She came in a cipher, and she left that way. Her "answers" to Gwen Ifill's spongy questions were as substantial as Quaker Rice Cakes, and had all the improvised spontaneity of a Pope's funeral.

Sarah Palin's handlers and the compliant American media considered it a victory that she didn't soil herself and run for the ammonium carbonate. Too bad few outside the loop felt that way.

This just isn't the year for Little Mary Sunshine glad-handing and "hey, sailor" winks. More than any other time in memory, voters want - need - specifics. Less wink, more wonk - comprende?

Palin's rote, memorized script responded to questions that weren't asked, as if she'd showed up at a different debate. When the subject was about foreign policy in Africa, she talked about... energy. When she was asked about nuclear proliferation, Palin practically blinked and said "buffalo".

Meanwhile, Joe Biden stealthily established his humanity by choking up a bit when refering to his family's tragedy. A slim ray of real, basic decency showed through his customary facade as Washington Insider No. 1.

If that was planned, the Obama people are geniuses. They are successfully executing an effective, "anti-Rovian" tactic - setting quiet traps into which blustering opponents blunder. They've sold their tax reform plan the same way, steadily attracting a working-stiff electorate ready for a class-war offensive of their own.

On MSNBC last night, Pat Buchanan, apparently swept away by Palin't "style", went a little bonkers - suggesting that the financial collapse was the only factor in Obama's widening margin in voter polls. But the charts don't reflect that; they show McCain's stock steadily falling after the GOP's expected post-convention bump in early September. And that was weeks before the credit industry and Wall Street laid their eggs.

The key to the election, as Buchanan is fond of saying to advance a much different point, really is Obama, or, more to the point, Obama's announced policy of shifting the burden of public revenue off the backs of the working class. From the perspective of those making less than a quarter of a million a year, this "redistribution of wealth" - as per Palin's accusation - seems pretty fair.

The Obama campaign's other talking points - end the war, reform health care, police the greed that has so rotted high finance - are the ones resonating with voters this year. Palin offered no specifics simply because she didn't dare: A McCain administration seeks to extend the Bush-Era status quo for as long as possible, and plainly outlining that goal will go down like a carbolic acid cocktail among this year's restive citizenry.

But the media seems as unconscious as the GOP of this slow, unrelenting sea change. The talking heads appeared genuinely flummoxed that snap polls following the 90-minute debate showed Biden clearly winning. They couldn't understand it! She was so... polished.

Palin was dipping deep in the Reagan Bag, even, at one point, using the line "there you go again", as well as doggedly reminding listeners of her origins far, far away from the Beltway establishment.

She defined herself as a "maverick" - many times - without ever telling us why we should consider her so. Words do matter - but sometimes their value is on the cheap side.

Whether federal investigators can succeed in their attempts to sneeze off the troublesome anthrax attack case remains to be seen, but interesting facts continue to emerge in this murky incident that so terrified the nation on the coattails of 9/11.

Bay Area Indymedia today files a great story that asks why the FBI allowed Fort Detrick scientists to investigate themselves in the long, winding trail of the probe.

The case seemed to have broken open in August, when a Detrick scientist - Dr. Bruce Ivins - committed suicide amid high-pressure tactics by the FBI to pin the crime on him. But many questions remain - enough that FBI chief Robert Mueller promised during Congressional hearings last month that the bureau’s evidence will be submitted to a scientific panel for review. And there things stand.

As Bill Simpich’s story notes: “The battle will now turn to the independence of this panel, and whether "all evidence" or merely "scientific evidence" will be under review.”

This story has been buried under the avalanche of the Presidential campaign and nationwide financial meltdown, but its importance as one of the key provocations in the Administration’s case for the Iraq War makes it an issue that still resonates.

Simpich’s article has some eyebrow-raising touches:

“In his recent book Taking Heat, former White House secretary Ari Fleischer wrote that Bush was more shook up by the anthrax attacks than by any other event. White House officials repeatedly pressed Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by al-Qaeda or Iraq. After days of provocative statements designed to scare the American people, Cheney himself believed that he had been exposed to anthrax. Although the test results were negative, October 18, 2001, was the moment when Cheney decided to withdraw to an "undisclosed location" and carry biodefense protection during all of his mysterious travels.”

Huh! To me, Cheney’s avuncular, silk-tie-and-cufflinks machismo makes him an amusing candidate for paranoid hypochondria. You just never know...

If nothing else, this account is a good break from all the economic uncertainty and Palin fetishes.

Anyone doubting the Republican Party's utter soullessness continues in its Post-Rove Age can look at the ugly farce it's staged in the past five days.

- House Republicans stymied the original bailout plan late last week, reconfiguring the proposed $700 billion charge account for Treasury Secretary Paulson to become instead a federally underwritten insurance plan whereby creaky financial institutions would pay for their own rescue, backed by federal cash. Problem: Since the American financial industry is sinking in its own bad credit, this demi-rescue plan would do little more delay inevitable government payouts, and undoubtedly add an expensive layer of accounting bureaucracy on an already overloaded and under-supervised system.

- Again, House Republicans shot in the ass an alleged compromise package yesterday because... Speaker Nancy Pelosi hurt their feelin's!

Nobody is looking forward to trusting such an enormous amount of money to an administration with a record of handling huge appropriations with all the responsibility and caution of a drunken hayseed in a stolen muscle car. Remember all the billions that evaporated in Iraq like a desert mirage? But we're over a barrel, here. The American financial industry knew all along they could drain the coffers of their own system - extending bad credit and buying up more - simply because when the shit hit the fan the federal government would be forced to cover their greed with taxpayer money... or face a worldwide depression.

International money markets know they're trapped for the same reason. They will extend us the ready cash to cover the losses - hopefully - with the stipulation that American taxpayers and their children's children's children will be strapped with the bill for decades to come.

And as Paul Krugman notes in his New York Times blog, while the net borrowing could be recapitalized before we're all forced to learn Chinese economic terms, his "banana republic with nukes" classification of the country remains in play.

We must bite the bullet and put the money down. Nobody wants it, but the prospect of selling apples for a penny on a street corner,  or coming home on payday with buckets of useless cash, is too frightful to imagine.

House Republicans listened to the initial grumblings from their districts back home. The idea of using taxpayer money to fund CEOs' monster parachutes and ego yachts is to horrible to bear - and "average citizens" balked. These carbon-copy executives were the very, greedy sons of bitches who set up the whole mess!

But the politicians knew the markets would quake when the bailout flared out, and unease edging on panic would bring the Just Folks into line.

Now they can come back with a new plan at the end of week. It won't be substantially different from the failed bill - but it will carry the Republican stamp. This whole routine was mere pantomime to create an illusion the Republicans are running the show, making the key decisions, keeping us from the abyss - and rescuing the Republic. Who knows, maybe the Fed's Hollywood-accouting "loans" and funny money will juice the markets enough to make moot any bailout... and the unforeseen benefits of their delaying tactics will take on the status of legend. ...With endless, brain-deadening repetition, of course.

In a year when their chickens are coming home roost, these antics are all they've got. Despite a media blackout on the subject, I'm betting few forget the Nirvana of Deregulation was a Republican brainstorm, as well; this counterintuitive doctrine allowed an overstuffed industry to police itself - and create shell-game chicanery like "credit default swaps" to avoid risk and maximize profits through the roof.

...For awhile.

Now this: cheap political sideshow instead of truly coming the country's aid. From McCain on down, the GOP has become immersed in theatrics and superficiality. The party is a ugly, corrupt Karl Rove derivative, unable to see past lobbyists and the juicy temptations of money politics.

Their only "substance" is the wreckage smoldering on Main Street.

More and more, the GOP seems willing to snatch the whole country into the toilet down which the flailing party has flushed itself.

This afternoon, House Republicans scuttled the Bush Administration's emergency bailout to save Wall Street's hide. And the McCain campaign was quick to... blame Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.

Republicans have stopped grasping at straws this election year - now they're feverishly clawing grass, twigs and those tiny, almost-invisible wisps that bubble up on the surface of stagnant water. Republicans are caked with blame for this disaster; remember, it wasn't the Spartacist League squealing to dump all those nancy-boy regulations that so beset our credit and investment markets in safer, more solvent decades.

Plus, they've got a candidate who staged a flea-circus spoof of being "in charge" during this frightening Wall Street splatter fest - only to have his own party knife him this afternoon... ending the fiction his visage of authority brought the Beltway temperature down long enough for an agreement.

A sage no less sagacious than William Kristol Saturday condemned as pointless McCain’s comic-opera buffoonery earlier in the week - “suspending” his campaign and the debate to squeeze into tights and cape, tubbily flying to “rescue” the Republic from a disaster he helped stew up.

If a “Republican” that embedded in the current, corrupt machinery was left cold by McCain’s chaotic dumb show, we can be sure it fell flat elsewhere.

In Friday's debate itself, McCain’s only substantive statement was that he would freeze spending. Obama deftly countered that’s taking a hachet to a job requiring a scalpel. There was a lot of fuzzy nonsense about everybody pulling together down here on Main Street. No specifics, but both men were too rattled by the crisis to come up with ideas quickly.

Other than that, McCain all but married himself to Iraq, promising little more than four more years of the same bloodletting. He was passionate, passionate, passionate about the Russia/Georgia dustup - a disgraceful attempt to reignite the Cold War that leaves Americans, if anything, utterly repelled.

Oh... and forget about the National Intelligence Estimate - Iran is trying to get the bomb and we can't let 'em. Obama said he would talk. McCain promised more tough-guy posturing to a nation sick of this crap.

Obama equivocated far too much - will somebody tell him to just say it! Don't qualify, soften or sweeten! McCain was either basting himself in mauldlin sentiment or sneering creepily at his opponent. Or... not at him, per se. Jeepers - slip a hunting cap cap on this angry troll and let him stalk cwazy wabbits
 
So who's really winning? And who's just playing politics - our financial viablity be DAMNED?