As bad as Palin's been all week, we knew that she couldn't live down to that level of ineptitude tonight. Literally anything she said tonight wouldn't be as bad as everything she said to Katie Couric. As it turned out, that's pretty much what happened: as expected, she exceeded expectations.

But what does that mean? She didn't make any stupid statements. Her statements and arguments were almost devoid of content. As before, she adhered very closely to her preloaded talking points, including repetetive claims that she and McBush are “mavericks”. Lucky thing we weren't playing the Palin drinking game tonight. Nevertheless, content or no, she was perky, spunky, and stuck with her scripted persona. It was like watching Biden try to debate Kelly Ripa. (Oh, and by the way, happy birthday, Kelly!)

Biden, on the other hand, was great. There were a few points where his remarks probably got deeper into the details of what happens in the Senate than was good for him. On the other hand, he displayed a breadth of knowledge, judgment, and a commitment to the real people of the United States that was very impressive. One of the television commentators said it was the best debate of his life, and I'm prepared to accept it. While in past years he's come across as a lightweight, too fond of the cute smile and quip, tonight, he was a statesman.

The TV commentators were observing that Palin's performance were designed to, and did, shore up support among the Republican base. Maybe so, but that's fine with me. At this stage in the campaign, if the ticket that's behind has to devote this effort to shoring up the base, that means they're not passing, or even catching up, they're just trying to avoid losing any more ground. Maybe they did that, but that's probably not good enough for them.

You're probably looking forward to tomorrow's VP debate, aren't you? Admit it, I know you are.

Sarah Palin may do better than we expect, but her performance so far has exposed her grossly inadequate command of any single area of American government. From the economy, to foreign affairs, to national defense, she can't say anything without coming across as an idiot, which means that, despite her reputation as a scrapper, it's hard to believe that any reasonably intelligent debate moderator (and Gwen Ifill more than meets that standard) should eviscerate her. Hell, Katie Couric has been able to do it, and her primary, if not only, qualification is that she's cute as a button.

CBS has released more of the interview, and it isn't getting any better. As you know, the Supreme Court has been the favorite target of the right wing since the 1950's. Remember “Impeach Earl Warren”? Remember Gerald Ford's repeated efforts to impeach William O. Douglas? So you might find it shocking that Sarah Palin can't even recite a single Republican talking point about the Supreme Court. Not only does she get the Republican position on Roe v. Wade wrong (their argument is not that it should be a state issue, but that the fetus is a living human being with a right to life, and when Bork was nominated he would have completely disagreed with her statement that there is a constitutional right to privacy), but she can't mention a single other Supreme Court decision she disagrees with. What about Medina, Miranda, and the other precedents that keep the cops from beating confessions out of subjects? What about all the other exclusionary rule decisions? What about allowing affirmative action? What about one-person-one-vote? Every statement she makes, like the repeated references to this history of this great country, sounds like the kid using two inch margins and triple spacing in a vain attempt to meet the page requirement for that high school paper where they haven't done any of the work.

So while you wait for tomorrow's debate, sit back and enjoy this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rXmuhWrlj4

 This is sad news. I think I first met Dave before he was the Capitol Police Chief, maybe when he used to do court security. Always friendly, good at knowing who might be looking for you in the building, or where the person you're looking for might be. Many GMD posters and readers spend a lot of time at the State House, and I'm sure that we'll all miss him.

A guest book has been established at the Times Argus.

Thanks to fellow blogger and State House habitue Morgan Brown for this tip.

Found this at another blog and I had to post it. Follow the link for the full text.

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a
transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had
crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion
dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most
profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my
replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may
know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the
1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

Missed Votes by Member

• 64.1%
  • Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)
    • Representing: Arizona
    • Votes: 412 votes missed (64.1%), 231 votes cast
• 48.4%
  • Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD)
    • Representing: South Dakota
    • Votes: 311 votes missed (48.4%), 332 votes cast
    • Note: Sen. Johnson suffered a brain hemorrhage on Dec. 13, 2006, and spent several months recovering. He has since returned to the Senate.
• 45.9%
  • Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)
    • Representing: Illinois
    • Votes: 295 votes missed (45.9%), 348 votes cast

PBS is running a poll on whether Sarah Palin is qualified, and, incredibly, the yes votes are ahead, 56-42%.

Let’s see if we can fix that.

http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/p…

We were talking yesterday about AIG, its collapse, and why the mortgage crisis would hurt insurance companies, and I had no idea. Since then I've heard an excellent interview on Fresh Air and done some reading on the topic, and I think I have a bit of an answer. I may be missing some of the details, but it looks pretty damning for McCain and his economic plans.

To understand this we need to go back to a pretty ugly time, a time back in December, 2000, right after that thug Scalia and his henchmen on the Supreme Court assigned us Bush as our Resident. The federal budget was going through Congress, and Phil Gramm, McCain's biggest economic advisor, called up a bill that had been considered dead, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, and muscled it into the budget bill, which then passed, right around midnight before the Congress went home for Christmas.

It didn't actually deregulate anything, it just prohibited the federal government from regulating a new, and little-known financial instrument called a swap. You may never have heard of a swap, but the swaps are what made the saps at AIG go down.

Now just keep that little bit of history in your mind for a while. Time goes on, the real estate market goes crazy, and people with money burning a hole in their pockets figure that a way to make tons more money is to bet on the following two propositions: real estate prices will always go up, and people who don't have the ability to pay their mortgages will somehow pay them. This bet leads banks and fly-by-night mortgage outfits to start lending out tons of money, even more than the house is worth, and even to people who have bad credit, their income doesn't meet standard underwriting standards, and so on. They then bundle up a whole bunch of these mortgages and sell them on the secondary market in the form of various kinds of securities. I guess the idea is that even if some of the mortgages don't perform, they will be bundled together with a bunch of other very profitable mortgages, so it's a safe bet. (Would you lend the price of a house to someone who doesn't have the money to pay it back? Me neither, but maybe that's why we're not smart enough to run Countrywide or these big banks.)

But, it's not really a safe bet, because it's not safe enough to get reasonably prudent investors to buy them. The risk is too much. However, we've known for a long time how to get people to invest their money in something when they think the risk of losing it all would be too great. It's called insurance. You wouldn't spend $10,000 or 20,000 on a car, or $100,000 or $200,000 on a house, if you thought that you would just be wiped out if the car or the house were destroyed and you were just out the money. Some people won't even spend $1,000 or $2,000 on a vacation without buying insurance on it.

So they figured out that they can just insure this risk too. That's what a swap is. They created an instrument called a credit default swap, in which Investor A pays a premium to Company B, and Company B promises Investor A that if one of the borrowers fails to pay their mortgage, Company B will step in and pay Investor A their investment. Company B gets their money, Investor A gets to make the investment and to receive the income that the investment is going to generate, and it's all possible because of the swap. That's what AIG was selling.

So what, you say? We have insurance for all kinds of things, and all kinds of bad things happen without insurance companies going out of business. People get into car crashes, trees fall on houses, vacations get rained out, and the insurance companies just pay off the policy holder and move on. How do they do it? There's a one-word answer: regulation. Your state government won't let me to call myself a car insurance company, and start collecting car insurance premiums, unless I can prove that I have enough money on hand to pay off the claims. Homeowners' insurance, the same thing.

But now we go back to Phil Gramm, and his midnight Christmas present to the money men. The law he wrote (oh yes, and if I think back to 2000, I'm pretty sure John McCain was in the Senate that year; there's the experience thing) said that these credit default swaps cannot be regulated. The government can't stop me from selling credit default swaps, even if I'm just a guy sitting in my basement in Montpelier, and it can't make me prove that I have enough money to pay off the claims.

And that's where we are today. Property values stop going up. A bunch of those mortgagors (they're the borrower–remember, “Mortgagee rhymes with Simon Legree”) reach into their pocket and come up empty, so they default on their mortgages. The banks have to foreclose, and the people who own the mortgage-backed securities start looking around for someone to cover their losses, and who's standing their with their face hanging out? AIG, which sold them these credit default swaps, these promises that if the mortgages didn't perform, they'd be good for the money.

Only because of Phil Gramm, John McCain, and the other guys who voted for Gramm's bill, nobody ever made AIG set the money aside in case the loss they were insuring should happen.

And now, whose economic ideas are in the head of John McCain, the candidate who admits he doesn't know anything about the economy?

Right, Phil Gramm's.

So tell me, how much sense does it make to turn the economy over to McCain and Gramm?

Sometimes these things just write themselves.

The Republican rap on Obama is that he's an elitist, right? A guy who was raised by a single mother on Food Stamps, got to college on scholarship, went to law school on student loans–elitist all over, right?

Now we have confirmation of that characterization by one of Hillary Clinton's supporters and fundraisers, who announced today that she's supporting McCain.

And her name is . . .

Wait for it . . .

No, she's not the Comtesse de Beige. It's Everywoman, known to her friends as Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, international financier who splits her time between homes in New York and London.

“This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don't like him,” she said of Obama in an interview with CNN’s Joe Johns. “I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.”

Forester is the CEO of EL Rothschild, a holding company with businesses around the world. She is married to international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.

As my wife said, I guess she would know.

Sorry it’s taken me so long to post this, because I really do think this is a big deal.

The Vermont State Democratic Committee met Saturday mainly to adopt its platform. One of the other items on the agenda, though, was to choose our electors for the presidential election. These are the people who, if Barack Obama wins in Vermont in November, will actually cast Vermont’s three votes for Obama.

And guess what: longtime GMD front pager and current poster Euan Bear (NanuqFC) was chosen as one of our electors. Euan’s also the chair of the Franklin County Democrats and a tireless worker. For many years the way the electors were chosen was that the inner circle would nominate a slate of candidates and that slate would be voted up or down, essentially ratifying the choice of the insiders. As a grassroots leader, Euan worked on the Rules Committee to make sure that this year, for the first time, there would be an open vote.

The fact that she got the nod from her fellow State Committee members is a testament to the high regard in which her hard work and dedication are held.

Congratulations, Euan!

It's so reliable you can set your calendar by it. Every election year, and especially every presidential election, the Republican Party does its best to pervert the republican form of government required by our Constitution to ensure that the people do not have the chance to vote to protect their own interests. In addition, we know that the Republican dominance of the last forty years has been built on a foundation of racism and racial discrimination, primarily in the South, but really wherever they can gain control of the mechanisms of voting. See, for instance, the examples of Florida's fraudulent voter list purge in 2000 and Ohio's subversion of the voting system in 2004. Nevertheless, this week we have two particularly odious examples.

In Wisconsin, the attorney general, who also happens to be McCain's state campaign chair, has filed a suit designed to slow down voting lines and drive voters away from the polls. 

A lawsuit filed by the state attorney general Wednesday has the potential to slow down voting lines in what promises to be a staggering turnout for the Nov. 4 election, local voting officials said.

“It will disenfranchise voters. That's what we're concerned about,” City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said.

Witzel-Behl said the net effect of the lawsuit, if it is successful, will be to discourage people from voting.

“It's going to slow down the lines,” she said. “And it will not only affect the people who have been flagged in the poll book, but the people who are standing behind that individual who have all come to the polls to vote.”

I know, I know. You thought that people are supposed to vote, it's an aspect of good citizenship, and everyone's civic duty. The problem is, when “certain people” vote it's just a bit inconvenient for the Republicans. Keep them away from the polls, and problem solved!

Bad as that is, though, what they're doing in Michigan, where I used to live, is even more loathsome. Really, beneath contempt: they're making sure that people who have lost their homes through foreclosure will also lose the right to vote.

Michigan Republicans plan to foreclose African-American voters

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

 And how do they know people have lost their homes? Well, convenently for the Republicans

GOP ties to state’s largest foreclosure law firmThe Macomb GOP’s plans are another indication of how John McCain’s campaign stands to benefit from the burgeoning number of foreclosures in the state. McCain’s regional headquarters are housed in the office building of foreclosure specialists Trott & Trott. The firm’s founder, David A. Trott, has raised between $100,000 and $250,000 for the Republican nominee.

They're doing the same thing in Ohio:

Carabelli is not the only Republican Party official to suggest the targeting of foreclosed voters. In Ohio, Doug Preisse, director of elections in Franklin County (around the city of Columbus) and the chair of the local GOP, told The Columbus Dispatch that he has not ruled out challenging voters before the election due to foreclosure-related address issues.

UPDATE: As of late Thursday afternoon the Republicans claimed they had backed off this plan to block foreclosed homeowners from voting. 

The Macomb County Republican Party chair who told Michigan Messenger earlier this week that Republicans planned to challenge voters at the polls using a list of foreclosed homes has changed his story.

Instead, they plan to use another sophisticated vote suppression technique called “voter caging”. 

Last week Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner acknowledged that the use of mail for vote caging has disproportionately affected poor and minority communities and she instructed that returned mail should not be considered reasonable evidence that someone has moved.

UPDATE: Having been caught in the act, the Michigan Republicans are trying to silence criticism by demanding a retraction. The Michigan Messenger, which reported the voter suppression story, has refused demands for a retraction and stands by its story.

Fortunately, there is a national campaign to protect voting rights, and they are actively seeking volunteers. Unfortunately, given the success of Republican vote suppression campaigns in recent years, it is entirely posible that these efforts will once again have an effect on this year's election.