What is best in politics? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, to hear the lamentations of their women . . . I'm like a kid waiting for Christmas, wondering what's in those packages under the tree.

Not to count any unhatched chickens, but I'd like to gently remind all you Obamaniacs that the Democratic candidate is running on tax cuts, enlarging the military, expanding the invasion of Afghanistan, and sustaining the grip of private insurance companies on the nation's health care system. Our likely Secretary of the Treasury and economic policy czar is Larry Summers, who to the best of my knowledge has never worn love beads. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, may stay on for a bit. Obama is running as the competent Republican. No doubt, a competent Republican is better than an incompetent Republican, especially if he or she happens to be a Democrat.

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Ezra Klein and some other progressive blockers are suggesting that we all stick it to the rightwing haters by buying Rashid Khalidi's book, "The Iron Cage," about the occupation.

I just did, and I have two copies already. According to Klein, it's already climbed to #1 on Amazon in the categories of books about Israel, Palestine and the World. It's 137 overall. Getting it to the #1 nonfiction book on Amazon is a nice way to tell the right that their efforts to demonize writers they don't like will backfire. Especially when the issue against the author is his ethnicity.

Buy it here.

Eugene Jarecki's new book has spurred a good discussion this week. We all seem to agree that the country's economic crisis is part of a larger political crisis. And that real change must come from the bottom up, as Naomi Wolf argues. This will be particularly important as the next administration makes its budget decisions. Cutting entitlement spending could increase the suffering of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens and make our economic woes worse. Cutting some of the 100 percent increase the military budget has enjoyed over the past eight years makes more sense, but will trigger major political resistance.

It is unlikely that Eugene and Andrew Bacevich's suggestion of Barney Frank as the next defense secretary will take, but shaking up the bureaucracy is the right idea. Secretary Gates did a good job with the mess that Rumsfeld made during his six-year tenure. However, Gates and other Bush Administration possible holdovers are not the answer, even if Obama wins in a close, contested race. There needs to a fundamental shift from the Cold War policies of the past, especially in the area of defense spending and nuclear weapons policy. As president of the Ploughshares Fund, I have dedicated my life to making this change.

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I spoke last night on Obama and the transformational possibilities that would open up with his victory, to an overwhelmingly friendly congregation at Temple Emanuel in Great Neck, on Long Island. During the Q-and-A, a man halfway back in the audience started shouting: "You have no business here! Shut up! Get out! Obama hates Israel! You hate Israel! You're anti-American! You're a Communist!" And so on. (I think there was something about terrorists, too, though I'm not sure, the acoustics not having been designed for enraged disruptions.) The shouter had to be, as they say, escorted out. Rabbi Robert Widom closed out the evening with an impassioned appeal for civility. Without question he spoke for his deeply embarrassed audience.

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(This is my edited for TPM IPF Friday piece from this morning. It bears considerable resemblance to Jo-Ann Mort's terrific piece but is different enough -- I'm more vicious and I focus more on the nauseating pandering to Israel on general --that I'm posting it),

I have been looking to see if the Jewish "defense organizations" put out statements condemning the vicious attacks on Professor Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian-American academic.

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In today's New York Times story about plans under discussion in Washington to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, and the problems associated with helping some underwater homeowners but not others, a special adviser for policy at the FDIC was quoted as saying, "This is not about trying to create fairness. The goal is to keep people in their houses." But that conception of government's mission in this crisis is exactly backwards. The more appropriate mission, which would be modestly more costly to pursue but also far more likely to lead to outcomes that would be widely recognized as reasonable, would be to assure that every family whose mortgage exceeds the value of their home ends up with decent housing in a place they want to be.

The plan summarized below by my Century Foundation colleague, economist Bernard Wasow, builds on a proposal made by fellow TPMCafe denizen and genuine wise man Dean Baker. The basic thrust is to minimize perverse incentives while reaching fair resolutions by having the government provide support that would be available to anyone with a mortgage that exceeds the value of their property:

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I want to take a bit of a different angle in talking about the issues Eugene has raised, and others, more competent than I, have begun discussing. I also want to refer to my own teaching over the past three years, teaching that has attempted to illuminate the ongoing titanic struggle present in the U.S. since 1947 between our soul and our security. It is a struggle in which security is increasingly winning--for numerous reasons other than the fact that Americans collectively want to feel safe. Call it the battle of our traditional political and cultural values--bluntly encompassed by Patrick Henry's saying, "Give me liberty or give me death"--against the compromises with, and attacks on, those very same values by the demands of the national security state. Today, the cry from across the country is almost the antithesis of Henry's: "Protect my life at any cost."

The repercussions of "any cost" have been rather stupendous.

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One Saturday morning in 1982 I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections and found 30 supporters of then-State Senator Vander Beatty "checking" voter registration cards from the recent primary election.

The hobgoblins of Florida, 2000, never outdid what I saw next that morning in Brooklyn. But, believe me, it can happen again. It was stopped in Brooklyn only thanks to an insider with a conscience.

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It has come to this--the red baiting and the nastiness of the McCain/Palin campaign, in desperation to get Jewish support, is now baiting and bad-mouthing a notable Palestinian-American historian, Rashid Khalidi, for his and his wife's friendship with Obama. The Khalidi's know Obama from their time in Hyde Park, when Rashid was a professor at the University of Chicago.

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Greg, thanks. Your analysis makes sense to me but still -- and I am sorry to be the one continually beating this drum -- I am still stuck on what I am hearing every day on the road from people who have no hope of ever participating in a discussion about policy at a level where they think they can be heard. Even if everything you hope for and propose does happen, I am not sure it will address the increasingly severe malaise, indeed crisis I see out there. Ordinary Americans of both parties and third parties feel that this chess game is happening with little regard for them; that the game players are beholden to interests they can never budge or only slightly affect; and that it is a closed political and media-elite economy.

Especially now that we are seeing reports surface -- and they are still under-investigated and under-developed -- of extraordinary insider dealing with the bailout billions -- now that we have seen that even Obama caves on FISA, talks most recently in his long ad about `liberty' in terms of military engagement and not the shredded Constitution. As long as there are no indictments being prepared for the many crimes of officials at high levels in this administration, and those in the opposition who colluded with them (notably in terms of being `looped in on torture), many of the American people will continue to feel that whoever is in power, it is all happening under a bell jar.

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Just read an amazing list of stats in Hollywood Reporter-worth listing here:

Obama's 30-minute primetime infomercial was seen by 33.6 million viewers across seven networks -- including CBS, NBC, Fox, Univision, MSNBC, BET, and TV One. That's 70% more people than watched the conclusion of the World Series last night on Fox (19.8 million). B&C: An appearance by Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart delivered the highest rating in the program's history.

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Today Charles Krauthammer explains why he's voting for John McCain even though he considers Barack Obama the better man. If Obama wins...

1) "Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union."

2) "The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chávez-style travesty [will try to ] abolish conservative talk radio."

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The Wizards truly and deeply stink.
As I said last year, it was a big mistake to sign Arenas. Then he got hurt. Then it was a huge mistake not to bring in Elton Brand. Then Haywood got hurt. And the result is the team is awful to watch: no one who is left seems to know how to play. The good players are lost on the court; shooting from bad spots and not stopping to gain their balance. There is no coherent defense. A lost season. I predict: lottery bound.

So many valuable ideas have been advanced in response to my initial post that it's hard to choose which to address. But I do want to say that Andrew Bacevich's whimsical suggestion of a Pentagon run by Barney Frank is not as far-fetched as it might seem.

This past week, Frank advocated a 25% cut in defense spending, which as Joe Cirincione points out can be achieved without any decrease in our national security. Frank is often the father of some of the smartest and most counter-intuitive arguments ever to come out of Washington. For example, noting that many people who are pro-life also oppose social assistance programs for the living, Franks once joked that for such people it might appear that life begins at conception and ends at birth.

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Greg Mitchell says that a big Obama win will bring a marked shift to the left. That is common sense. But there will be no sea change in US foreign policy. Obama's advisers and words indicate that he is a typical liberal internationalist, one who agrees with Madeline Albright and Robert Kagan that ours is an indispensable nation. (I think what Charles De Gaulle said about indispensable men applies to nations). What we're probably in for is a kinder, gentler hegemony, as Andrew Bacevich points out.

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I love "Open Secrets" where you can discover if you have any friends who are secret Republicans. (I don't).

I was looking up one guy I know in the "E's" and discovered that Julie Nixon Eisenhower, daughter of Richard Nixon and grand-daughter-in-law of Dwight David Eisenhower has maxed out to Barack Obama. Cool.

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In following the discussion here of the drastic reforms needed under the next president, I really ought to add a "whoa" before continuing. Like others, I anticipate that any major changes (good or bad) would only come with an Obama presidency and, probably like others, I predict that he will, indeed, win on Tuesday.

However, I don't take this as a given and I believe that the mood for change will vary significantly based on the size of his victory (if indeed he wins at all).

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From TPM Reader IS:

David poses an important question. I think the overarching issue will be whether a significant Obama and democratic party victory creates a mandate for governing free of the overwhelming influence on both parties of corporate money. We don't pay enough attention to the enormous concentration of economic and political power of the big players in all major industries, from finance, defense, oil, high tech, health, insurance, auto, telecomm etc. It is hard to imagine the evolution of our public policy, relatively free of these influences. Of course, since their impact is so great on democrats as well we will not ignore them. However the key will be for govt. To regulate, and incent them to act in a way that furthers our environmental, international and domestic goals in way that balances public interest with their corporate interest will be the test. The financial collapse actually provides an opportunity to have government play a thoughtful and meaningful role in our recovery.

Discuss!

I didn't like the idea of a 30 minute campaign ad, five days out. I thought it might be cheesy or seem presumptuous. I was wrong. It was very moving, like one of those PBS shows about American history. I felt like I was watching a film about JFK or FDR. It was simply a pitch perfect closer.

I should have learned by now that Team Obama always knows what it's doing. It's like that wonderful web ad people keep sending me. It shows a smiling confident Obama with the inscription: "Everyone, chill the fuck out, I got this."

He does, indeed.

I wrote three weeks ago about Sean Hannity featuring the longtime anti-Semitic propagandist Andy Martin in his hour-long screed against Obama on Fox News. Now here's Howard Kurtz in Monday's WP:

Martin said on the show that Obama's community-organizing work in Chicago was "training for a radical overthrow of the government." The onetime political candidate has a history of making controversial statements. In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, according to the Chicago Tribune, he referred to a judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew" and described Holocaust survivors in a filing as "operating as a wolf pack." Martin has denied holding anti-Semitic views....

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I may differ from Joe regarding the importance of how the next president chooses to fill his inner circle. Obama and McCain both vow to "change the way Washington works." We'll get the first inkling of what exactly that means (if anything) when the winner of next Tuesday's election begins to announce his appointments to top level positions. The idea du jour is that a President Obama would do well to keep Secretary Gates on the job at the Pentagon. I admire Secretary Gates. To say that he is an improvement over his disastrous predecessor is a vast understatement. Yet Gates is very much a conventional thinker -- as his position on nuclear weapons affirms. He is a prudent guardian of the status quo. Were Obama, if elected, to persuade Gates to stay on, Obama would elicit plenty of applause. But he'd also be giving an indication of exactly how modest will be the change that is to come.

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Freud, where are you when we need you? Think tanks in Washington, DC and across the land are furiously issuing position papers in preparation for the new administration. They are full of "we need" statements. They declare: "We need to fix the climate," "we need to stop Iran from making nuclear bombs," "we need to restructure the UN Security Council," and on and on. The sentiments behind these statements are often noble, and they may well find their way into high flying speeches. But they, unfortunately, ignore the main point Freud taught us.

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So now John McCain is attacking Obama for his association with Prof. Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi is a Palestinian-American who has consistently supported Palestinian recognition of Israel, has opposed terrorism, and promoted Washington's efforts to produce an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Yes, he is connected to the PLO, the organization Israel negotiates with (Netanyahu negotiated and shook hands with Arafat, for heaven's sake) and recognizes as the "legitimate representative of the Palestinian people."

But, as you can see here, McCain likens Khalidi to a neo-Nazi. Why? Not because he believes it (McCain has a long-time association with Khalidi too) but because the Republicans' latest strategy is to count on (1) Jews being such such racists that, so far as we are concerned, any association with any Arab is bad and (2) hey, this is what the McCain Republicans do.

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One of the more objectionable arguments in yesterday's speech on nuclear weapons by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was his assertion that "there is absolutely no way we can maintain a credible deterrent and reduce the number of weapons in our stockpile without resorting to testing our stockpile or pursuing a modernization program." In plain English, Gates is threatening that the Pentagon and the National Nuclear Security Administration -- which runs the nuclear weapons complex -- will break a longstanding moratorium on nuclear testing if they are not allowed to build a new warhead (known in bureacratese as the "Reliable Replacement Warhead." This assertion is wrong in so many ways it is hard to know where to start. Point one is that according to the Pentagon's own experts, the plutonium "pits" that form the most important active component of current bombs are good for at least 85 years, as set out in an analysis by Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association.

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I'm not going to paraphrase this. If you are interested in having the cockles of your heart (whatever those are) warmed, read this.

Let me join this interesting discussion by picking up on Andrew Bacevich's point from Tuesday. I am not convinced we face a constitutional crisis, but I know we are in a political and economic crisis. A major contributor is a defense budget hyper-inflated during the Bush years (a subject dear to Eugene's heart), from $280 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $542 billion in 2009, plus $860 billion spent thus far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the wars will cost us $2.4 trillion before they are over.

The budgets are justified by an expansionist foreign policy and approved by a Congress more concerned with defending their political positions than with sound policy. We need a dramatic change in course. But the next president, as Andrew points out, will face formidable resistance. There will be a struggle between the "transformationalists" and the "incrementalists." A case in point is Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' speech just yesterday defending the Cold War nuclear policies of the administration--with a few tweaks.

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I was on the Bill O'Reilly show last night and placed in the position of defending Barney Frank against the charge that he was largely responsible for the housing bubble and crash. I have occasionally had bad things to say about Frank myself, so I don't mind O'Reilly or anyone else criticizing him, but this one seemed more than a bit over the top.

O'Reilly blamed Frank for protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their unsound lending practices. I made the obvious points that Fannie and Freddie were followers, not leaders in this mess (they lost market shares to the private sector whiz kids). More importantly, Frank didn't even take over the Financial Services Committee until January of 2007, after almost all the bad loans had already gone out the door.

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So now we know why Joe the Plumber is for McCain. He is worried about Israel.

Funny, I would never have guessed. I saw "Joe" being interviewed and he's a rightwing nut (he wants to abolish social security) and a racist (he said Obama reminded him of Sammy Davis, Jr).

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I respectfully disagree with Ben Friedman. Our liberties are by no means safe and our status as a real constitutional Republic is beyond fragile. On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division -- three to four thousand battle-hardened warriors -- to...somewhere in the United States. Their original stated mission according to Army Times was 'crowd control' and 'subduing unruly individuals.' They have lethal and nonlethal technologies and tanks. After some questions were raised -- not, I note, by anyone in the mainstream media, which has bizarrely ignored this massive subversion of 200 years of our having been protected by the 1807 Insurrection Act and by 1879's Posse Comitatus from being policed at home by military forces -- the Northcom PR people changed the stated goal of the mission to 'protecting communities affected by weapons of mass destruction.' Still, I would have thought, a story -- and so thank the hundreds of citizens who are contacting me trying to find out more. For those commentators who do not yet think our liberties are at risk, I would direct their attention to the use of military forces as a source of intimidation of voters in a closely held election that is characteristic of closing societies around the world.

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In a speech today at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a last ditch effort to justify the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the United States, even as figures ranging from Barack Obama to Henry Kissinger to a growing network of citizen's organizations have endorsed the goal of "a world without nuclear weapons."

Given that Gates has been mentioned as a possible Secretary of Defense in an Obama or a McCain administration, his opinions still matter -- although one would hope that his status quo position on nuclear weapons would disqualify him from receiving such an appointment. This is especially true given that eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons should be the top priority of the next administration, as Joseph Cirincione, the President of the Ploughshares Fund, suggested in a recent interview.

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As the polls tighten, Slate's veteran blowhard press critic Jack Shafer surely knows that sensationalist journalism and racism are two of the biggest reasons. But, as Todd Gitlin notes here, Shafer is training his piercing gaze on liberals in the media, who, he complains, are so enraptured by Obama that they can't bear to acknowledge his faults and their inevitable disappointments if he wins.

Let me give this sage of journalism something he really deserves -- a viral e-mail. This one really stopped me. It will help Shafer and all of us, far more than his own commentary does, to tell whether liberal pundits' jitters are worth frothing about just now. Ask yourself these simple questions:

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If we are talking about militarism -- an overgrown military establishment, a proclivity for war, and runaway executive power, all justified by exaggerated security concerns -- then I agree that we have a problem. But the problem results not because we can't sustain this posture but because we can.

We are still rich as hell, despite our current trouble, which is not a result of military spending or war in any case. Despite George Bush's assaults on our civil liberties, our freedoms are essentially intact; we vote and speak as we like. And the vast majority of us are safe and secure. The danger of war does not touch us.

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I largely agree with Eugene Jarecki's assessment of the problem - a badly abused Constitution, a political system that is fiscally irresponsible and fundamentally corrupt, a reckless overemphasis on military power. The list goes on.

Yet it is not as if these tendencies have evolved when no one was looking. They have flourished in broad daylight - with the majority of the American people either tacitly or explicitly (through their own political behavior) buying in.

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Slate's Jack Shafer, inveterate practitioner of the countercyclical twist-and-reverse, warns that "tiny tendrils of trepidation are starting to drift over the liberal members of the commentariat and the political press corps." Not because they fear Obama will lose, but because they're so enraptured by him, "so convinced that his candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering," so "in love with the idea of Obama, of the 'meaning' of his run for the presidency," that they're courting "performance anxiety." "How," he wonders, "do you pack all the Obama touch points--healing, hope, change, civility, the second coming of Camelot, post-boomer politician, inspirer of youth, great uniter, world president, and so on--into one story without sounding hagiographic?"

Speaking for myself, I make no apologies for hearty enthusiasm, even spells of giddiness, whiffs of overconfidence calling for iron realism which then gives way to musings about this moment's transformational possibilities, the obstacles to same, and the Meaning Of It All. What with America's long-running abdication of moral nerve, a ruinous war, piles of spectacular malfeasance in high places and manifold abominations of the last eight years, any writer alive to the moment may be forgiven a touch--or more than a touch--of the rhetoric of wild aspiration. Hell, even an analytically tinctured gloat or two about the ruptures of the conservative movement is acceptable in my book.

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This sums up the McCain-Palin voter. The owner of the Miami Dolphins says he'll sell his share of the team now rather than pay a higher tax under Obama. (His numbers are wrong, by the way).

But it's the principle here that matters. This guy is your typical McCain Republican. He says he'll be damned before he gives his tax dollars "to him" (Obama).

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Perhaps before we get to proposing serious reforms and re-ordering priorities in this space, we should consider the inevitable role of the media in how Americans will judge any such movement. This happens to be something I know a little about - both from my current job and recent books but also from personal history, protesting the Vietnam war and starting my journalism career in the era of Nixon and Watergate.

Naturally I wonder what others in this forum, and readers, think.Has everything, or an awful lot, changed in the web/blogosphere era? Has the liberal dominance online shifted the balance forever, away from the longtime tilt of right-wing talk radio, Fox News and timid mainstream reporting?

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Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter and I are on the same wave length. He writes in this week's Newsweek that Obama could still lose and, if he does, the only reason will be racism.

I totally agree with that. The only difference between Alter and me is that he is sure Obama will win and I will believe that after the votes come in, and not a minute before. Having grown up in small cities where racism was (and is?) rampant, it is hard for me to believe that these white voters I know all too well will vote for a black guy no matter what they say.

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There's a vast gulf between what the Framers intended when they founded this country and where we now find ourselves - such a gulf that it's fair to say the proverbial "they'd be rolling in their graves" if they saw us right now. Looking into this abyss, we as citizens must focus with urgency and precision on the need for "change" not as a campaign slogan belonging to either candidate (both now claim it), but as a far deeper national challenge that can only be met by the people of this country, as opposed to its leaders. Unless we see ourselves - individually and collectively -- as the engine for real societal reform - no matter how hard that may be to imagine given our developed habits of disengagement -- our vote on election day is wasted.

In my new book The American Way of War, I try to put today's constitutional crisis (let's call it what it is) in an historical perspective. The Framers intended a government of the people, in which the separated powers of equal and opposing branches of government would exert checks and balances over each other and thus prevent any individual or faction from steamrolling the remainder of the society. Fast-forward two hundred years and we today see a very different picture - a government unleashed, its arrogant executive branch aided by Congress and the courts as it tramples over the separation of powers, shows contempt for the checks and balances, and guides the country to long-term ruin in its effort to seize its own short-term gains.

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This week at Cafe, filmmaker and author Eugene Jarecki joins us for TPM Cafe book club. We'll be discussing his recent book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril. Expanding on the themes from his film, Why We Fight, we'll be talking war, American foreign policy, the public's mandate and the Constitution. Or, in Eugene's words:

I try to put today's constitutional crisis (let's call it what it is) in an historical perspective. The Framers intended a government of the people, in which the separated powers of equal and opposing branches of government would exert checks and balances over each other and thus prevent any individual or faction from steamrolling the remainder of the society. Fast-forward two hundred years and we today see a very different picture - a government unleashed, its arrogant executive branch, aided by Congress and the courts as it tramples over the separation of powers, shows contempt for the checks and balances, and guides the country to long-term ruin in its effort to seize its own short-term gains.

Joining Eugene are Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, and author, most recently of So Wrong for So Long on Iraq and the media, Andrew Bacevich, Professor of international relations at Boston University and author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation focused on nuclear weapons policy and conflict resolution, Ben Friedman, Ph.D. candidate in Political science at MIT, and Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute, and Naomi Wolf, author of Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Join us.

Some people are still wondering whether Barack Obama will be flummoxed on Nov. 4 by the so-called "Bradley Effect." Maybe, maybe not, but that we're even debating it shows that much has changed for the better, as I note in a short commentary, "Things No One Talks About," in Dissent magazine.

What I don't talk about even there is that some of us were heralding this change even before we'd heard of Obama, way back when some of his biggest current backers were claiming that prospects like his could never materialize, and even that they shouldn't, because who needs a deracinated neo-liberal? The struggles behind his struggle can be quickly sketched, but they were hard-won, and worth knowing about.

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This is a hoot. The AP is reporting that Sarah Palin met with Israel's ambassador and told him that the McCain administration would "look forward to working with your Jewish Agency."

What! Palin surely doesn't know this but the Jewish Agency was the name for Israel's pre-state government. After 1948, the governing authority was the State of Israel.

CORRECTION: AP has clarified. She was indeed talking about the Jewish Agency which, as Matt Yglesias points out, is just weird.

Here's a nifty new resource from Ph. D. student John Kelly, who when he's not getting his degree in Communications at Columbia is teaching at Harvard's Berkman Center. Go to his Morningside Analytics site and you can see how many liberal and conservative blogs link to the 100 top political YouTube videos over recent days. You can thus, in his words, "Measure the Movement of Ideas through Social Networks."

We all know how hard it is to get by on tens of millions of dollars a year. That is why the Washington Post was near hysterical in its support of the Wall Street bailout earlier this month. They argued that if we didn't give $700 billion to the banks right away that all hell would break loose.

Those who wanted to put conditions that ensured that the money didn't go into the pockets of shareholders or top executives, or even that the bailout was done the right way through direct injections of capital (as it eventually was) were denounced as reactionary Neanderthals. So, the bailout went through and the Wall Street executives are now getting tens of millions in compensation, courtesy of average taxpayers.

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The Old Bob Dylan line, "When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose."must have been roaming around conservative pundit David Frum's skull in the last couple of days. Rarely does a partisan tell the leader (and Presidential Candidate) of his party, "the emperor has no clothes."

I could pile up the poll numbers here, but frankly . . . it's too depressing. You have to go back to the Watergate era to see numbers quite so horrible for the GOP.

McCain's awful campaign is having awful consequences down the ballot. I spoke a little while ago to a senior Republican House member. "There is not a safe Republican seat in the country," he warned. "I don't mean that we're going to lose all of them. But we could lose any of them."

In the Senate, things look, if possible, even worse.

So Frum's basic plan is to abandon the Presidential race, retreat and fight a Geurrilla War from a base of 41 Republican Senators. Take all the money you can out of advertising McCain and Palin and try to save a couple of Republican Senate Seats!

It boggle's the mind.

While our focus on this special Talking Points Memo segment has naturally been on election polls, another area of concern is public policy polls. Typically, media polls are designed not to report public opinion but to manufacture a "public opinion" that is interesting and plausible for the news stories - often at the expense of anything that resembles what Americans are really thinking.

The major tactics media pollsters use are 1) asking forced choice questions, to get answers even from people who have no opinion; 2) providing information to respondents in the interview, in case they don't know enough already to offer an opinion - and in so doing taint the sample, so that it no longer represents the general public that has not been given that same information; and 3) failing to provide meaningful intensity measures that could help distinguish firmly held views from the "top-of-mind" views that respondents express in the press of a quick telephone interview.

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Check out this thread from Lucianne.com. Lucianne is Jonah Goldberg's mother, the woman famous for arranging the Monica blue dress deal. Lucianne.com is the second biggest rightist website (after Free Republic).

We live in the same country with these people. How many are there? We'll find out soon enough. But these folks are the mainstream right.

Think race matters to them? Oh yeah, he's also a socialist!

In 1994 I wrote that the left activist and sage Jim Chapin considered New York's then-new mayor Rudy Giuliani a "progressive conservative" like Teddy Roosevelt.

David Brooks, who worshipped Giuliani, picked up the phrase, and now he's claiming that it would have fit John McCain, too, if only McCain had "escaped the straightjacket of a party that is ailing and a conservatism that is behind the times." That he didn't escape makes his campaign "unspeakably sad."

Hello? The hero of Hanoi, imprisoned by his Republican base and his chosen running mate? What's unspeakably sad is how long ago McCain's leadership and Brooks' judgment went wrong -- a surprise only to journalists who still fall for Brooks as they once did for McCain.

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Last night I had the luck to have a visit to New Mexico to see my cousins and uncle in Albuquerque with a trip by Obama to the state and we went to the rally at the UNM campus with 40,000 others. New Mexico is one of the few states still in play and it's being heavily visited by both Reps and Dems. McCain was here earlier in the day yesterday and could barely muster 1000 at the New Mexico State Fair. What was most interesting for me, though, was the festive atmosphere for Obama--mostly young people and hawkers selling buttons and t-shirts as at a rock festival. What happens on November 5 to this energy?

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Gideon Levy is one of the top writers in Israel.

In today's column, he responds to a well-known spokesman for the setlers who accuses the majority of Israelis of hating them.

Levy writes: "Large segments of Israeli society do indeed hate. But this is not baseless hatred, not hatred for the sake of hatred, to use your words. It is hatred for your enterprise. You have earned this hatred honestly - the only honest thing about your enterprise."

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In today's agonies, David Brooks trembles over the transformation of the once great, John McCain. You know, all the usual blather about the great leader he once was and his tragic decline these last few weeks or months.

It's truly unbearable stuff especially to those among us (pretty much all serious liberals and conservatives) who always thought McCain is a big zero, a product of ridiculous hype by his buddies in the media.

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