Stickybuffalo.com

Alright, I’m letting go of the reserved attitude from here on out. Will I be a broken person come November fifth if this thing gets stolen? Yes, but I’m tired of living in cautious hope, fearing that Obama is going to lose. The signs point to win, and it’s about damn time to get riled up.

Update: FiveThirtyEight.com agrees.

Now if we can get 60+ senate members

http://election.twitter.com/

I’ve just added an RSS feed showing the last 5 tweets that match the search terms Obama OR Biden Or McCain Or Palin. These tweets are rolling out at an amazing rate, so fast that the RSS feed is delayed quite a bit. I suggest heading over to http://election.twitter.com/ to watch in near-real-time. It’s mesmerizing. I suppose twitter folk are more techno-literate and therefore I also assume they tend to be more liberal as most of the tweets are PrObama. The other side is represented by a lot of hate, and a lot of spammers. What a hoot, or is that tweet?

Tonight you can even comment live on the debate, via Twitter:

contrary to polls that show georgia remaining solid red this year, fivethirtyeight.com has analysis of registration and early voting figures that actually suggest a potential obama lead on the strength of black votes.

Think these numbers sound unreasonable? Early voting is underway in Georgia, and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, black voters do not represent 30 percent of Georgia’s early voter turnout. Instead, they represent almost 40 percent. Although early voting figures can be idiosyncratic, Barack Obama certainly seems to be having little trouble getting his vote out. Indeed, Barack Obama is winning Georgia right now.

d’you buy that?

i got just want i wanted for my birthday: john mccain strapping on his bib and tucking into a big ol’ bowl of shit. today’s q-poll shows huge leads for obama in OH, FL and PA. the rest of us were playing it cool last week, but it looks like gray’s instinct was dead-on.

debate-night pundit commentary notwithstanding, viewers saw obama as the winner by a wide margin, and this week’s polling bears that out, along with reflecting voters’ apparent disgust with mccain’s “suspension” stunt. (the letterman thing probably didn’t help either.) it’s hard to see how the biden-palin debate reverses that dynamic. and don’t forget, voters still have two more opportunities to see mccain, cranky and up past his bedtime, behave like a petulant child as obama debates circles around him.

34 days to go. tick-tock…

I’m not the only one suggesting that maybe the DJIA dive is simply the traders on Wall Street doing what they can to force the bailout:

(A) bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This “moral hazard” generates enormous distortions in an economy’s allocation of its financial resources.

Thoughtful advocates of the bailout might concede this perspective, but they argue that a bailout is necessary to prevent economic collapse. According to this view, lenders are not making loans, even for worthy projects, because they cannot get capital. This view has a grain of truth; if the bailout does not occur, more bankruptcies are possible and credit conditions may worsen for a time.

Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.

Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street’s hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/29/miron.bailout/index.html

200 Economists agree that yesterday’s vote was the right way to go. Is it a cause to celebrate? No, but it’s certainly time to stop saying things like “Great Depression 2.”

So, John McCain’s campaign has been in trouble for the last week or so, as Palin’s popularity has plummeted, his bestest buddy turns out to be (surprise, surprise) collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for nothing other than assuring that investment banks will have inside access to a McCain White House, and he and pretty much everyone around him have been vomiting gaffes as if their common sense had been up all night shotgunning ipecac. The economic situation others here have been covering well (and I’ve been avoiding, out of sheer terror) is turning into McCain’s worst enemy.

And now, he’s suspending his campaign until some sort of bandaid is signed into law. Nobody appears to be fooled by this gambit.

So now, I ask, with all due sincerity, is there any way in the world for McCain to win this election?

So, this year, Obama’s been selling a lot of buttons, t-shirts, signs, and various other things imprinted with his logo. It’s a pretty nifty idea: run a store on your campaign website and file purchases as campaign donations. Your logo sees broader exposure, you get to report super-high donation totals each month, it’s easier for supporters who live in places without a campaign office or frequent campaign events to get campaign gear, people who would already have made donations get a little token for their trouble. Everybody wins.

But I wonder why it seems to take at least several weeks (and sometimes a few months) for orders to be shipped. I’m not complaining in a “where’s my stuff?!?” way, since Obama was gonna be getting my money even without a store on his website. I’m wondering why distributing campaign advertisements isn’t seen as more of a priority. It took my window sign almost 10 weeks to arrive, and I’ve lately been showered with apologetic emails telling me that my buttons, stickers, and t-shirts (ordered weeks ago) just might be shipping soon (though I’m not to expect them to arrive for a few weeks after they’ve shipped). That’s a lot of weeks that I could have been displaying Obama’s logo everywhere I went.

I suppose the cynical answer is that Obama doesn’t really care about people putting signs in their windows, handing out buttons to their friends, putting stickers on their cars, etc., and is really just after the money. That might be the case, though that would be a little surprising, given the amount of importance Obama’s campaign places on the ground game. The online store is supposed to generate revenue and increase campaign visibility, and I seriously doubt the Obama campaign would sacrifice one almost entirely in order to maximize the other.

Rather, it seems like they’re just being really cheap, which I can appreciate. I’m sure they want to maximize the “profit margin” of the Obama gear, and hiring cheaper, slower manufacturers and using cheaper, slower shipping options would certainly be part of that. But really, I’ll be surprised if my “first edition!!!!1!!1!!!” Obama/Biden stickers and buttons get here before election day, at which point their advertising potential will be moot, and the items themselves will either carry a neutral emotional impact or will be depressing reminders of a very bad day.

I don’t have thousands tied up in mutual funds comprised of stocks, backed, through some convoluted process, by AIG. I don’t have a house that’s rapidly losing value, or for that matter a car loan to deal with. It’s times like these where the screams of sheer terror coming from the financial sector have that finite degree of separation from my daily life that it almost feels good to be a lowly student employed by a large healthcare organization. All that aside, it’s really hard not to feel like this is All George’s Fault. For now, I’m reading a lot of articles on The Motley Fool, which is providing some real temperance to the sky-is-falling feeling. I also appreciate the range of opinions realclearmarkets.com is offering (admittedly, it’s easy to click over from RCP).

As I said above, I’ve got little invested (sorry) in this directly, more so indirectly, and yet it’s quickly becoming the issue of Election 2008. In fact, it’s certainly bigger than the election. 700 billion dollars of wealth invested in the market evaporated and more to go considering the slide of nearly 500 points today means it’s not long before this starts taking out the retirement savings of everyone. Thank goodness it’s rapidly becoming the election platform plank that might just beat McSame into a quiet life at one of his dozen homes. Take a little breather from the hot AZ summer John, maybe some time at the beach? Certainly Cindy’s beer distributorship is depression-proof. Retire and let someone with patience and a willingness to learn step in to deal with this issue which you claimed to have little expertise in before last week. It’s hard to look at a January 2009 with McCain/Palin at the helm and envision anything better than the horrible situation the economy is in today.

Which leads me to another Kos post, also in the digg feed, which quotes the former National Review Online publisher, Wick Allison, as saying:

It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

May all fiscal conservatives reach such enlightened positions after this week’s mess.

There’s flip-flopping, and then there’s this. Pheeew.

But in all fairness to John McCain, the disconnect runs deeper in the GOP. How do you premise your entire economic platform on keeping government’s dirty mitts off our sacred financial institutions, then insist the government bail them out when they inevitably succumb to the too-predictable consequences of unchecked, boneheaded, myopic greed? How to reconcile the yawning discrepancy between these two postures? Let me give it a shot…

Everybody knows that free markets are identical with freedom and state planned economies are evil. Taking over an entire industry is about the most evil thing a government can do, but only when that industry is successful. See, when a foreign government dares to nationalize a critical economic resource — let’s say oil — because its private owners — who, just for fun, let’s postulate have their home offices on Wall Street — have failed to handle that national resource in a way that sustains that nation’s economy or benefits its people… well, that’s bad. Real bad. We go to war over stuff like that when other people do it.

But when our own financial institutions get into trouble, the government has to take control in order to right the ship. Otherwise, the economy would suffer! It may seem unfair to expect taxpayers to bail out companies that do stupid, evil things that ultimately lead to their own undoing. But things will be even worse if we don’t. It’s all about the public good!

And so you see, it’s not that Republicans are against government oversight of private enterprise. On the contrary, when the shit happens they advocate the same policies as guys like Hugo Chavez. It’s just that they draw a key distinction between assets and liabilities: when a business is successful, hands off! As long as somebody somewhere can theoretically be making money off it, any form of government intervention would be oppressive. BUT, the moment that moneymaking enterprise ceases to make money and instead creates problems, it’s on the rest of us to dig the moneymakers out of the hole they have dug for us all.

I hope that clears up any confusion. You may now resume voting Republican on the principle that they’re good with money.

You’d think being a creative type and all that that I’d've gotten around to playing with iMovie much sooner than this, but… no. Anyway, it’s my firm belief after listening to the Dems keep repeating that McCain is “four more years of Bush” and focusing on the economy that the Obama campaign actually needs to take a page out of Bill Belichick’s playbook and go after his opponent’s strength, not his weaknesses. So I made this 30 second spot to make my point:

Took me most of this morning. Lemme know what you think… but be gentle, it’s my first time.