In the Pictures Worth A Billion Words department:

Just look at the last day or so.

There was Barack Obama sharing the campaign stage with Bill Clinton, and later with Al Gore.

There was John McCain sharing the campaign stage with …

… Joe the plumber.

Really, no further verbiage necessary.

Something’s starting to smell like month-old blubber (all emphasis added).

Gov. Sarah Palin’s signature accomplishment - a contract to build a 2,760-kilometre pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the lower 48 states - emerged from a flawed bidding process that narrowed the field to a Canadian company with ties to her administration, an Associated Press investigation says.

Beginning at the Republican National Convention in August, the McCain-Palin ticket has touted the pipeline as an example of how it would help the United States achieve energy independence.

Despite Palin’s boast of a smart and fair bidding process, the AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favoured only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefitted the winner, TransCanada Corp.

And contrary to the ballyhoo, there’s no guarantee the pipeline will ever be built; at a minimum, any project is years away, as TransCanada must first overcome major financial and regulatory hurdles.

In interviews and a review of records, the AP found:

-Instead of creating a process that would attract many potential builders, Palin slanted the terms away from an important group - the global energy giants that own the rights to the gas.

-Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.

-The leader of Palin’s pipeline team had been a partner at a lobbying firm where she worked on behalf of a TransCanada subsidiary. Also, that woman’s former business partner at the lobbying firm was TransCanada’s leading private lobbyist on the pipeline deal. Plus, a former TransCanada executive served as an outside consultant to Palin’s pipeline team.

-Under a different set of rules four years earlier, TransCanada had offered to build the pipeline without a state subsidy; under Palin, the company could receive a maximum $500 million. Source

A tad more:

TransCanada Corp. has been awarded a state license, but still needs approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is years away. Canadian regulators must sign off on their portion. First Nation tribes in Canada are objecting to the proposed route. And even if it sails through financial and regulatory hurdles, TransCanada still has no obligation to build the pipeline.

If the company doesn’t complete the project, it could still receive up to $500 million in state subsidies, with startup costs split evenly until the company tries to secure contracts to ship gas through the supply channel. Between the time TransCanada locks in shipping commitments and files for a federal permit, the state will pick up 90 percent of the tab even before ground is broken.
[snip]
According to a new report by the Congressional Research Service, TransCanada and state officials may be underestimating how long the project will take; the target finish date is 2018.

Should TransCanada win federal permission to start digging, U.S. taxpayers could be on the hook, big time. Included in the company’s bid is a proposal for the federal government to absorb up to $75 billion in liability over a 25-year period if the major natural gas suppliers refuse to ship their gas through the line, the CRS report said. Such a measure would require congressional approval. Source

Really not feeling up to composing more than a few words, but the three stories linked below are more than worth your time.

1) Lost generation and a resultant construction of a foundation for the future on quicksand in Iraq.

2) That word “socialism” you Republicans use, it doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means.

3) Blind to the very concept of The Family of Mankind: Torquemada, Cotton Mather and Father Coughlin would be so very, very proud.

Slime beyond slime. If and when this report is verified, the vile, uncivilized culprits with no conscience and less shame behind (and funding) such antediluvian tactics must — must — be exposed for who and what they are.

Over in Indiana, PA and Northern Cambria, PA, volunteers fielded complaints of a massive wave of ugly robocalls both paid for by John McCain’s campaign and those paid for by third parties. The third party call was interactive, and purported to be from Barack Obama himself. The call starts out reasonably, and then “Obama” asks what the listener thinks is the most important issue. Whatever the response, “Obama” then launches into a profane and crazed tirade using “n***er” and other shock language. Source

There is plain and simply no excuse, no explanation of any rationality or merit whatsoever behind which to hide.

Perhaps, in a Palinesque move, McCain is contemplating the oft-mentioned Joe the Plumber as Secretary of the Navy.

After all, Joe’s home state of Ohio is right on one the Great Lakes, so he perforce must know all about ships and stuff like that.

rimshot

Now that ye old scribe has had an opportunity to sit through the debate a second time, some further thoughts.

First, nearly everybody and his brother or sister will (rightly) be shining a spotlight on Sen. McCain’s patronizing air quotes on the “health” (his teminology) of pregnant women.

But bear along for just a bit, and let’s focus on something which this voter found equally objectionable.

That is John McCain’s statement of “We have to change the culture.”

Taken in the context of the venue, the question and the conversation, who is “we?”

One can immediately discount that he was speaking about the American people as “we” as, within our political system and history, the American culture (amorphous as it may be) at any given point in time is, by definition, a function of, derived from and subject to the ebb and flow of change, design, alteration and even revision through trial and error by the building blocks of the people.

Did he mean by “we,” perhaps, Republicans? Conservatives? An evangelitist clique? A blue ribbon commission? Again, taking the statement purely within the context of the argument, one has to also logically say no. Clearly (and one hopes also correctly) he did not have intend to brazenly call for top-down imposition of what and what not constitutes and defines American culture, so let’s discount those possibilities as well.

What is left then is that he meant “The government has to change the culture.”

That, ye old scribe puts it to you, is not and was not an intended function of the American government, its structure, its place and purpose, and its operation as power in service to and at the behest of its people.

Ye old scribe wishes to posit that government’s intended role is to respond to the culture, not to dictate it or limit it to a preconceived mold.

Rather than get long-winded about it, shall give a quick example.

It took 144 years — from 1776 to 1920 — but as the culture evolved, as it tempered and re-thought views, outlook and traditions as a culture on the position in society, abilities and status of women, the government responded by eventually changing the structure and focus of itself, culminating in granting women access to the vote.

Instant reaction: An exercise in chilly civility.

Sen. McCain: Flashes of touchiness, definite extended refrains of defensiveness, and rote repetition (yet again) of stump speech phrases. This voter was struck by a curious sense of a lack of conviction behind too many of his stances and statements.

Sen. Obama: Over-reliance on verbosity, but also peppered with calmly expressed explanations as opposed to sloganeering.

Personal observation: By the use a few days ago of the unfortunately constructed phrase “whip his you-know-what,” Sen. McCain apparently referred to the pinky toe.

Predicted net effect on standings in the polls: About the same as closing the barn door after the livestock has bolted. Rather than agendas being advanced, they were just more firmly nailed into place.

The questions? Mr. Schieffer may as well have been feeding coins to some kind of generic Ask-O-Mat.

(With apologies to Jimmy Durante): Good night, Joe The Plumber, wherever you are.

Confused over the rhetoric and the simplistic (and even wholly fictional) cause and effect charges being thrown about? (Emphasis added.)

As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

Commentators say that’s what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They’ve specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren’t true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

[snip]

The “turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into 2007,” the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets reported Friday. Source

Feeling as inundated and weighed down by events as is ye old scribe? Time to take a deep breath and recharge with a toe-tapping riff inspired by Copland’s masterly theme.

It’s one thing to be partisan; it is quite another to incite, be demeaning and slanderous, and employ McCarthyite tactics. The Republican presidential campaign has crossed that bright line.

Is the McCain-Palin ticket demonstrating desperation by wading neck-deep through the effluent of character assassination, veiled assertions and reams of unsupported, inaccurate and fraudulent labels meant to arouse (unwarranted) suspicions?

Obviously (duh!).

Ah, but that is not all, grasshopper.

Ye old scribe puts it to you that there is also a deliberate long-term calculation at work. Barring a dramatic event equivalent to, oh, infinity on a Richter-like scale, the campaign and its officials can read and have clearly read the handwriting on the wall of the electoral college.

Besides snatching onto the Lowest Vulgar Denominator Express, this is (to these old eyes) a plan in action to poison the well: if it the case that the opposing ticket is going to move in and that McCain-Palin can’t have what they are after, that sorry duo and their enablers will go about methodically hobbling and aborting (in utero, as it were) any viability by dint of victory to their opponents’ tenure and term, broader consequences be damned. What is being undertaken now is the planting and broadcasting of the loathsome, stinking seeds intended to be watered with crocodile tears and foamy spittle for four years; it is a scenario designed and meant to inflict PTSD on the greatest part of the electorate and division and stasis on the greatest part of the political system as possible.

It is now beyond desperate; it is a petty, cheap, vicious, intolerant, selfish and malevolent pattern. It is beneath the dignity of the collective us as a people and country, but it has become crystal clear that it not beneath the contemptible creatures the elephant insignia-ed race has hired and those it is running.

They are not just shooting themselves in the feet, but deliberately emptying the chamber into Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty, trying to bleed the next administration into a political coma and ineffectuality by innuendo, smear and slime.

Harry S Truman was noted for the bromide “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” McCain-Palin will be noted for “If you can’t stand the heat, destroy the kitchen, raze the house and salt the ground it stood on, then linguistically sneer.”

‘We have to destroy the civic structure in order to save it’ is more than evidently what they have chosen.

The two at the top of the ticket and their advisers, surrogates, whisperers in mufti and the rest in cahoots with such a mangled, lunatic ‘philosophy’ have now more than proven both themselves and their cohorts not only undeserving of office but of commerce in the forum.

Instant reaction: Some of the most insipid questions ever thrown onto an official Presidential debate floor.

Both candidates did seem to seek to rise above the level of the questioning, but fell back to talking points and stump speech lines.

Sen. McCain: Blinking at a furious rate, harking back time and again to his “many, many years” in government, yet bringing out very few demonstrable successes during those years. And suggesting a post-socialist policy of having the governmnt hold your mortgage (read: be the default owner of record of the property) while simultaneously assigning a chosen and frozen valuation to the property? Oh, and trying to be a “maverick” and a “steady hand on the tiller” are mutually exclusive claims.

Sen. Obama: Too little specificity (and even less charisma), but a technocrat’s grasp of many of the issues brought up did peek through. Too timorous by half about providing solid reasoning – for example a short list of, say, 5 items – for voting for his ticket rather than just reasons for voting against the other ticket. Much better prepared on the question relating to energy policy and the follow-up.

The closer, physically, they got the further apart, politically, they also got. Reading between the lines, McCain’s Manichaean, black-and-white worldview was contrasted with Obama’s acceptance and internalization that there are a variety of shades of gray in both consideration and option.

Basic outcome: No more than minimal help for either campaign, but rather a deeper etching of the current standings into stone. As someone who suffered through Nixon’s (non-existent) “secret plan” malarkey, have no patience whatsoever and give no credibility whatsoever to McCain’s pallid, shallow drone of “I know how to” do something, which he applied too many times to too many issues, conveniently never providing any substance or policy suggestion. If he truly “knows how,” how about sharing it (and having shared it) as the wars, the economic morass, etc., etc., etc., have and continue to exist?

Too, for someone so eager to crow about voting against pork and earmarks, the vote last week for a bill that dominated the news then, stuffed with 150 billon dollars’ worth, seemed at best a disingenuous claim by McCain.

Remember the first cinematic version of Arounf The World In 80 Days? Maybe too much of a stretch, but tonight Sen. Obama was reminiscent of David Niven versus Sen. McCain as Cantinflas.

And who provided all those identical yellow cameras to the ‘ordinary folks’ in the side galleries? And what else were those folks given in exchange for or as largesse for their appearance?

Brother, can you spare a dime few hundred billion?

What was passed and then, at warp speed, signed into law today?

Flinging open the doors to the treasury, inviting select intimates to the trove, and shouting “Help Yourself.”

And this is just the first helping. They’ll be back for more. Soon.

Marginally shocked there wasn’t included a provision to replace the stars in the flag with 50 screws.

Instant reaction, the shortest version:

Sen. Biden: I can spout off reams of numbers, but projecting ahead the consequences of policy and more specifically laying out the wanted consequences is not my forte. However, he did directly address and answer a lot of questions.

Overall? Professorial versus professional. Came across as more human than he usually does.

Gov. Palin: I can spout off foreign names and soothing generalities, but what the Constitution reads and what the meat rather than the packaging of policy consists of is not my bag., so maybe projecting vapidity by hypnosis through intently staring at the camera will work.

Overall? Image versus substance. Came across as extremely tentative and leery of being vulnerable.

Personally, ye old scribe doesn’t want Jed Clampett anywhere near Pennsylvania Avenue, and that is who Gov. Palin most came across as. Wouldn’t choose Sen. Biden for the White House either, but as the one designated to wait in the wings and be more able to get value and, more important, validity from from doing so, can swallow it.