America before the election to help elect McCain.

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Thank you, Mitch Plitnick, who represents B'tselem, the Israeli human right organization in Washington for bringing this insanity to my attention.

A group of Israeli settlers have filed a suit against Israeli authorities because the so-called security checkpoints -- designed to prevent terrorists from getting into Jerusalem -- are making them late for work, school, the gym, whatever.

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Live from Cincinnati: It's Tuesday afternoon! Is that quick and bloggy enough for the TPM Café? Well, here's my not so bloggy beginning, with a thought to loosening up later in the week once I get my first, coherent two cents on the cyber-table.

Yes, the standard vote-choice question developed by Gallup and imitated by countless other pollsters certainly does minimize the "undecideds", especially during the earlier time periods preceding the election, such as the summer. So David's post and critique of the standard practice in the field (elaborated in his book, which I just finished reading last week) is largely on target, but I don't think David goes quite far enough in digging into a even bigger issue: the meaning of saying you're "undecided" or that you "haven't made up your mind" or "could change your mind before Election Day".

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After weeks of often ineffectual negative attacks against Barack Obama, the McCain campaign seems to have settled on a new rhetorical approach to use against the Democratic nominee: he's a socialist. Nearly 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall it seems the Red Menace has returned to the campaign trail. Yet at a time when the economy is faltering and voters are looking for government to lend a helping hand such attacks have little chance of succeeding.

In a sense, Mr. Obama has no one to blame but himself for this new GOP attack. It is a direct result of his now legendary sidewalk encounter with "Joe the Plumber" in Ohio. There, the Democrat defended his proposal for raising taxes on those who make more then $250,000 by saying that well-off Americans need to "share the wealth" with those who were less fortunate. Sen. McCain and his Republican cohorts quickly took this as evidence of Mr. Obama's wealth redistribution tendencies and began to tar him with the socialist label.

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I agree with Nancy Mathiowetz that the media rarely report follow-up questions that reveal how many voters could change their minds. She is right to note that the CBS News Poll story has occasionally focused on the size of the "swing voters" in the electorate - voters who either are undecided or who say they could change their candidate preferences before the election.

However, for the most part, pollsters do not themselves emphasize the swing voter population (much less the news media stories). Indeed, by forcing voters to make a decision, and then afterward asking them if they could change their minds (the standard approach pollsters use to measure voter intensity), pollsters go at the measurement of the undecided voter in a backhanded manner.

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Senator Biden has been repeatedly criticized by Senator McCain for calling for the dismemberment of Iraq. McCain charged Biden with saying that "that Iraq had to be broken up into three different countries," and called the plan "one of the more cockamamie ideas that I've heard in a long, long time."

Actually, the most sensible policy that follows from Biden's position is to recognize that Iraq is much more a tribal amalgam than a solid nation. Hence, the more each ethnic and confessional group is able and encouraged to govern itself, the closer we are to a stable Iraq. A federation with a high level of devolution to the various regions is the best model.

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First of all, I'd like to congratulate Ken Silverstein on his revelatory article in Harper's and subsequent book. Thanks for letting me add my two cents. I remember seeing Ken in Washington shortly after his piece came out and wondering how he spent months in a city as small as DC disguised as a bearded lobbyist for Turkmenistan. Quite a feat of investigative reporting.

There was some brouhaha following Ken's piece about whether it was proper journalistic ethics for him to go undercover and knowingly mislead his fellow lobbyists. But I don't think Ken had any choice--to get a great story about Washington lobbyists, Ken had to become one of them. That's because lobbyists working in America have to disclose very little about what they're actually up to and American lobbyists working abroad don't have to disclose anything.

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Last week, Associated Press ran a piece profiling several potential candidates for the next Treasury Secretary. The candidates had one feature in common with all prior Treasury Secretaries, they are all white men. This fact is especially egregious because one of the most obviously qualified candidates is a woman: Sheila Bair, the current chairperson of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

During ordinary times, the FDIC is a relative backwater, having to deal with minor policy tweaks or the failure of a small bank here or there. However, the housing crash has put the FDIC at center stage. Ms. Bair has been forced to arrange the takeover or merger of many of the country's largest banks, including Wachovia, Washington Mutual, and IndyMac. The FDIC has been a key actor in containing the credit crisis.

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Here's a contribution from my friend Peter P. Swire:

As a professor of both banking regulation and technology policy, there are striking similarities between the anti-regulation positions of John McCain in these two key sectors. Under the pressure of the current financial crisis, McCain has recently backed off of his laissez faire positions and admitted that the government must play a greater role in housing and financial markets. His unrepentant positions on technology policy, however, reveal the intellectually flawed approach to government regulation that has led both to the financial mess and to mistakes in technology issues such as broadband deployment, net neutrality, and privacy online.

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Although David raises a great point, the issue for me with all polls is the provision of sufficient information for the consumer to make his or her own judgment. Whether the question is about the election in November or asked as if the election were held today, the percent of respondents who respond with a "don't know" or "undecided" response are rarely reported by those who conduct the polls. Almost all pre-election polls follow up with questions of leaning; knowledge of how individuals respond to the initial question and to the follow-up question is rarely revealed. Providing estimates from the initial as well as the follow-up question would be revealing about individual preferences, the strength of one's preference, and the state of the election.

In fact, the CBS News Poll conducted prior to the New Hampshire primary did provide information about the fluidity of the race: their press release indicated that 28 percent of Democratic voters' minds could still change. But this piece of information did not make the headlines until after the New Hampshire primary election.

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In his Farewell Address, George Washington famously warned against the
"insidious wiles of foreign influence." In the instructive but depressing new book Turkmeniscam, Ken Silverstein shows that this danger is very real. Moreover, it's mostly our own fault. Why is it so easy for foreign governments to sell themselves in Washington? Because there are plenty of people inside the Beltway who are for sale--or at least for rent.

Lobbying does not occur in a vacuum, of course, and three features of contemporary U.S. politics account for the extent of this problem. The first is the extraordinary openness of the American political system, which gives anyone seeking to advance some cause numerous points of access. There are 535 members of the House and Senate, and one or two well-placed legislators on Capitol Hill can do you a lot of favors so long as the rest of their colleagues don't know or care about the issue at hand. If working the Hill doesn't pan out, there will be individuals in the Executive Branch who will be willing to advance some foreign power's agenda, particularly if that agenda is being pushed by experienced Washington insiders. As Silverstein shows, lobbying firms can also count on sympathetic think tanks and a pliable media to lend their efforts a patina of legitimacy.

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My Pollster.com colleague David Moore is right that the standard vote choice question typically used by pollsters deliberately pushes voters to make a decision, when their level of certainty about how they will actually vote is somewhat less than complete. From George Gallup on down, pollsters have learned that pushing harder, especially in the last few days before an election, usually produces a more accurate forecast.

Unfortunately, media accounts often lose sight of the fact that the preference expressed on surveys is not set in stone, and may still change. A preference is often not a final decision. We all learned this lesson the hard way earlier this year in New Hampshire. When David and his colleagues at the University of New Hampshire did their final survey before the primary, they had Barack Obama leading by nine percentage points (39% to 30%). Nearly all of the Democratic primary voters (94%) expressed a preference for a candidate (i.e only 6% were ("undecided"), but only 53% described themselves as "completely decided" and one in five (21%) said they had "considered some candidates but are still trying to decide.

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Martin Peretz, former New Republic proprietor, writes today that Obama doesn't need Colin Powell's endorsement.

According to Peretz, all Powell represents is "the race card." and "if truth be told, [Powell is] not really a military hero, at least not in comparison to McCain."

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Hey there Ken. I've just received your book and am much enjoying it. As with your original Harper's piece, you've managed to lay the issues out sharply and with the context that is usually lacking, and you've come up with anecdotes that are surprising and infuriating - and I say that having covered lobbying for some 15 years.

Now, to your questions:
Lobbyists are basically a whole other branch of government. Given that, they are often both expensive and ineffective, just like the legislative and executive branches. Lots of money spent on pricey K-Street firms probably doesn't accomplish much - and especially so with foreign countries as clients. As you point out, conditions have to be right for a member of Congress to want to go out on a limb for some shady regime or interest. That said, somebody in Washington is always ready to take their money.

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This is interesting. The Jewish vote for the Democratic nominee is now within range of the traditional 70-80%.

That is not surprising. About 20% of Jews are Republicans (I'm proud that the number is so low), you add another 5% or so that won't vote for a black guy and that is pretty much that. Obama ends up with 70%-80% on election day.

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The presidential election is in full swing and so, as happens like clockwork every four years, American politicians hates lobbyists and "special interest groups." John McCain recently referred to lobbyists as "birds of prey" and promised that anyone working for his administration would face a lifetime ban from the profession. Barack Obama won't take any money from lobbyists and promises to greatly diminish their role in Washington in his quest for good government.

It's hard to take any of this too seriously. The McCain camp, as has been widely noted, has rather obvious and embarrassing ties to lobbyists. Start here with campaign chairman Rick Davis, who a few years back was representing telecommunications firms before McCain's Senate Commerce Committee. Then there's Charlie Black, who has a long history of working for the most ethically challenged clients, ranging from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to Mobutu Sese Seko in what used to be called, as has been widely noted, Zaire.

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For a long time, I've been concerned about the fact that all of our pre-election polls deliberately suppress the undecided vote. Instead of measuring how many people have made a decision, and how many have not, most pollsters today follow the format first used by George Gallup 73 years ago - a forced choice, hypothetical question: Who would you vote for if the election were held today (among a list of names).

He first started that in 1935, Alec Gallup acknowledges, because Gallup knew that if he asked who people would vote for in the 1936 election, so many people would say they didn't know, the newspapers wouldn't have found the results interesting. Unfortunately, pollsters have continued with that same question ever since.

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Happy Monday Caférs,

We have two features lined up for you this week:

First, David W. Moore, author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls, is leading a discussion on polls in our Special Features section. The race is down to the wire with only 15 days left. No doubt many of us are going to be watching every fluctuation of the polls with bated breath, flinging numbers and percentages around like stale twinkies in a food fight. But what's the real significance here? Is there a cream filling or are we just throwing around empty shells?

Joining Moore, who was a senior editor at the Gallup Poll for thirteen years, will be Nancy Mathiowetz, sociology professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and past president at the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), George Bishop, professor of Political Science at U of Cincinnati, Mark Blumenthal, journalist and editor of pollster.com, Michael Traugott, former president of AAPOR, and professor at U of Michigan, and Scott Althaus, author and professor at U of Illinois Champagne-Urbana.

Next, we've been feeling the slime on the campaign trail lately, so what better time for a spotlight on special interest groups in Washington!

Spearheading our dive into the muck is Ken Silverstein, here to discuss his latest, Turkmeniscam, in Book Club.

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In the early 1970s, when I was a young immigrant in Jerusalem, I found myself the head of my building's co-op committee. The job's main responsibility was collecting co-op fees (for heating oil, stair and entrance cleaning, etc.) from twenty-four immigrant. Our mortgages had been heavily subsidized by the government. We came from all over the world. (One Iraqi family actually brought a lamb into the elevator at Passover, which never came down.)

On the whole, it was a pleasant job. The problems started with my "Russian" neighbors, from the not-yet-former Soviet Union. I would knock on their door and invariably get a hug and a sweet and a coffee. What I wouldn't get was the 50 pounds they owed to the building. "We refuse," they would tell me, "we hate socialism."

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As Josh said yesterday, it's clear that the McCain campaign will finish up the race with a Greatest Hits of their racist McCarthyite campaign. Their bet? The media won't fight back with enough force to make calling Obama a Muslim socialist terrorist a net negative.

The media sphere proving them wrong would be a victory not just for the Obama campaign, but for society as a whole and the forces of tolerance and rationality broadly. And some people are making an effort.

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Man, this story encapsulates why the wonderful word chutzpah is Yiddish!

John McCain did a conference call with a bunch of so-called (i.e. Republican) Jewish leaders. On the call, McCain was urged by a far-right settler rabbi from the West Bank to go on the offensive and attack Obama over Rev. Wright. McCain said that he'd rather focus on Bill Ayers.

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Okay, as we all now know, almost everything about Joe the Plumber is a lie. He doesn't own a plumbing business and apparently is not even licensed as a plumber, but he does raise a legitimate concern about "spreading the wealth around." The only problem is that in this country, when the government spreads the wealth around it usually means redistributing it upward.

That is certainly the case with the hundreds of billions of dollars being used to bail out the banks. The public has a real interest in keeping the banking system functioning. It has zero interest in subsidized the pay checks of wealthy bank executives or enriching the bank's shareholders, which Secretary Paulson is now doing.

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Bob Cesca answers the question in his Goddamn Awesome Blog.

While I have you, let me link to Bill Kristol's column today challenging Peggy Noonan's argument that our politics has been vulgarized. (Of course it has but by Peggy's party not ours). Anyway, Kristol doesn't like Noonan because she is a rightwinger who can write and he knows that the Tmes would kill to steal her from the WSJ and dump the embarrassing (for Sulzberger) Kristol.

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. . . [E]conomic freedom. . . . Freedom for men to choose their own callings, to accumulate property in protection of their children and old age, freedom of private enterprise that does not injure others. . . . A large number of the men administering our preparedness program do not believe in this freedom. With a long war--and it will be long if we put our boys into it--then their methods with the inevitable debt, inflation, unemployment and demoralized agriculture will make us over into State Socialism, probably under some other name. -- Herbert Hoover, 1941

Someone, I forget who, once said the history of the world is the history of class struggle. In the current politically morbid period, where the predators and the stupids have unearned market power in the marketplace of ideas, the history of the world is the history of class struggle over taxes. But maybe not for long.

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