Today, over at Huffpo, "serial entrepreneur and second time CEO" Penny Herscher, took it upon herself to patiently explain to the teeming, huddled masses why it is that our friends on Wall Street need their bonues, even if they have to be paid by us simple taxpayers. 

Wall Street will be facing a talent retention challenge very shortly unless the bonus issue is elegantly handled this year.

Over the past week the news has been full of "outrage" and questions about whether bankers should get their bonuses this year. Talk of large chunks of the bailout going to top bankers and class-warfare type language.

But unfortunately this problem is not as simple as the government, or the "public" controlling the pay of an industry they don't understand. I'm a pretty hard-core democrat and yet when I hear talk of the US taxpayer wanting zero bonuses on Wall Street this year -- per a Bloomberg article today -- it concerns me that the public doesn't understand how talent works.

Our best companies are very, very competitive. In all but a very few rare cases, a company is only as good as it's people. And companies, like fish, rot from the head. It's a common adage in my world that A players hire A players and B players hire B and C players. Talent is everything. So, in the competitive world of banking it is essential for the long term health of our institutions that they keep the talent, within the institution if at all possible, and definitely within the country. Our best deal-makers will go where the money is and that had better be in the United States and at the institutions that make our financial systems work.

So while I understand that taking public money and using it to pay bonuses may be optically obscene -- and it is certainly a good idea for the very top management of the institutions to not take bonuses -- if that action is taken too far down there will be a negative backlash -- and the talent which is so critical to long term health will leave. There are too many other firms, and countries, that will be happy to hire them. 

My response was too long for HuffPo's comment system so I'm doing it here. 

Damn, Penny, condescending much? 

Boy was I naive.  I now see that I'm just a complete simpleton, and have so little ability to understand the mind-boggling complexities of personnel decisions in the super-duper complex banking arena, that I should just shut up and let your friends in the banking and investment business do whatever the hell they want with the taxpayers' money. 

Silly me.  I admit that I had this quaint notion that the point of a bonus was to reward success above and beyond what the company expected if people had merely done the job for which they'd been paid their salary.  I also had this misguided notion that another point of a bonus on top of base compensation was to give executives an incentive to try to improve the company's financial performance.  I even had some expectation that one of the criteria used to determine those bonuses would be (though I know I'm really taking crazy-talk, here), whether the employee's actions improved the intitution's long-term health. Indeed, I had actually mistakenly inferred from their use of the word "bonus" that the idea was to create a kind of participation in the company's risk that carried both a positive and a negative incentive to perform. 

Thank you for enlightening me, Penny.  I now see that "bonus" really means "chuck of salary paid out in a gigantic lump sum regardless of whether the employee's efforts helped the company to soar or to punch a gigantic smoking hole into the ground." 

Here's why we naive, child-like taxpayers are pissed, lady. 

You think you live in a world of complexities which you understand, but that are unfathomable to us common folk.  Got that.

We, on the other hand, think your "A Talent" paid Phil Gramm to pay Congress to allow them to engage in utterly incomprehensible parastic transactions with no adult supervision.  For years they, and their mouthpieces like Gramm and Alan Greenspan, assured us that they were all so smart--and therefore worth the mind-boggling amounts of money they were paying themselves--that they could comprend the complexities of these transactions, and accurately assess and manage the risks. 

In fact, however, hardly a goddamned one of them understood, or much cared, what they were doing.  They'd pick up the prospectus for a derivative that amounted to nothing more than a gambling contract on the outcome of an underlying transaction in which had no substantive interest and as they flipped through it, their understanding was limited to "blah, blah, blah, details, details, details, boring stuff, boring stuff, boring stuff, lawyer words, lawyer words, oh, here's what I was looking for--the part describing my vast management fees and commissions if I sell this to one of the funds the rubes are investing in through their 401(k)'s and pension funds." 

We think they're con artists, in other words and you're fronting for them. 

And at this point, now that their your pyramid scheme has met its inevitable end, they really don't have a whole fuck of a lot of credibility when they come to me and say, "hey, we 'A talent' people managed to wreck the economy so we need you to cover our losses and, on top of that, we want to reward ourselves with bonues for the fine job we've done of demolishing your 401(k), forcing you grandmother to postpone her retirement indefinitely, and forcing your kids to pay off the extra public debt you'll run up to keep us from having to trade our fantabulous apartments for a cardboard box on Skid Row and our trendy drinks in martini glasses for Ripple." 

Christ, you really do think we're dumb, don't you? 

Look, maybe Americans don't understand a lot of things they should, but they understand the basics of capitalism just fine.  They are steeped in it from toddler to teen, absorb it by osmosis throughout a succession of chores and summer jobs, are trained in it's principles in school and by life.  And they are smart enough to know that your "A Talent" people are not capitalists.  You want to privitize profit and socialize risk.  That's not capitalism.  That's not even socialism.  That's kleptocracy.  And we say not only "no," but "fuck, no!" 

If there's a company that's good enough to still be in a position to pay obscene bonues out of its own coffers (rather than mine), I suspect, or at least hope, they'll also be smart enough to recognize that all this brilliant fucking "talent" you're talking about are the people who destroyed the companies they're now seeking to leave because they might have to go without a bonus this year.  They are the people who are supposed to culled from the herd by the Darwinian lions of a functional capitalist economy.  We're not going to pay them to perpetuate the dysfunction they've purposfully built into our economy.  If we're going to have to reach into our pockets to cover the inevitable consequences of that dysfunction, we're by-God going to use the leverage that comes with that money to rid ourselves, and our economy, of the dysfunctionality. 

And, btw, if you're  thinking they can just take some of that taxpayer money and using it to buy Congress again, I'd suggest you take a look at both the revolution in campaign financing we just saw and the results of the last election, first.  I know the people in Congress are, and that corporate PAC money isn't looking quite as sweet to some of them as it used to.  The smart ones see the handwriting on the wall, and the dumb ones--i.e. the ones who think we're too dumb to pay attention any longer--will be culled from the herd in 2010.  (Hear that, Congress?  Democracy still has a little Darwin in the tank, too, in case the last three elections haven't made that clear to you yet.)

Ninety years ago, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent in a war little remembered by Americans but that's still seared into the psyche of Europe. 

The First World War has held a very special sick fascination for me since high school and, yet, I have yet to finish a book about it.  I can't seem to get past 1916.  I get through Verdun and the Somme and the mutinies in the French Army, and I just don't have the will to finish it.  The horror of that war just overwhelms me--the fetid mud and rats of the trenches.  Men trying to master their panic and don gas masks with trembling fingers before the heavy gas--chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas--oozed down into their trenches.  Relentless pounding artillery fire.  No Man's Land: a tiny strip of land across the length of Europe where earth and unburied corpses had been churned into a  ghastly, horrific moonscape by years of artillery and rain. 

Above all, the endless prideful futility of sending waves of human beings "over the top" and into the horizontal sleet of metal expelled by machine guns and massed fire from (by today's standards) high-powered large caliber rifles.  Contrary to myth, the generals on both sides knew perfectly well that small arms that were accurate to 800 yards and artillery that could throw masses of explosives and shrapnel for miles and with obscene accuracy  had changed the very meaning of "war."  Their answer, however, even before the war, was simply to incorporate acceptance of the likelihood of previously unimaginable casualties into their war-fighting doctrine as a cost of doing business.  Their armies were trained in that doctrine, their war plans were based upon it and none of them had any real idea of what it would mean if those plans were implemented. 

The armies that fought that war are almost unimaginable to us today.  Every nation in continental Europe had a large standing army of mostly conscripts and an "invisible army" of forced reservists, men who had completed their duty as conscripts but were still required to attend periodic drills, each assigned to a specific unit in the event of war. 

These men were citizens of states that had become drunk on hyper-nationalism and militarism.  They had absorbed that nationalism in their schools and had been indoctrinated into the militarism during their active duty stints.  Those states were locked into alliances that institutionalized old grievances.   They viewed war as just another tool in the nation-state's toolkit for accomplishing national goals and the leaders in each state were determined not to flinch away from using it if the occasion arose. 

Back during the Cold War, political scientists often cast a worried eye at the way those alliances and the unstoppable mobilization and war plans on each side had turned a minor crisis--fueled by the uniquely persistent perniciousness of Serbian nationalism--had lead to an inferno that consumed entire empires and twenty million lives.  They looked at those plans and bethought themselves of the competing plans governing the use of nuclear weapons by the two superpowers and worried. 

We lucked our way past that disaster, but we didn't learn.  And, so it was that in 2002, as Bush and Cheney were rushing to war with Iraq, I was directed to the website of a group I had heard about, but previously ignored--the Project for a New American Century. I noticed with interest that the members of this curious association were all in, or closely associated with, the Bush Administration.  I read their statement of principles and was appalled.  The first thing I thought of was the blind militaristic hyper-nationalism of the Kaiser and the Third Republic.  Long before 9/11, these people had been advocating war on Iraq as a simple exercise in militaristic dick-swinging.  There as no thought of any cost in blood, treasure, prestige or power we might have to pay. 

It did not escape my attention that few of these men had military experience and none were war veterans. 

So back to 11:00 at 11/11/18.  As Europe counted its uncountable dead, and America came to grips with how it could have piled up 300,000 dead or wounded in only nine months of combat, we made the day that war ended a holiday, a day to mourn the dead of the War to End All Wars, and give thanks that it wouldn't happen again.  In 1954, we expanded it into a day to honor the veterans of the two wars that came after the War to End All Wars, and all the ones that came before and would come after. 

It is, as a better man than I once said, altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.  We still have veterans coming back from our current wars--some in coffins or with physical and psychic wounds they will bear for life--despite the best efforts of the people who started those wars and botched both of them to keep them out of sight and out of mind. 

But just today, and maybe ten years from now, spare a thought for the men buried in Flanders' fields where the poppies grow.  There is little to show for their death.  Old grievances gave way to news ones and led to worse horrors still.  The British Empire's days were numbered as of 11/11/18.  The hero of the Third Republic became the traitorous puppet of the hated Boche.  German and Russian Empires dissolved into revolution and totalitarianism and the empire of the Hapsburgs was consigned, at long last, to the proverbial ashheap.  America actively refused to take a leading role in making something better of the world and turned inward, to its later sorrow. 

The only real lesson taught by the twenty million dead of World War I is that hyper-nationalism and militarism are the mother and father of death and disaster.  Remember them today, please, because we keep forgetting that lesson.

I have made a series of absolutely astonishing discoveries since Tuesday.

Here's one.  Turns out, I am a party to a contractual relationship whereby people expect me to do work, work for them, in exchange for the money they give me.  It appears that I have a great deal of this work to do in this thing, this "job" as I am told it is called, if I am to keep drawing that pay.  These people are not, it develops, the Obama campaign, but, rather are private parties who expect me to do work related to their own narrow pecuniary interests. 

Here's another.  It further appears that I have been a party to this so-called "job" thing for quite some time now, including the last two years.  Further investigation has revealed that, somehow, by some strange autonomic process that did not actually engage my conscious attention, I have actually a done a great deal of this work over the last two years.  This was most fortunate.  It is now my understanding that failure to do this work would have resulted in cessation of the payments I've been getting from them as I pursued my actual vocation of frantically checking polls and news and fundraising figures, writing comments and blog posts at TPM, and doing volunteer work for the campaign. 

Yet another unexpected discovery: schadenfreude is tricky stuff.  Wednesday night, I dropped by "hillaryis44.org," a place that has long since ceased even pretending not to be a Republican front, to do a little private gloating.  Instead, after I read the latest long crazy rant from "the Administrator," as they call him, I dove into the comments and found myself feeling only pity.  I rebuked myself for the low and unworthy desire that had motivated the trip, turned off the computer and went to bed. 

The next day, however, I drove to a high end deli I favor for a lunch date and, on the way inside, had to pass between two tables-full of what I've come to call "the tennis biddies."  These are the aging wives of the handful of rich old white guys who, not so long ago, used to run this town like it was their private little game of Sim City.  I instinctively disliked this class of women even before I'd lived here long enough to figure out who they were. These are women who've lived out lives of perfectly useless country club Republican indolence, playing tennis, organizing stultifying parties, participating in so-called charities that do no actual good other than postponing cocktail hour.  Week after week, they come to this busy restaurant during the lunch hour in their horrifically expensive, repulsively skimpy tennis outfits and blather endlessly away about nothing long after their meals are finished, haughtily ignoring the people with actual jobs (did I mention it turns out I have one?) walking around with their trays of food and looking in vain for an empty table.  This day, however, there was little blathering.  Instead, they looked, to a woman,  simultaneously stunned, mortified and utterly despondent.  Their whole world had been turned upside down.  Their fear of imminent Islamofacist pillage and rapine and socialist expropriation was palpable.  It was thoroughly delightful to behold. 

And finally, another, less morally suspect, discovery I made a few minutes earlier, that same day.  Since last February, I've have been telling everyone I know, and via the Internet, many people I do not know, that this country is not what they think it is.  When people have said that the Democrats were dead and/or that the country still wasn't ready for a black president, I've been the guy insisting that changing demographics, the slow decay of ideological racism among whites into a soft prejudice that merely creates a rebuttable presumption against blacks made it possible.  For two years, I've been telling disbelieving friends and relatives that there was a steadily rising disaffection with all things Republican that, unnoticed by our somnolent media, began about fifteen minutes after George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term and that that disaffection would sweep the Democrats back into power by huge margins.  I've been strident about it at times, though I've tried to stay on the good side of "shrill."   

Not tooting my own horn or bragging about my presience, because, this week, I've, most ironically, discovered the difference between belief and hope.  Turns out, all these things I believed, were merely hope.  I know this because on Thursday afternoon, the first full day after I recovered from Tuesday, I was driving to the aforementioned lunch date and heard these words on the radio:

"From National Public Radio, this is Lakshmi Singh.  President-Elect Obama . . ."

I didn't hear the rest.  My throat suddenly closed up and my vision fogged over.  To prevent an accident, I had to hastily pull into a nearby bank parking lot where, for about thirty seconds, I did that choking-weeping thing that guys do in lieu of actually crying.  Turns out, a part of me didn't really believe any of that stuff.  Instead, I was just hoping it was true. Having your beliefs proven brings quiet satisfaction. Only hope fulfilled can make you cry. 

Yesterday, the weather sucked in North Carolina. 

I don't blame the weather for the closeness of the result here.  It might have been decisive if not for early voting, but fortunately we'll never know. 

I sensed it was closing back up in this state over the last week.  McCain-Palin stickers started proliferating after being largely absent until the last ten days.  Worse ,my tap into the world of the serious religious fanatics and the general stupid shitkicker segment of the population told me that the hysteria level was being fanned to a well-timed climax and some people were discovering they weren't as broad-minded as they thought they were a couple of weeks ago. (Today, btw, a lot of these people thing the Tribulation has begun and the Rapture could occur at any second between now and January 20.  Really.)

The campaign sensed it was closing as well.  There was an urgency to poll observer training I had not felt even during the must-win days of the primary, an even greater emphasis to do everything possible to minimize provisional ballots simply because, as they only ballots that Republicans could link to a name, they were subject to levels of challenge not possible once the ballot was in the box (or the memory chip, or whatever) with all the others. 

Which, unfortunately, is exactly where we are now anyway. 

Anyway, the weather sucked.  As was the case during the primary, although for different reasons, I was stationed as an outside observer at a polling place in a predominately African American neighborhood, this time in the adjoining county of Guilford.  Unlike the primary, when the weather was absolutely beautiful, it was cold and it was raining.  Worse, the precinct captain took a distinct dislike to me.  

To be fair, the precinct captain was apparently under close scrutiny by Republican election judges (who were, shall we say, definitely from out of the neighborhood) and a contingent of roving Marmalards and Neidermeyers from various College Republican groups who would drop by to try to make sure that anything that could be done to suppress votes was being done.  The precinct captan was clearly protective of his voters  and was determined, I think, to make sure that the integrity of their votes was beyond reproach. Compounding, that however, was the fact that he apparently he blamed me a complaint that got phoned in about someone being forced to vote a provisional ballot and he was pissed. Beyond that, he was seemingly suspicious of my presence in general and, perhaps, even doubted I was who I said I was and that I was, in fact, with the Obama campaign.  He kept asking me, each time we interacted, as if he was expecting me to change my story.  

So, there I was in the rain, rules regarding distance from the door and acceptable conduct applied by a precinct captain who clearly ran a tight ship in the first place being applied with special rigor and specificity to me.  Associated with that was a rather stricter rule of silence where I was concerned that had apparently  been imposed upon the other poll workers when they stepped outside for a smoke.

Information that was, in fact, public information, and which was given out freely to anyone else who asked, was denied to me.  Because of that lack of real information about conditions inside, I was forced to glean what scraps of intelligence on how things were going I could indirectly, by asking people if things were going okay as they came out and, if they seemed unwilling to talk, by judging demeanor. 

And for a a couple of cold gray rainy hours, I was very concerned by what I was seeing. 

When I covered an African American precinct during the primaries, the attitude of the voters coming out was generally happy, but only a little happier than you would expect people to be who had voted on a an absolute gem of a beautiful spring day.  Some were jubilant, a few were solemn, a few more seemed downright nonchalant.  Yesterday, however, many of my precinct's voters seemed subdued after they voted.  Quiet, thoughtful.  The weather accounted for some of that, the attitude of people who braved some mildly unpleasant  (if you weren't sitting out in it for 13 straight hours) weather to complete a task that needed doing.   

However, with rising alarm,I noticed that many of them, unaccompanied men in particular, seemed quite distressed, even distraught, as they came out of the polling place.  Bereft of any information about what was going on inside, I felt a rising fear that many of these men were being turned away without being allowed to vote, so after I detected the pattern, I asked a few of them "everything go okay in there?"  or "get it done?"  or "any problems" or some such.  All of them said yes.  So I sat my soggy butt back down in my soggy camp chair and saw yet another man come out with that experession and then it hit me and I mentally slapped my forehead.   

These men weren't upset or distressed.  They were simply struggling to keep from crying.  

I hadn't seen it during the primary, because that was just a primary.  It was great to be able to cast the vote, a real achievement "no matter what happens" (a phrase I heard dozens of times that day).  They were armored against despondency by the knowledge that, win or lose, the wall had been broken. Yesterday, however, these men had just cast a vote for a man they knew was actually about to become the first African American President of the United States.  For many of them, the enormity of what had just happened, what they had just done, hit them full force as they left the warmth and community of the polling place and, trudging through the cold rain to their homes and cars, were alone with their thoughts.  ,

I hastily took a drink of water from my bottle to wash down the lump that had suddenly developed in my throat.  

In the end, I doubt that I did much of account.  Certainly, I did infinitely less good than the brave woman who sat and stood beside me that day.  She was much older than I was, on disability and knew she'd be so sore she could hardly move today.  Over and over again, as voters came, she popped up off her chair over handed out her flier and explained North Carolina's ridiculous system by which a straight party vote does not cast a vote for president.  "Vote for president, for a straight ticket, and then vote in the judicial races, these are the candidates who have been endorsed by the Democratic Party."  Up and down, time and again, soaked to the bone for 13 hours and she'd done the same throughout early voting.  I know she's suffering for it today. She's my hero. 

Maybe one or two voters voted who would not have if I not been there to answer their questions. Maybe.  More likely not.  Probably, there was little I did that justified either the inconvenience to myself or the aggravation I caused the precinct captain.   Still, short of being back in the precinct I covered during the primary, I can honestly say there was nowhere else I would rather have been yesterday than that precinct. 

This post is especially for the Kool-Aid drinkers, the naive children who didn't really understand how the world worked, the Obamabots, the cultists. 

I wish I had had more time to appreciate the moment.  That's what it means to be middle aged.  You get to a certain age and it seems like life just starts rolling past you faster than the scenary out the window of a bullet train.  Middle aged people have been complaining about that (sans bullet train metaphors) since they started living that long, and younger ones have been rolling their eyes and not appreciating what that means until they get there themselves.  So the truth is, I've been so damned busy trying to clear away enough time from my job to do my day of poll monitoring tomorrow, and with the training and the prepping for that (the logistics get a litte more complicated when you end up having to monitor from outside, and on a day when they're predicting rain), that I just haven't had time to take in seismic event that's about to happen. 

For those who, like me, haven't, stop and take time to and consider sheer improbable cinematic drama of the last twenty-one months. 

Remember the keynote convention address that caused so many to say "that guy's going to be president some day!"  The announcement in the town Lincoln thought of when he thought "home."  The first time you read one of his books and said, "Jesus, I think he'sactually  the real deal."  There we were, cynical, ironic, smirking, savoring the smug detachment that comes with twenty five years worth of despair over the fate of our nation like it was some especially well-built dry martini.  And, like Rick and Louis in "Casablanca," some of us found that the ashes of our idealism still contained some pesky embers that could be fanned back into life by someone who dared to call us to our better selves. 

So we signed on, warily, feeling that squirrely feeling you get in your gut when our inner cynic warned us of all the times we'd dared put our faith in a politician and found ourselves bitterly disappointed.  Every time that happens, the part of you that's capable of hoping died a little, making the next time that much harder and the pain when you were disappointed that much worse.  Which is wjy, for so lone, many of us still had to contend with that little voice that said this guy was just too good to be true, that there had to be a catch, some skeleton in his closet and you waited for the proverbial other clay-smudged shoe to drop. 

 And it never did.  Parking tickets when he was at Harvard?  He has some personal and political contacts a guy in Chicago who was indicted?  His preacher could go off on some alarming rants?  That's it?  That's the best they can come up with?

Then there was that Democratic field.  The best, most able, most competent field of Democratic candidates in decade  The incredibly well-heeled, by past standards, juggernaut that was Hillary's campaign with all the years of planning, a primary calendar specifically designed for her and all the Democratic money people and power elites in her corner.  And if she fell, there was Edwards, the presumptive challenger with a chance, and if he fell, the old war horses, Biden and Dodd, either of whom most Democrats would be perfectly satisfied to see elected in the end. 

And damn, but the byplots were as good as the main one.  Hillary's incredibly dramatic campaign and McCain's equally amazing fall and resurrection.  The anger and the bloodletting between Democrats that was swept away by a series of brilliant convention speeches by the Lion of the Senate, by Bill and Hillary, Kerry and Biden, Michelle and Barack.  (And later, of course, by the nightmarishly thuggish Republican Convention and the prospect of Vice President Sarah Palin.)  The beautifully conceived and excuted bit of political theatre when New Mexico yielded to Illinois, Illinois yielded to . . . New York(!) and then, yes, there she was moving to nominate by acclaimation. 

And then came the vilest, fear and smear campaign in recent memory--and recent memories contain many memories of abundent  fear and smearmongering--  coming from a guy who'd made the classic Faustian bargain.  A candiate who counted himself a hero, a man of honor and integrity, running a campaign of slander and innuendo because being president was more important to him and, ironically, losing because he abandoned the person he thought himself to be.   

Its been Frank Capra directing a script by Allen Drury based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren. And coming next?  Well, back in May, I did a post about my day as a poll monitor at a primary early voting site.  Commenting on my feelings about being warmly thanked for a half-day's work by a random African American woman who'd just voted, I said something that I still believe:

It was a reminder to me that come January 20, 2009, we will all look at each other differently if we elect him.  It was a reminder that, if we elect him, a  slender, desparately needed, bridge of trust will be thrown over the abyss of hurt and mutual suspicion that has separated black from white for decades.

It's not the main reason I'm for Barack, but it's no small thing.  Not a small thing at all.

I've done a lot of stuff I've never done before because of Barack Obama.  Contributed significant sums of money, worked polls.  And blogged and commented on blogs.  The latter has been the most gratifying because of all the people here I've interacted with--both positively and negatively.   In the process, I've come to feel something that feels unexpectedly like friendship with people I do not actually know. That's really unlike me, for what its worth.  Indeed, that sounds suspiciously like something I'd have made fun of, not too very long ago. 

Some of the people I've sparred with, and against  here drifted away after the fights of the primaries gave way to the (comparatively) harmonious discourse of the general and I miss many of them.  Some who are here now, I suspect will drift away after this week, as we try to get our lives back to something more like normal.   Its not impossible I could be one of them..  Probably not me, but, who knows? 

Regardless, it seems likely we'll drift away and apart after January 20, if not sooner, because, well, that's what happens and that's how it happens.  Its what we mean by "life goes on."  Before that happens, I just want to let you all know its been good knowing you.

See you on the other side.  

I rarely post twice in one day, but, wow.  Just  . . . wow. 

If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media

Palin believes that the press is abridging her First Amendment rights by exercising its own First Amendment rights. 

Wow.  The sheer agressively ignorant abyssal stupidity of this statement almost defies comprehension.  How is it possible, how is it conceivable that anyone with such a staggeringly deficient understanding of basic elementary school civics could possibly be the vice presidential candidate of a major party?     

Freedom of the press is going to destroy freedom of speech, if we don't watch out. 

For the last eight years, we've repeatedly been smacked with actions and statements from the present administration that leave you saying "Jesus, I knew they were stupid, but I wasn't capable of imagining that they were that stupid until they did that."  Then we adjust our defintion of how stupid they are downward accordingly, think we know how stupid they are and then they do or say the next damnfool thing that makes you say Jesus, I knew they were stupid, but I wasn't capable of imagining that they were that stupid until they did that."  And you adjust you expecations downward again, think its hit bedrock and then comes the next stupid thing that makes you realize you were still overestimating them. 

That's the story of George W. Bush and the neocons for these last eight years and then suddenly, someone is thrust onto the national stage who makes Bush look like a nucyuler fucking physicist and a constitutional law professor all rolled up into one brilliant package. 

It just hits hou like a ton of bricks.  This woman is running for the Vice Presidency of the United States of America and its evident she has less understanding of the Constitution than a 12 year old in a decent school district and, indeed, its questionable whether she's ever even read the thing all the way through.  And yet, a significant faction of the group that considers itself the brains of the Republican Party thinks she's their best bet for 2012 or 2016.  God save us, all. 

Its become painfully obvious to many within the GOP, and gleefully obvious to many non-PTSD afflicted Democrats, that McCain doesn't have a frakkin clue how to run a national campaign.  A guy who's greatest asset was a press image that was, a masterful work of pure media manipulation and brilliant, relentless, self-promotion, listened to a guy who told him he could only win by dumping on the media.  A guy who rebranded himself "Mr. Integrity" in the wake of the Keating Five scandal who proceeds to run the vilest, most foully negative, presidential campaign in recent memory. 

Well, today, comes news that McCain's hammered the last few nails into the coffin of his ambition as the Washinton Post reports that McCain has beggered the once-formidable GOP ground game squirrel away funds for a last minute TV ad blitz. 

This move is, to me, emblematic of why McCain would have been a terrible president.  He's a archtypical Navy flyboy, utterly disdainful of the importance of infantry, a guy who believes every war can be won from 30,000 feet without ever actually having to understand the terrain or get down in the blood and the mud.  A permanent tyro, a guy who's so convinced of his own strategic brilliance that he can rarely give sufficient acknowledgment to an error to learn from it and, when he does, is incabable of drawing the correct lesson.  A guy who trusts his gut, without recognizing that, when the choice is between something he already knows and something he doesn't know enough about to judge its merit, his gut will always tell him to go with what he knows.   

I have seen a corner of Obama's ground game, first hand.  Even what little I have seen of it, combined with what I've read, tells me that it it would have won even against the 2004 Rovian ground game.  Against the unfunded, uncoordinated, disjointed, demoralized and, in many cases, resentful, ground game the Republicans are going to be able to cobble together on Tuesday from the junked pieces of Roves 2004 machine, they don't stand a chance. 

Bottom line: McCain has just thrown away the one tool in his GOP-issue toolkit that could have delivered the close red leaning states into his column in favor of a funding one last spurt of his incredibly lame and ineffective ads.  In so doing, he's ensured that the the Republic will be spared the kind of inept leadership he's exercised over his own campaign. 

Hereabouts, the transtion from urban to agricultural and rural is abrupt.  Very abrupt.  As in, boom, it happens between two exits on I-40, so, especially as a lawyer, you get to circulate out of the city and out into the less citified areas, most of which bear very little resemblance to anything I ever saw on Andy Griffith. Living here, observing with an outsider's eye but raised among a different flavor of rural conservatives, was like having a ring-side seat for the parade of horribles that has been the last sixteen years. 

Two of the most memorable floats in that parade were the beliefs of the Angry North Carolina White Guys (especially the religious ones) as I've come to call them, a particular species of North Carolinian with whom I became all too familiar,  All of them seem to unconciously ape the dress, the mannerisms and the facial expression of their hero, Dale Earnhardt (who was, after all, one of them).  The farmer cap, the pencil thin mustache, the grizzled hair and tough stringy musculature.  And the hard eyes behind which a torrent of rage seemed just on the verge of breaking out. 

They seemed to me to be very much men of their times, guys who were getting the shit kicked out of them by life and the economy pretty much 24/7/365, whose state was changing around them with bewildering speed but who always seemed to get the short end of the stick as first the tobacco business collapsed, then the textile mills shipped out to China and then the furniture companies followed.

To a man, they were hardcore Republicans, and so were their wives.  They left the Bush/Cheney stickers on their cars til '07, listened to Rush incessently, got all their news from Fox. 

And here are those two floats on the Parade of Horribles I was talking about, both pulled by these Angry White Guys and their angry, angry wives. 

Throughout the 90s, to a man and to a woman, every last one of them was convinced beyond a doubt that Bill Clinton raised their taxes.  It was absolutely incredible.  Congress passed Clinton's budget that jacked the tax rate on the top bracket by three percent it went into effect and the Angry White Guys raged and frothed and stomped about their taxes going up, despite the fact that they hadn't.  The witholding on their paychecks didn't change a bit.  Their take-home pay did not go down one red cent and yet they knew, knew with absolute certanty, that Bill Clinton had raised their taxes. 

Then came Bush/Cheney and the Bush tax cuts and I witnessed the second float in the Parade of Horribles.  A lot of these guys lives got steadily worse under Bush.  The once thriving industrial sector melted away faster than the ice caps.  Factories shut down and the jobs were off-shored, one after another.  Textile companies folded, reorganized under Chapter 11 and came out of it as brand that got slapped onto cheap imports.  The federal government ended the tobacco quota program and the retail spaces in even Winston-Salem, home of R.J. Reynolds and one of the smokingest cities in America, had gone non-smoking.  The furniture manufacturing industry, once the pride of the Piedmont, evaporated in less than a decade. 

None of these folks were under any illusion that Bush had cut their taxes in any meaningful way.  They were now too close to the margin to nuture that kind of delusion.  All of them understood clearly that most of the benefit of the Bush tax cuts had gone to people making a lot more money than any of them would see in a decade. 

But, the final fruit of the thirty year Republican campaign to portray our long-held civic virtues as  positive evils, they believed that was a good thing.  Rushbo told them on the radio that the rich folk need that money to invest and create jobs, and all of these guys nodded approvingly.  They kept nodding for a decade while those rich guys took their extra lucre and invested it in ever more exciting new and innovative ways to make the the Angry White Guys poorer.  

This is where we are now.  Progressive taxation, a cornerstone of the civic values underlying the income tax since the 16th Amendement was passed, and one the rich used to actually take a certain grudging noblisse oglige pride in bearing, was now deemed a job-destroying scurge, a socialistic force of evil destruction that's probably just a big plot to take hardworking people's money away from them and give it to the blacks. 

And now, the guys at the the Republican Party's Minitrue have finally managed to take this innovative thinking to a new level.  Now, they've finally managed make a lot of these guys take the final step and proclaim progressive taxation to be a manifestation of Marxism.  That's what what we saw Joe Biden get hit with by that fruitcake anchor lady in Florida and you saw how incredulous he was. 

I wasn't.  That's been knocking around in the emails the Angry White Guys and their wives have been sending each other for a couple of years now.  Progressive taxation is Marxism.  Not just socialism, nope, its outright Communistic, precious-bodily-fluid-contaminating Marxism.  That's the received wisdom we have have to deal with now and that means we've got to go back to basics when if we're going to beat it back. 

Where did this radical notion of progressive taxation come from?  What economy destroying bleeding heart came up with it?  What no-good job destroying libtard perpetrated this great fraud on the United States of America?

Ladies and gentlemen (as Joe would say), I give you the genesis of the concept of progressive taxation:

 The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion

What rotten commie pinko fag said this?  Was it Karl Marx?  Leon Trotsky?  Eugene Debs?  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? 

Nope. That would be Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations."   

Sigh.  Why do Republicans hate capitalism? 

Let me start by saying I have no interest in provoking a historical debate.  I realize that it is fasionable in certain circles to dis Abraham Lincoln, either as a war-mongering aggressor (among creepy neo-Confederate wingnuts) or as a violent racist who doesn't deserve the adulation he recieves.  If you're among either circle, go write your own damn post and talk about it there.  Because here and now, I want to say that across the century and a half between us, I am captivated by Abraham Lincoln and, indeed, love him like he was family. 

Funny thing about Lincoln.  You start out reading a little Civil War history.  Then you buy a biography of him.  Then you buy another.  And another.  And another and another.  Then you buy a short collection of his writings, then you buy a large collection, then you're buying biographies about particular speeches or groups of speeches like the Cooper Union address or the Lincoln-Douglas debate.  Next thing you know, you're downloading the seven volume compilation of his writings with the foreword by Teddy Roosevelt (only on my Kindle, thank you very much.  Cost next to nothing for all seven volumes.)  And suddenly people who look at your bookshelves come to the conclusion that you're some sort of expert on the guy when you know that, compared to the real obsessives, you're a mere dabbler, an amatuer, a tyro. 

 There's always something new about him.  Historians and biographers cannot stay away from him, even though they know that if this much had been written about anyone else, publishers and dissertation committees alike would simply roll their eyes. 

And if you're a lawyer it can become even harder to stay away.  I began this little Lincoln thing of mine well before law school but once the Socratic brain snatchers remold your mush into a brain that, alas, will forever after "think like a lawyer," you at least get the side benefit of having a deeper connection to Lincoln and the way he thought and wrote.  The Emancipation Proclamation becomes far more interesting as you suddenly can retrace the thought processes that led this this brilliant orator and writer to draft this important document in such dry, legalistic, terms .  The Cooper Union speech suddenly jumps out at you as an astonishing piece of legal research for the time, given the resources availible to a lawyer in Sprinfield, Illinois in 1859. 

And once you've endured a legal eduction, you suddenly get a real insight into how a man with less than two years of formal education developed that kind of rhetorical power.  Lincoln's sentences are inaffable and unmistakable.  He would write these long sentences that would hover perilously upon the brink of collapse under the weight of ungrammatical prarie idiom before suddenly resolving into eloquence.

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south -- let all Americans -- let all lovers of liberty everywhere -- join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.
Peoria --October 16, 1854.

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
October 15, 1858, Debate at Alton.

And then there's the Second Inaugural.  Just a few paragraphs long.  It starts so dryly and, by the end, sweeps you along in an emotional riptide:

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope---fervently do we pray---that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three  thousand years ago, so still it must be said ``the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.''

Where did he learn to write and think like this?  It helped that he was undeniably a man of vast intellect.  With no more than a year of formal education, he taught himself law and even, as what I assume was merely an intellectual lark, Euclidian geometry during the two years  he was in Congress.  Still, where could a man with less than a year of formal education--"picked up by littles," as he said--learn to write this way, to think this way?  And this is where being a lawyer helps.  Besides those few months of formal education you see, Lincoln had two teachers of whom he was particularly fond: Shakespere and Blackstone.  You can see the influence of both in every sentence he wrote. 

When you start reading about Lincoln, you necessarily learn a great deal about the early days of the Republican Party.  You learn who founded and why, where it drew its strenght from.  You learn of Lincoln's early leeryness of it and yet how quckly he rose to become a dominant figure over vastly more senior and well regarded, and more distinguished, personages such as Seward and Chase.  Make no mistake.  Some things about Lincoln's party are still  distinguishable today.  It was always very frankly pro-big business and so was Lincoln, though with a regard for the rights of labor what would have branded him a dangerous radical twenty years later.  And yet, above all, that first generation of Republicans was first, foremost and above all, dedicated to the destruction of slavery.  Some wanted to do it slowly, others immediately.  Some wanted to have the government simply buy all the slaves and manumit them, while at the other end, the radical abolitionists gleefully contemplated the prospect of slaveowners' entire net worth vanishing in a puff of smoke due to uncompensated abolition.  Some, like Thaddeus Stevens, possessed startingly and gratifyingly modern views on race (though they were demonized for it until the 60s--the 1960s).  Others were basically racists who nonetheless belived that, although blacks were inferior, it did not follow that they should be enslaved. 

Lincoln is widely considered to have evolved from one end of this spectrum to the other over the course of the last two decades of his life.  Perhaps.  Reading his earlier speeches and his letters to Joshua Speed during the 1840s and 50s carefully, it is difficult not to discern a canny politician carefully avoiding and evading the disclosure of racial views well in advance of the voters of his state. 

I cannot stand the Republican Party as it has been for decades, but, regardless, never let myself forget what they used to be, that they were once a party of strong principles, of Lincoln's principles, while the Democrats were the party of racism. 

And that's the background for why it literally makes me want to weep when I see shit  this.  And this.  At long last, this is the Republican Party looks like in 2008 when the chips are down, the internal censors are offline and the likelihood of defeat looms. 

We're sorry, Abe. 

I was having trouble with my email, so I went over to the RoadRunner site to get some help.  There I was confronted by a headline of truly epic stupidity:

Big Comeback for McCain?

No.  Really.  That's what it said.  Stupid picture of McCain blearily giving a thumbs-up.  Click on it and it links to a CNN story about the "tightening" of the race. 

Now, I must admit I've found it remarkable how much more likely CNN polls are to find a race "close" or "tightening" or "neck and neck" or "closing back up" than other polls and I've even fired off the occaisional snide comment.  However, I was only half serious until I read the thoughts of someone much smarter than I am about these things, specifically, the words of Sam Wang at the Princeton Electoral Consortium. 

Uncertainties such as the margin of error can be reduced by taking more samples. An individual pollster can halve the margin of error by surveying 4 times as many people. It's a square-root relationship: N samples lead to a sqrt(N)-fold reduction in uncertainty. The same is true for combining polls, with the added advantage of reducing the effects of methodological variation. Thus the value of poll-aggregation sites like this one. Meta-Analysis worked extremely well in 2004 and 2006, and is likely to do so again this year.

So why don't more pollsters or media organizations aggregate polls? The CNN Poll of Polls is a start, but it's an exception. Two forces encourage bad horserace reporting:

Competition among pollsters. It's not in the interest of individual pollsters to say "average my results with the others." It's also not advantageous to collect a larger sample once the margin of error meets industry standards.

The hungry media beast. With news budgets on the decline, it's costly to report real news. Why pay for investigative reporting when you can buy a poll and report the horserace? Within the area of poll reporting, market forces discourage high accuracy. For example, commissioning a survey of 4 times as many people would reduce uncertainty by a factor of two. But why pay 4 times as much for data that generate a lower likelihood of an apparent - and reportable - swing?

Dr. Wang was responding, specifically, to that Gallup poll that showed the race within two points that McPow was selectively gloating about on Fox yesterday.  But his point also applies to CNN polls.  And it's the point of what both Wang and Nate Silver do at their websites (even if Wang does tend to sniff a bit at Pablano's methodology).

They're both good places to go if you want to see what the polls really tell us about the race.  Wang's site tells us how many electoral votes Obama would get if the election were held today, providing an upper and lower range, along with the best guess about where it would really land.  Last time, Wang's prediction the day before the election was dead-on balls accurate (or it would have been had he not introduced an erroneous assumption about undecided voters into his math at the last minute.).  Fivethirtyeight purports to make a prediction of how many electoral votes the candidates will win on election day based upon a far more complicated, and thus far untested, methodology, but its far more entertaining than Wang's site and its got better commentary.

They're both smart guys.  I'm smart enough to more or less understand what they're doing, but nowhere near smart enough to do it myself.  I check them both every day.  Today, Fivethirtyeight predicts Obama will get 344 electoral votes. Wang projects that if the election were held today, Obama would get 364 electoral votes and, within the range of the aggregated confidence intervals says it would come in at a minimum of 330. 

Is the race tightening up a bit?  Quite possibly.  Obama predicts it and Silver seems to believe its happening, but until the electoral vote projection of either of these guys drops below, say, 300, I'm not getting dressed for the Chicken Dance. 

By the way, totally off-topic, but if you want to see my nominee for the iconic campaign photo of Campaign 2008, here it is, an AP photo from yesterday's rally in Fatalburg, er, Fayetteville that was plastered across the front page of our local rag this morning. 

Before Joe the Plumber's fifteen minutes are up, I'd like to point out a small fact that the MSM won't tell you and most people don't get. 

Joe has his wrench in a twist because:

"I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year," Wurzelbacher said. "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" 

And Obama answered him truthfully, "It is true that from 250 up - from 250 - 300 or so, so for that additional amount, you'd go from 36 to 39%, which is what it was under Bill Clinton."

Obama was telling you the truth, but I'd suggest you go have a chat with your accountant, because here's what most people don't get (and, by "most people," I, of course mean "me, before I was forced to take Income Tax during my second year in law school"): that top rate will apply only to income over $250,000.  Got that Joe?  No?  Let me break it down for you. 

If your company's taxable income--not gross, taxable, i.e. your income after all your business deductions like salaries and expensed capital costs and insurance and a zillion other things are subtracted--is $280,000.00, well first of all, congratulations, because you're doing a hell of a lot better than me and I'm an overpaid attorney.  But hey, Joe, its okay.  I'm not begrudging you the extra income, because what you do is more important than what I do.  True, we both deal with other people's crap for a living, but, on the whole you deserve to make more because I deal with metaphorical crap and you deal with the real thing.  I may keep civilization from crumbling by giving people a way to solve disputes without resorting to violence, but you make civilization possible.  Good plumbing is the very flower of civilization and the thought of living without makes me shudder.  (Although I do think public defenders ought to make more than both of us, because the metaphorical crap they deal with is worse than my metaphorical crap or even your real crap.  But I digress.)

Okay, so let's say you've got your new business going and you have 280 large you've got to pay taxes on.  Well, that's a hell of a great problem to have, but it's a problem, nonetheless.  The good news is that that top tax bracket you're all upset about Obama wanting to change only applies to income over 250K.  Got that?  You're only paying the top rate on 30,000.00 of your 280K in income.  On the rest of your income, you pay the exact same tax as some poor schmoe scraping by on $249,999.49 a year under the current system and that won't change under Obama's plan (though taxes on that part may go down for everyone, but I understand you're worried about that top bracket, so let's set that aside). 

As to that last 30K, right now the rate on it is 36%.  That means if the Bush tax cuts are extended, you would give $10,800.00 of that last 30K to Uncle Sam.  Yeah, I know.  Ouch.  But hey, we all started getting used to it the first time we got a paycheck and saw the stub.  Suck it up and work with me, here.  Obama wants to let the rate applicable to that last 30K go back up to 39%, where it was under Clinton.  So under Obama's plan, you'd end up paying $11,700 on that 30K. 

Horror of horrors, Joe!  Obama wants you to give up an extra nine hundred of your two hundred and eighty thousand dollars!  Geez, I can already see your whole business plan crumbling before your eyes. 

Well, you know, Joe, lots of Americans are going to have a hard time crying with you, especially the ones who've recently paid a bill for your very necessary nonetheless hideously expensive services.  But the truth is, between Obama's middle class tax cuts (i.e. cuts on the rates applicable to the other 250K), his assistance to small businesses who provide health insurance for their employees and the reduction in health care costs that will hit once we can stop using Level I trauma centers as walk-in clinics for the uninsured, you're tax bill is almost certainly going to go down and you're business income is going to go up.  Or, hell, for that matter, incorporate the damn thing as an S corp, pay yourself half that 280K in salary and deduct it as a business expense, pay the rest to yourself as a capital gain and you're out of the top bracket on that salary and paying a capital gains rate on rest.  (Okay, actually, I'm way past my area of expertise here.  This isn't legal advice and you're not my client and you really need to check all this with your own lawyer, but I guaran-damn-tee you that in all the history of progressive income tax, there has never, ever, ever been a person whose had as little income in the top bracket as you're forecasting who didn't find a way to push his AGI down below, or at least mighty close to, the top bracket's threshold level.)

So, look, I know that's all detail-laden and complicated and not at all the kind of simple answer to a simple question that you crave, but, the belief that all of our problems are simple and all of them have a simple answer is the very essence of the Republican delusion that's gotten the country got into the mess its in now.  Life if complicated, government is complicated, business is complicated and, above all, taxes are complicated.  I'm sure you know that.   

Oh, and Joe?  Good luck voting, buddy.  Looks like your name's misspelled in Ohio's voter database and, thanks to the vote suppression tactics your party has been busily implementing for the last eight years, that could be a problem.  I'd look into that, if I were you.