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My debate reactions follow.

• John McCain has sacrificed one of his own party’s best hopes by pulling Palin into the VP nomination about 3-5 years before she’s actually prepared. She did a reasonably decent job in the debates. In fact, put her in the Republican primary debates and she would have won, as she was far, far better than most of the tripe that was regurgitated by the candidates in the Republican field. But she’s going to lose this election and she’s going to get the blame (though it’s actually McCain who is to blame — see Post Turtle). Now, I could never vote for someone who supports the policies she is for, but I can recognize a genuine political talent, and a truly winning personality (though some of her tics do grate a bit) — she would have been a huge star on the national scene and a formidable opponent had she been allowed to grow into national policy experience and knowledge.
• Just as I noticed the night of Palin’s speech at the RNC, Republicans sure do like to tell lies.
• Biden was much better than I expected. He looked relaxed, he clearly had the facts at his disposal and wasn’t delivering prepared speeches. That was clear from the relative pacing of the two’s comments — Biden was measured and varied the pace of his remarks, while Palin raced through everything, as though she wanted to make sure she’d get through all the prepared points before time ran out. While she didn’t crack, she was clearly not a seasoned debater on these issues.

It’s pretty clear to me that Biden won simply by relaxing and being himself. Palin certainly may have repaired her growing reputation for incompetence in speaking, but she still wasn’t in the same league as her opponent. In short, Palin exceeds the extremely low expectations, but Biden still wins.

I’m right now listening to Rachel Maddow’s show on Air America, where she’s rebroadcasting her MSNBC show from the night before, and she’s chatting with Ana Marie Cox, who mentions the cringe-worthy Palin/Couric interview when she didn’t answer the question and just responds with silence. Cox refers to it as a “John Cage moment” and suggests it might be fun street theater to let the whole debate be like that.

What other political commentator anywhere on radio or TV would have people on who know who John Cage is?

I HEART RACHEL MADDOW! (and I’m also thinking from her appearances on Maddow’s MSNBC show that I kinda like Ana Marie Cox quite a bit, too — she’s certainly very entertaining and seems to have really good chemistry with Maddow).

Details of the summit at the White House on Thursday with Bush, McCain, Obama and Senate and House leaders continue to trickle out. For me, a key point from the Washington Post’s illuminating article on the topic is this:

Pelosi said Obama would speak for the Democrats. Though later he would pepper Paulson with questions, according to a Republican in the room, his initial point was brief: “We’ve got to get something done.”

Bush turned to McCain, who joked, “The longer I am around here, the more I respect seniority.” McCain then turned to Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to speak first.

Boehner was blunt. The plan Paulson laid out would not win the support of the vast majority of House Republicans. It had been improved on the edges, with an oversight board and caps on the compensation of participating executives. But it had to be changed at the core. He did not mention the insurance alternative, but Democrats did. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, pressed Boehner hard, asking him if he really intended to scrap the deal and start again.

No, Boehner replied, he just wanted his members to have a voice. Obama then jumped in to turn the question on his rival: “What do you think of the [insurance] plan, John?” he asked repeatedly. McCain did not answer.

One Republican in the room said it was clear that the Democrats came into the meeting with a “game plan” aimed at forcing McCain to choose between the administration and House Republicans. “They had taken McCain’s request for a meeting and trumped it,” said this source.

This sounds to me as though Obama is a political genius, either because he was well-advised by Pelosi and Reid, or because he knew the right thing to do, but either way, he stuck to McCain and showed him up. That’s impolite, but it’s hard-ball politics, and I’m glad to see that behind closed doors, Obama is not averse to being impolite.

And there was no way he believed it wouldn’t get out, so he’s also sending a message to potential political opponents: you’re not dealing with a timid novice here, but with someone who knows how to capitalize on a political opportunity to skewer his political opponents.

Kudos to Obama!

FactCheck.org fancies itself the authoritative, objective, non-partisan fact-checking site on the web, but, in fact, it needs to be fact checked itself in many cases. The worst example is its fact-checking of the first Obama-McCain debate.

Example 1: Diplomatic talks with adversaries of the US

Obama said McCain adviser Henry Kissinger backs talks with Iran “without preconditions,” but McCain disputed that. In fact, Kissinger did recently call for “high level” talks with Iran starting at the secretary of state level and said, “I do not believe that we can make conditions.” After the debate the McCain campaign issued a statement quoting Kissinger as saying he didn’t favor presidential talks with Iran.

This is a very mealy-mouthed fact check (and the later detailed analysis doesn’t get any closer to the truth). In fact, there are at least two other very good fact checks of the debate, ThinkProgress’s real-time fact check, and the Washington Post’s next-day effort. The continuing “disagreement” between McCain and Obama over this issue stems from McCain’s change of the terms of the debate. He is mischaracterizing Obama’s original statement, concentrating on the *level* of the talks, whereas Obama is concentrating on whether or not there are preconditions. It is the latter that Obama has consistently criticized the Bush adminstration for using as a way to prevent any diplomatic contact with the US’s foreign adversaries. Kissinger is on record as favoring talks without preconditions at the level of Secretary of State. Obama’s position is clearly that high-level talks are needed without precondition, not that they must be engaged in by the President. In short, none of the three fact checks quite gets this one right, seems to me.

Example 2: The legendary $42K tax increase

Obama denied voting for a bill that called for increased taxes on “people” making as little as $42,000 a year, as McCain accused him of doing. McCain was right, though only for single taxpayers. A married couple would have had to make $83,000 to be affected by the vote, and anyway no such increase is in Obama’s tax plan.

This is so incredibly bad as to be laughable — even the WaPo gets this one right:

John McCain claimed that Obama voted in the Senate to raise taxes on anyone making more than $42,000 a year. This is misleading on several levels. The vote that McCain is talking about was a non-binding resolution on the budget that envisioned letting the Bush tax cuts to expire, as scheduled, in 2011. But these budget resolutions come up every year, and do not represent a vote for higher taxes in future years. In fact, Obama has said that he will continue the Bush tax cuts for middle and low-income taxpayers. He says that he will cut taxes for all but the wealthiest tax-payers.

The detailed analysis is a great example of “burying the lede:”

The resolution actually would not have altered taxes without additional legislation. It called generally for allowing most of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts to expire. McCain is referring to the provision that would have allowed the 25 percent tax bracket to return to 28 percent. The tax plan Obama now proposes, however, would not raise the rate on that tax bracket.

In other words, the legislation that Obama voted for wouldn’t have raised anyone’s taxes, because only *other* legislation could have done that, and secondly, this is not a part of Obama’s tax plan. *That* should have been the fact check conclusion at the top of the article, not buried here in the “analysis” section, where it is not even clearly drawn out to show that McCain’s use of this old canard is simply another example of McCain’s profound dishonesty.

Example 3: McCain’s $700 billion in “foreign aid”

McCain repeated his overstated claim that the U.S. pays $700 billion a year for oil to hostile nations. Imports are running at about $536 billion this year, and a third of it comes from Canada, Mexico and the U.K.

This is a truly egregious example, in that the “fact check” accepts the McCain campaign’s spin, allowing them to compare apples to oranges, and then does nothing but quibble over whether it’s a McIntosh or a Red Delicious being compared to the orange. A real fact check from the WaPo:

When discussuing what ways he would save money in the federal budget, McCain said, “Look, we’re sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much.” This is a line he used in his campaign acceptance speech, but as a matter of context he was not talking about foreign aid. That only amounts to $39 bllion a year, most of which is economic aid. McCain instead is talking about the amount of money that Americans spend on foreign oil, though some experts think that figure is a bit high. It certainly is not part of the federal budget.

And ThinkProgress’s version of the same fact check:

Discussing ways he would save money in the federal budget, McCain said, “Look, we’re sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much.” But as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler points out, McCain is confusing foreign aid with the amount of money that Americans spend on foreign oil. The U.S. spends only $39 bllion a year in foreign aid.

The only justification for FactCheck’org’s acceptance of McCain’s framing of the issue as oil money is to ignore the context within the debate. From the transcript:

OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that are very important that are under funded. I went to increase early childhood education and the notion that we should freeze that when there may be, for example, this Medicare subsidy doesn’t make sense.

Let me tell you another place to look for some savings. We are currently spending $10 billion a month in Iraq when they have a $79 billion surplus. It seems to me that if we’re going to be strong at home as well as strong abroad, that we have to look at bringing that war to a close./p>

MCCAIN: Look, we are sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much. Some of that money ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations.

The issue is clearly *government* expenditures, but McCain is talking about the total that the US economy spends on foreign oil. This is a completely non sequiture, and rather Palin-like in its ADD switch from the topic of discussion to one of his debate-prepped talking points. FactCheck.org accepts McCain’s context switch (and, not suprisingly, McCain uses inaccurate numbers even in his own private context), and ignores the fact that he’s making a really stupid claim that sounds to the casual listener as though the US spends $700 billion in governmental expenditures for foreign aid. This is either profoundly dishonest on McCain’s part, or just sloppy debating. Either way, no fact checker should be led by the nose this easily.

Amusingly enough, the editors of the article seem surprised at the idea that the context was actually different from what they “fact checked,” since they add this parenthetical comment:

(Note: A few of our readers messaged us, after we first noted McCain’s mistake, with the thought that he was referring to foreign aid and not to oil. If so he’s even farther off than we supposed: The entire budget for the State Department and International Programs works out to just $51.3 million.)

Ya think? Geez. There is no question that in the actual context of the debate (i.e., following Obama’s remarks on Federal spending) McCain’s switch of subject away from government spending to the whole country’s expenditures on foreign oil leads to the implication (intended by McCain or not), that he’s talking about government spending on foreign aid.

Pathetic.

Example 4: Percentage who get Obama’s tax cuts

Obama said 95 percent of “the American people” would see a tax cut under his proposal. The actual figure is 81 percent of households.

This is a case of cherry picking Obama’s words. At one point in the debate, what Obama said. From the transcript:

…Now, $18 billion is important; $300 billion is really important.

And in his [McCain's] tax plan, you would have CEOs of Fortune 500 companies getting an average of $700,000 in reduced taxes, while leaving 100 million Americans out.

So my attitude is, we’ve got to grow the economy from the bottom up. What I’ve called for is a tax cut for 95 percent of working families, 95 percent.

And that means that the ordinary American out there who’s collecting a paycheck every day, they’ve got a little extra money to be able to buy a computer for their kid, to fill up on this gas that is killing them.

Obama was *very* clear here on who it applied to, not 95% of taxpayers, but 95% of “working families.” It’s no surprise that this “fact check” is not included in the others, since this is just a made-up error in the FactCheck.org version, which bases its “fact check” on another context, in which Obama said this:

My definition — here’s what I can tell the American people: 95 percent of you will get a tax cut. And if you make less than $250,000, less than a quarter-million dollars a year, then you will not see one dime’s worth of tax increase.

Now, to me, the second sentence makes precisely clear what he means, by virtue of citing the cutoff for his tax cuts (i.e., $250K). In the context of the debate, it’s even clearer, since it was the question of “who is rich.” The “fact check” is only true if you ignore the relationship between the two sentences uttered back-to-back by Obama.

Example 5: McCain’s health care “plan”

Obama mischaracterized an aspect of McCain’s health care plan, saying “employers” would be taxed on the value of health benefits provided to workers. Employers wouldn’t, but the workers would. McCain also would grant workers up to a $5,000 tax credit per family to cover health insurance.

This one is close, in that Obama was a bit elliptical in how he worded it (from the transcript):

Just one last point I want to make, since Senator McCain talked about providing a $5,000 health credit. Now, what he doesn’t tell you is that he intends to, for the first time in history, tax health benefits.

So you may end up getting a $5,000 tax credit. Here’s the only problem: Your employer now has to pay taxes on the health care that you’re getting from your employer. And if you end up losing your health care from your employer, you’ve got to go out on the open market and try to buy it.

The fact is, employee withholding will have to go up, which means that an employer’s payments in taxes to the Federal government will go up. But those taxes will be taken out of the employee’s paycheck. The principle behind employee-provided healthcare was that the cost was tax-free, and it allowed the employer to provide non-taxed benefits. If those benefits are taxable, it becomes a good question why the employer should provide them at all, and the assumption among many experts is that employers will simply drop their health plans entirely, leaving the employees to find their own health insurance. So, while it’s technically true that the taxes will be paid with a check from your employer, the employer is just passing through money taken out of the employees’ paychecks.

I’d score this as another of those fact checks that gets the detail right (McIntosh vs. Red Delicious) and misses the main point. You’ll also note that it’s not an issue mentioned on either of the other fact checkers, which tells you something about whether or not it was in need of any comment.

The last really annoying thing about this article is that the summary omits a boatload of the detailed fact checks in the analysis section. Why would that be? Well, perhaps it’s because in the details, it becomes quite clear that most of the factual errors were by McCain — by cherry picking which fact checks to put at the head of the article in summary format, they make it look like there was some kind of parity between the two candidates, with both Obama and McCain saying a few things that were inaccurate. But, once again, here we have the media coddling a Republican for lying by putting the truth beneath the fold: McCain lies a lot and Obama only occasionally shades the truth (and usually because he’s being elliptical, not because he’s misrepresenting basic facts).

The pundits I saw last night on the TV machine (as our beloved Rachel Maddow calls it) all seemed to see the thing as a tie. I didn’t. I thought McCain clearly won.

Why?

In my mind, McCain went into the debate as a crazily unreliable batshit insane guy who is all over the map on everything. But he was completely coherent in all of his foreign policy-related comments, and not just coherent in a Republican sense, but coherent in a reality-based community sense. I disagree with him, but he was clear and was not struggling at all to make his points. He may very well have been heavily prepped, but the prep just made his answers deeper, rather than bubbling to the surface, Palin-like, in a tumble of non sequiturs.

Yes, he told a string of lies about Obama’s record, but that’s what Republicans do these days.

But for me, he regained a level of respectability that he had lost in the past two weeks of flailing over the economic crisis. Whether or not the undecided voters see it that way, I can’t say.

Obama, on the other hand, seemed to me a lot like Kerry. He had the facts and he had coherent answers, but he just wasn’t direct enough in his answers.

And $deity spare us the awful “talk to each other” format. It may have looked really great on The West Wing, but when your debators are not actors delivering pre-scripted lines, it maybe doesn’t work so well.

What I’d like to see is a debate that is fact checked in real time, maybe with a single moderator and a panel of bloggers with computers researching every claim, so they could provide documentation on the lies to the moderator so he/she could call the candidates on them. In this debate, Obama might have been called on 2 or 3 misrepresentations at most, while McCain would have been called on at least a dozen outright lies and myriad other misrepresentations.

Of course, it will never happen.

With all this talk about the financial crisis, I can’t help but wonder how stupid the people running these firms really are. Couldn’t they tell that the mortgages and investments that have gone bad were bad ideas in the first place?

Take the so-called “liar loans,” where there was no effort to verify income of potential borrowers, and borrowers were encouraged to inflate their income so that they’d be able to get bigger mortgates (and, hence, bigger houses). Why did anyone think it was a good idea to disconnect the mortgage from a realistic assessment of the borrower’s ability to pay?

Of course, it’s not like this tendency in lenders is new. In 1987 I bought a used car (with an insurance settlement to replace an old beater that was stolen), and I had to fight with the car dealer over the price I was willing to spend. I had so much money from the insurance settlement, and wanted to pay a certain amount per month in car payment and no more. But the dealer kept arguing with me, saying my income would allow me to afford a lot more car (with a much longer loan period and a higher monthly payment). I kept insisting that I didn’t *want* to pay more. This was met with a blank stare, something the salesman couldn’t seem to comprehend. I eventually got exactly what I asked for, and a $110/month car payment (I think it was a 2-year loan period, but can’t recall for certain).

Why would any sensibly-run lender want to loan not just more than what the borrower wants, but more than the borrower’s income justifies? Is that not just a really bad business decision?

This is why it annoys me that the government seems to be stepping in to buy the bad investments, and so many commentators seem so willing to say “there’s enough blame to go around for everybody.” No, there *isn’t* — if the lenders had followed good business practices, none of this would have happened. They didn’t and now the whiny-assed titty babies want to be rescued from their bad judgement.

It pisses me off a lot, especially given that the same people championing the bailout (I mean *you*, John McCain) were perfectly happy last Spring to tell the borrowers that they didn’t deserve a bailout themselves because they’d made bad decisions in taking out these mortgages.

NOTE: I found this post in draft stage today. It’s apparently been sitting there since early 2004. It is just as relevant today as it was then.

Those Wacky Catholics: Bishop Raymond Burke of the diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin has issued an order that prohibits priests in his diocese from administering communion to Catholic representatives who have voted for legislation that allows individual choice on the subject of abortion (see article here).

It has often been said that Catholics in general do not know their Bible, and it seems to me that such a decree as this ignores the lesson of one of Jesus Christ’s parables, the lesson of which is “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” This parable, and this lesson, is included in 3 of the 4 Gospels (the exact verse in each case being Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17 and Luke 20:25.

Now, it seems to me that the general principle established here by Jesus is that there are secular realms in which one has secular duties that do not in any way conflict with one’s sacred duties. Indeed, that principle is enshrined in the US Constitution, and is at the very heart of all the civic and governmental structures of our nation.

Officeholders, like Roman taxpayers, have duties to their constituents that are independent of their religious duties.

This despicable Wisconsin bishop has undone, in a stroke, all the progress that was made in the last half of the 20th Century in debunking the lie that Catholic lawmakers would be beholden to the Pope, rather than to those who elect them. John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic president, and this was a major stumbling block for many voters. But his words and actions demonstrated that in his duties as civic officeholder, there was no conflict, as demonstrated by the words of Jesus himself.

Now, it seems that this is no longer the case. Roman Catholic officeholders must now shirk their civic duties and let their Church’s decrees rule their voting decisions, or face separation from the central sacrament of their church, and, thus, can never be fully in a state of grace.

The Pope has taken the same position on the issue of gay marriage, ignoring that the question being considered by officeholders worldwide is not a religious one, but a civic one, the question of the definition of civil marriage (which is distinct from religious marriage).

Roman Catholics always seem to want it both ways. When the Act-Up protesters disrupted mass at St. Patrick’s in New York City in 1989, this was seen as a dreadful intrusion into the religious space. Indeed, it was exactly that, but it came as a response to the Church’s intrusion into the civic realm. If the Church insists on trying to shape lawmaking, which has an impact on all citizens, Catholic or not, they open themselves to interference and disruption from outside, in just the same fashion as their own actions interfere with and disrupt the lives of those who are not under the authority of the Church.

Roman Catholics in the US need to learn that they cannot interfere in civic affairs without there being a corresponding reaction from non-Roman Catholic citizens. The result of the bishop of La Crosse’s decree and the Pope’s recommendations on gay marriage is that Roman Catholics are now disqualified from public office, as they are now under the kind of pressure from their Church that we as non-Catholic citizens can simply not expect them to endure. They now are required to have duel allegiance, and as voters, we cannot vote for any candidates whose allegiance is to anything but the consituency that elected them.

It amuses me greatly that somehow Tina Fey’s line on Saturday Night Live impersonating Sarah Palin has become gospel. It seems to me that an awful lot of people think she actually said that.

What interests me is how often Republicans will try to counter this by saying it’s a lie. If they try that, they will have to point out that what she actually said was that there are places in Alaska where you can stand and see across the Bering Straits to Russia. In fact, the only such place is an island off the coast of mainland Alaska, and all of Russia that it can see is another island.

This doesn’t help their case. Palin may not have literally said she can see Russia from her house, but what she actually said is only marginally less absurd than Tina Fey’s version. By trying to correct the misrepresentation, her supporters can do nothing but make matters worse by driving home the point that she’s batshit crazy in regard to her claims of any experience with foreign relations.

Microsoft has a blog for the next version of Windows, called Engineering Windows 7, and it has lots of interesting articles. Today, a post is discussing the Windows ecosystem, and one of the major topics therein is the way OEMs package Windows. I have always been really annoyed with the garbage that gets bundled to load out of the box in a lot of OEM setups, especially when they include trial or limited-feature versions of software that provide important functions. These are the ones that annoy me the most:

• AV software with limited subscriptions: if you’re providing AV software pre-installed, make it at least a one-year subscription!
• Optical drive software support: Windows should be providing full writability to CD-R/RW and DVD-R/RW without any additional software needed. But in many cases, you have to have somebody else’s software installed for your optical drives to work. This means that if you rebuild your system you may not be able to restore full access to these devices.
• Anything that puts an icon in the system notication area (formerly the “System Tray,” which MS denies was ever its real name, despite the fact that its executable was named “SysTray”): I don’t need an AOL icon, nor do I need one for QuickTime or Adobe Reader or Windows Media Player or MSN Messenger or Real Player and so forth. Many software manufacturers use the system tray as an advertising venue, and Microsoft should so something to stop this abuse, in my opinion.

Thus endeth the rant.

McCain’s enormous confusion over Zapatero/Spain really causes me to ask whether or not the man is mentally fit. He often seems to get confused in interviews, and seems truly unable to cope with unexpected questions (e.g., on The View), but I don’t recall him ever having not just misinterpreted the questions, but in this case, he couldn’t even absorb the clarification kindly offered him by the interviewer.

If he has more of these gaffes, I wonder whether he’ll be completely toast.