I'll be on this one to find out.

Before you accuse me of being a Chicken Little: No.

If McCain has changed his mind -- he has in fact changed his mind.

We'll see what is said on the call. McCain himself won't be on; it'll be surrogates. Whether this is a continuation of raising Fannie/Freddie questions almost apologetically, or a sign McCain has now realized he can't just ignore the issue and pray it goes away, we'll have to see.

Only McCain himself can elevate the issue. Not surrogates, and not cutesy internet ads.

For a week I've been sending increasingly frustrated and pleasing emails for the McCain camp to address this stuff. Whether they've come to the conclusion we came to two weeks ago, or if they're just going to make a token half-hearted effort, I don't know.

Posted by: Ace at 10:07 AM | Comments (37)
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Even the decidedly secondary issues seem off the table.

It's over. McCain has decided he can't win and will press merely for an honorable defeat. Like Vietnam all over again. Peace with Honor. A Decent Interval.

Some weapons are just not worth using, it seems.

As Adam Sandler shouted in frustration, "Things that would have been helpful to know YESTERDAY." Or during the primaries, at least.

Don't shoot the messenger. I'm not making these decisions. I'm doing everything I can to change the campaign's mind.

So, McCain will cement his place in history as the guy who got the first black president elected. Lovely. I'm so proud to have been a part of the effort myself.

Posted by: Ace at 09:56 AM | Comments (63)
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Stephanie Cutter on FoxNews now.

Now that the Obama camp knows that they not only won't have to worry about an attack from McCain, but also won't even have to worry about a defense, they're just running with it.

Before they might have been defensive and hesitant about this line of attack, given Obama's responsibility for the bailout. No longer.

Character, integrity, patriotism. Incompetence.

John McCain is determined to run on the second and third most important issues in the country right now, while conceding the very most important issue completely to Obama.

In other words, McCain's letting Obama score touchdowns every drive while hoping he himself can get a field goal every once in a while.

How this math could possibly work -- especially given that Obama is already up by 7-10 points -- is utterly beyond me.

Incidentally, McCain does have some negatives on this issue -- several of his advisers, etc., lobbied on behalf of Freddie and Fannie. Rick Davis most prominently among them.

Here's the difference: McCain pays those guys.

Jim Johnson and all the Fannie and Freddie execs paid Obama, through huge campaign donations.

Now: Who is beholden to these guys? McCain who's paying them for their services, or Obama who was paid lots of money by these guys for his services?

This is why, I'm pretty sure, McCain doesn't want to get into this.

While conceding the argument is harder to make than I have suggested, it is not impossibly difficult.

And further, difficult or not, it's absolutely necessary. If McCain loses on this issue -- as he has been for three weeks -- the election is over, anyway.

Actually... I was too glib there. I'm sure someone associated at one time with Fannie and Freddie raised money for McCain at some point.

McCain worries that he'll just be muddied further if he does this. But he can't be muddied further. He's covered in mud. And Obama is spotless.

Whether this is an easy case to make or not does not change the fact McCain will lose unless he changes the momentum on this issue -- and, alas, he's let it go so long I don't even know if the Mighty Media Narrative can be altered anymore.

I also am guessing that McCain doesn't want to get into the white/black thing regarding the CRA. He doesn't want to be painted as Wille Hortonizing Racial Demogogue.

Well, you don't have to Willie Horton it. You just have to note that Obama sought freer loans for credit-poor buyers of all races (and certainly more credit-poor whites took advantage of this, simply because there are so many more whites than blacks). And if you want t o avoid CRA altogether --fine, focus on Fannie and Freddie.

Once again we see Obama's -- and the media's -- use of the race card. Now McCain can't even mention that Obama engineered this crisis for fear of being called a race-hater.

McCain has to nut up and realize he's being called a racist for whatever he says anyway. Mention Bill Ayers? Racist.

Posted by: Ace at 08:40 AM | Comments (120)
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Monday may be a better day for a flamethread than Friday.

Friday you are all in a great mood, looking forward to eating lots of butterscotch pudding on the weekend, and generally in a charitable and groovy frame of mind for a pack of drooling nitwits.

On Monday morning however, you are back at work. Another weekend slipped through your fingers.

You succumb to dour thoughts of the hobo That Got Away. You brood about not being able to access youporn from the office.

And all your coworkers are smarter, better paid, and more attractive than you (unless you work with wiserbud).

Yeah, Monday is the better day for this.

If you don't like it you can just bite my ass.

Posted by: LauraW at 08:18 AM | Comments (65)
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As that US News blog post said, the McCain camp thinks it's "too complicated" to explain the current crisis to the American people, so they're going to let Barack Obama claim it was all the Republicans' and McCain's fault.

I said McCain would turn towards these topics after the bailout passed. I appear to have been very wrong. The McCain camp is choosing a frankly insane strategy of allowing Obama to destroy him every day without a peep of objection.

What will they run on? Character, patriotism.

All well and good, but Obama has now set the narrative that he foresaw the subprime meltdown and tried to avert it while John McCain didn't -- and in fact a abetted it with his crazy let's-deregulate-everything cuckoo policies. In fact, the opposite is true, at least on the subprime mortgage fiasco specifically, but McCain thinks that if he refuses to engage in the argument, the argument will just go away.

Running on character and patriotism does McCain no good if the public believes he has character, patriotism, and economic incompetence.

Which is precisely what he'sl letting them believe.

This SNL sketch would seem to indicate the issue is not "too complicated" for the American public to understand...

Democrats wanted to give credit-poor people mortgages they couldn't afford, resulting in a housing bubble, a recession, the American taxpayer on the hook for failed mortgages, and even the credit-poor homebuyers themselves harmed. Republicans -- including McCain -- tried to bring some sanity and oversight to the process, but were blocked by Democrats. What's so complicated?

Incidentally, this sketch is almost certainly written by Jim Downey, one of the acknowledged greatest SNL writers of all time, particularly on the political parody side, writer of the great Gore-Bush debate sketches, and, if not exactly a Republican, at least not so in the tank for Democrats so as to write every sketch as a DNC talking point memo. Compare and contrast to the debate sketch, for example.

But Jim Downey isn't able to carry this message. Only McCain is. Not even Palin can really carry it, as she wasn't present in DC when all this was happening. John McCain was, and could explain it to America, but chooses not to.

Posted by: Ace at 08:06 AM | Comments (74)
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(NOTE: I'm going to bump this every weekday morning until Ace tells me to stop.)

It's that time of year again.

The election is a month away. No matter how the polls move, or what McCain does or doesn't do, any favorable result is going to require significant volunteer effort.

If you're in or near a possible swing state (and there are lots of 'em this time), contact your local Victory Office through the state pages of the campaign site. They should have plenty of volunteer opportunities in the coming weeks. If your home is solidly red or blue, you can register for phone bank work directly through that national site. (If you know of other volunteer channels, please note them in the comments.) UPDATE (from sidebar): You can also register for the GOTV program directly at this page.

I'm still convinced Barry's going down next month, but he's going to need a firm shove. Ditch the self-pitying Eeyoreism and get to it. Remember:

This is the first battle of the Palin 2012 campaign.

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:43 AM | Comments (124)
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444 points at the moment.

A lot of people want to know why I'm not covering this. Well, for one thing, I don't really love covering bad news. For another thing, I don't want to keep arguing about the bailout. But a lot of people do, so here's the thread to do it.

Michelle Malkin asks, "Wasn't the bailout supposed to calm the markets?"

I guess I'd answer: No, the bailout was supposed to avert a near depression. At risk of being "defeatist," we are almost certainly in a recession, and have been for a month or two. Yes, I know about the two negative quarters rule -- but when that happens, when it does, they will date the start of the recession not according to when we really officially negative, but according to when the economy turned pronouncedly south. Ascribing all bad news to the bailout package fails to deal with the fact that we already had a slowing economy even absent a credit crunch. The bailout may (one hopes) alleviate that, and prevent that from working further damage, but it doesn't change the fact that the industrial indices turned negative a month or two ago and that the nation lost 159,000 jobs last month.

And, of course, not a single dime has yet been made available for buying out the toxic assets.

A writer at USAToday notes the economy has numerous problems; the credit crisis is merely the most acute and urgent.

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 AM | Comments (44)
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Every once in a while a tipster will nudge me into blogging when I don't feel like it.

Goes like this:

"It would be nice of you to blog this."

"It's still Open Blog 'til 10am, you do it," I say.

"(kisses my ass)."

"Let's never fight again."

Silver tongued tipster Tom M sends us a surprisingly balanced list of the candidates' viewpoints on issues. From the AP.

As Tom notes, you can tell there's a pro-Obama tilt, but not as much as we usually see. Calvin Woodward seems to have made an honest effort to lay things out dispassionately.

Tom adds another observation:

One thing I have noticed, and I just checked Ace's site to make sure it wasn't covered today, is that, although Congress' ratings are as bad if not worse than they were in '06, no one is talking about how bad it will be for the party in power.
I certainly don't expect it from the MSM, and as such, there won't be the self-generated momentum that undoubtedly helped to dethrone the Reps, but I haven't even read about it on any of the few political sites I visit.

It seemed like it was all we heard two years ago.

Yup.

(Dude, was that so hard?)

Posted by: LauraW at 06:22 AM | Comments (31)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:34 AM | Comments (72)
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I get grief every time I do this, but here's a nice blog worth checking out.

Stilettos in the Sand.

It's the daily chronicle of the life of an American woman in Saudi Arabia.

And with that, I do believe Open Blog may be over.

Posted by: Open Blog at 09:16 PM | Comments (84)
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