This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon's 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left", adding:

"It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys--you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was."

It certainly was strange, compared with the nation's politics at the start of the 1960s.

In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion--Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for "trash cinema." And we'll also look at Bobby Kennedy's Fascist Moment--and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan's A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.

Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Update: Welcome readers of InstaPundit, the Brothers Judd, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog at NRO, and--appropriately enough--the New Nixon Blog. Please look around, there's lots here we think you'll enjoy.

I remember reading a book on Stanley Kubrick that said that the great director wanted a large circular table in the middle of Dr. Strangelove's war room set, so that it would symbolically appear to audiences that the generals and the president were playing a very high stakes game of poker.

Here's a bluff of another sort:

You know where that very important $700-billion figure came from?

Here's a quote from that Forbes story:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

They made it up to be sufficiently ginormous to frighten everyone into rapid action.

And it worked.

Not yet.

Andrew Breitbart has a modest proposal for Hollywood:

Just last week, the Nobel Prize-winning and Academy Award-adjacent ("An Inconvenient Truth") Mr. Gore told students, "The world has lost ground to the climate crisis," and made a dramatic call to action:

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration."

But even if those coal plants are in foreign lands like Ohio and Pennsylvania, it doesn't mean we Southern Californians must stand still and let the planet implode in front of us. That's why I'm taking Al Gore's lead and starting Code Green, a Hollywood organization whose purpose is to use civil disobedience to thwart the unnecessary use of energy in the entertainment industry.

Inspired by Jodie Evans, who started the antiwar group Code Pink, the menopausal performance artists known for interrupting public debate, Code Green will demand oversight over her group because, after all, her tidy little rage club is based in L.A.

No more trips from L.A. to Minneapolis on Northwest Airlines to protest the Republican National Convention. (I saw you wearing that tiara - in first class!) Mother Earth coughed up some smog while you chanted at the GOP, "Not one dollar, not one more, Don't you dare buy Bush's war."

You are now not free to move around the country.

From now on, Jodie and Arianna, too, will be bashing their Bushes from home, telecommuting their unrequited anger by way of solar panels and the Internet.

The days of hoarding electricity and gas are over, including by the truest believers. Carbon credits are now as worthless as Lehman stock.

There are new rules that we will all have to adhere to, whether we like it or not.

Here is the Code Green four-point "Gang Green" mandate:

1.) Directive: Stop film and television production.

This will be the first sentence of the rewrite of the Kyoto Protocol.

Each show or movie leaves a massive carbon footprint that cannot be erased even by the best CGI masters. There will be no more "Grey's Anatomy" spinoffs, nor will there be any more labored attempts to squeeze out lame sentimentality from child actors pretending to be smarter than us. They will now have to work at Pinkberry, where those little saps belong.

Tough to argue with that--since I proposed a very similar tonic for Tinseltown over a year ago.

(However, since Andrew beneficently links to your humble narrator on his mighty and sprawling Breitbart.com Website, I'm more than willing to chalk this up to a case of synchronicity and GMTA, to borrow a little of the secret lingo from the Code Green code book.)

Allah Pundit has the gory details here:

House Republicans weren't willing to swallow a bitter pill today so they'll swallow a more bitter pill later this week. And guess what? They'll still get killed at the polls in November. Bill Kristol thinks McCain's only chance now is to stop campaigning (again) and come back to D.C. to try to drive through a compromise. If he succeeds, it'll prove his leadership and calm the markets. I don't see how he's supposed to pull that off, though, when the entire Democratic leadership will be primed to whine about how he's only making things worse by being there, is ruining delicate negotiations, etc. If Kristol's serious about solving the crisis and willing to sacrifice electoral gain to do so, there's an easy compromise solution: Have McCain and Obama do some sort of joint appearance, maybe a presser, urging support for a bailout. That'll swing public opinion sufficiently to remove the political incentives to voting no and give Pelosi the 10 votes she needs to pass it now. There's no gain for McCain at the polls in doing so, admittedly, but he's the guy who preaches "country first." Here's his chance.

Howard Fineman of the Obama-cheerleading Newsweek writes, "The Obama Administration began at midnight Sunday"--and at the moment, it's tough to argue with him; though hopefully Obama won't prolong the current financial malaise as long as FDR and Carter did theirs.

"They told me if I voted for John Kerry we'd end up with socialism. They were right!"

So Bill Clinton let Osama bin Laden go, but captured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now there's an awesome rep for the history books.

For those insomniacs checking in with us in the wee wee hours, be warned--here's a little something from Gateway Pundit guaranteed not to generate sweet dreams:

The financial crisis is real. Most people don't realize it yet, but banks, investment managers and corporate treasurers around the world all know what is going on. It started with the Freddie - Fannie collapse. They wrote loans to individuals who they shouldn't have. Government policies encouraged loans to minorities and the underwriting function of banks was no longer approving loans upon an individual's creditworthiness but their race was now a factor in the loan decision. In 1997 President Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, claimed Fannie Mae had exhibited "racial discrimination" and proposed that 50 percent of the GSEs' (Fannie and Freddie) loan portfolio be made up of loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers by 2001. When individuals are given loans based on race and not their ability to pay, it is inevitable that bad loans would be written and foreclosures would come. That's what happened and in a big way.

This caused ripple effects throughout the financial services industry. Firms who consolidated loan packages or guaranteed their creditworthiness were caught in the middle. Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers and others went under. The largest insurance company in the US by some measurements was one of the casualties (AIG). With insurance companies around the globe, AIG is hoping to have some business left when all is over. The government stepped in to rescue this giant by providing capital for the firm while it liquidates portions of its business to pay off the investment derivatives which caused it trouble and then pay off the government loan. The investments became bad when the mortgages went south.

The ripple affect continues. Putnam funds, the largest money market fund in the US and rated AAA, had to close its doors since money managers began to realize that Putnam's assets were not guaranteed by the Federal Government (unlike cash in banks and savings and loans) and began to ask for their money. Putnam had to sell securities in order to meet the demand. Although they have begun to pay their account holders, their reputation and money market accounts in general have been severely damaged.

And it only gets worse from there.

The Washington Post says, "Congressional Leaders Announce Breakthrough in Bailout Bill Negotiations":

Congressional leaders and the Bush administration last night struck a historic accord to insert the government deeply into the nation's financial markets, agreeing to spend up to $700 billion to relieve Wall Street of troubled assets backed by faltering home mortgages.

Shouldn't that be "more deeply into the nation's financial markets"? Especially since inserting the government deeply into the nation's financial markets caused all the trouble in the first place.

Rich Lowry:

Pelosi unloads on House Republicans. Why is it always OK for Democrats to call Republicans "unpatriotic"?

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Because it has no sting.

But I thought dissent itself was patriotic.

Update: "We're staring down the barrel of the worst disaster since Katrina or maybe even 9/11 and these people are playing douchebag psych-out games with each other."

Individuality is fine--as long as we all do it together.

Right Wing News posits that it as unfortunate as Obama forgetting the name of the soldier on his bracelet was, it was the tone of his response that created the takeaway moment of last night's debate:

And from yesterday's debate: "I've got a bracelet too." A lot of conservatives want to give Obama heat for the fact that he couldn't remember the name on his bracelet, but I actually find that forgivable. Obama was in the hot seat and, at moments like that (at least if you're me), names are the first thing to go. The sin wasn't the memory failure, the sin was that he made the statement in the first place.

Let's start with some context: In connection with his belief that there is no peace and honor without victory, John McCain told the moving story of the moment Matthew Stanley's mother gave McCain Matthew's bracelet and asked him to wear it and, more importantly, to honor and give meaning to Matthew's death by making the Iraq War an American defeat, not an American victory.

Obama, had he wanted to, could have scored some substantive points by immediately saying that we don't honor one man's death by creating more dead, or some such argument. That seemed to be where he was heading, but I tuned out because I was so overwhelmed by his actual response: "I've got a bracelet too."

What is this? Kindergarten? Could anything show more clearly what a selfish, self-centered, shallow man Obama is. McCain is talking about real people, and he's talking about how the beliefs he shares with those real people drive him to his understanding that, both for the good of the nation and for the honor of her troops, America must leave Iraq as a strong, viable nation. It breaks faith with both America and her troops to slink away as Obama so wants to do. This is a deep substantive argument. The bracelet wasn't the central point. It was simply a human-interest lead-in to that point.

And what does Obama say? "I've got a bracelet too." What that means, translated, is "I can't think of an original argument, I don't have a deep emotional story, I don't have sound policy justifications for abandoning Iraq now that we're trembling on the verge of actual and complete success but, 'Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah -- I've got a bracelet too.'" The attitude and ignorance behind the statement was appalling.

If this was just one example, it would be bad enough, but we've seen this before. When Hillary, the darling of huge chunks of American women, self-deprecatingly (and rather charmingly) acknowledges that she grates on some people, Obama snaps back with the condescending "You're likable enough." If I'd been Hillary, I would have marched across the stage and bitten him. So, I suspect, would all of her female followers.

And then when Palin comes on the scene, this man of Indonesia, Hawaii and Chicago suddenly discovers his inner Southerner and, when speaking of Republican policies, comes out with an old Southern expression: "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." At that moment, the remaining chunk of American women who aren't Obama acolytes lunged for their TV screens, teeth bared.

The MSM, no doubt recognizing how damaging this statement, is going to downplay "I've got a bracelet too" in the hope that it doesn't enter the pantheon of memorable moments in debate history. It's therefore our responsibility to make sure that this telling moment into Obama's character does not vanish into the abyss.

Elsewhere, Roger L. Simon explores Obama's Kissinger Blunder.

And Newsbusters opens up the Memory Hole: "Media Fail to Correct Obama's Claim of No Al-Qaeda in Iraq Before Invasion."

Update: Related thoughts here.

More: Biden's gaffe slowly begins to permeate the cocoon: the L.A. Times' campaign blogger writes, "Barack Obama: We'll never forget what's-his-name."

Kyle Smith reviews the new leftwing agitpropumentary on Lee Atwater:

Atwater's painful demise seems to delight the largely left-leaning pundits assessing Atwater's legacy, which inspired Karl Rove among others. Howard Fineman of Newsweek, for instance, says, "Life gets even with you in the end," an ugly comment that sounds a lot like the liberal equivalent of calling AIDS God's punishment for gays.

Mewanwhile, Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria begins his latest article with the following opening sentence: "Will someone please put Sarah Palin out of her agony?"

At the start of 2005, shortly before Newsweek started tossing Korans into toilets and American flags into garbage cans, Fineman wrote:

A political party is dying before our eyes -- and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

Might want to look a bit closer in the mirror, fellas.

Greg Pollowitz writes, "In the debate, Senator Obama laid out his four conditions for passing the bailout bill", "Yet 48 hours earlier, he had five conditions:"

Fifth, we both agree that this financial rescue package should move on its own without any earmarks or other measures. We have different views about the need for other action, but this must be a clean bill.

As Greg writes, "Yeah. . .can't have a clean bill now, can we? Not when there are billions for ACORN at stake."

Or as Glenn Reynolds puts it, "You know, it would be easier for me to believe this was a crisis, if the people in charge were acting like it was a crisis, instead of just an opportunity for graft. Then again, to some of these people, everything is just an opportunity for graft."

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has the change spam we need today:

Dear Sirs,

Please do not be alarmed at the way I am contacting you, and I trust God you will see your way to assisting me.

I am Mr. Henry Paulson, and I currently serve as Secretary of Treasury in a North American country, the US of A. I am due to be receiving the sum of USD700 billion (seven hundred billions), only the money seems to be held up. I got your name from the girl who runs the computer. This is where I need your help.

As soon as you can, God willing, I will need you to give me the number of your American account where I can wire this sum. For your trouble, as part of the settlement, I will give you the sum of exactly nothing.

Please be well, and I trust in God you will assist me honestly and without delay.

Yours, truly,

Mr. Henry Paulson
USA Secretary of Treasure

Via Steve Green, who also spots a New York Times parody (yes, there is a difference, believe it or not) that hits the mark quite well.

Jennifer Rubin thinks she may have spotted it last night.

"And now we can write: Round 1 in the contest to see who's most in the tank for Obama goes to CNN."

Bad news, but not entirely unexpected, as the legendary actor had been ailing for some time.

First CityWide Change Bank believes in change:

Bob Owens writes, "If he can't handle a simple debate without falling apart, how is he going to handle a Presidency?"

And elsewhere, Michelle Malkin spots the telling gesture of the debate.

Update: Jennifer Rubin asks, "Who Won the Debate? More importantly, who does everyone think won?":

How did they hold up on temperament? Obama seemed peeved, and a number of observers - including Juan Williams and Alex Castellanos -- agreed. McCain was occasionally funny and poked at Obama but showed none of the nastiness or ill-temper which his foes identify.

But the "gotcha" may have been from Obama -- who eight times conceded that McCain was "right" on a point. McCain rushed out a video capturing a number of these.

So how did Obama and McCain fair in the opinion wars? The telling difference: Obama's spinners tended to call it a draw while McCain's group was ecstatic. William Krstol on FOX said "no knockout but on the offense throughout." Nina Easton, also on FOX, criticized Obama -- "something bland and policy-speak" about him she thought. Juan Williams conceded that Obama didn't really successfully tie George W. Bush to Obama.

We'll have more as the night goes on. But for once this week the McCain camp is feeling a spring in their step.

Orrin Judd concludes:

Any analysis has to begin from the fact that the media and the Left have built Senator Obama up so much that a guy who's a mediocre debater at best was widely expected by the electorate to dominate. Thus, he's a loser if their performance was roughly equal and a big loser if you think he had a rough night.

Finally, Steve Green has a mild point of contention with Andrew Sullivan.

While change is an ever-accelerating dynamic, some things always remain the same. Whether it's 1960, 1988, 2000, 2004, or this year, the Republican presidential candidate in an election year can invariably count on plenty of CBS from the Tiffany Network.

As the headline on Jim DeMint's blog says, "What Caused The Economic Crisis? Watch This!"

Viral marketing at its finest!

(Especially since I heard about the site via an email from its author, who says that his next project might be "Measles for McCain"--though that could be a bit of a strain...)

"Is Bill Clinton deliberately undermining Obama?"

Update: Almost a decade and a half ago, Clinton said, "I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans." Now more than ever, judging by the title of this post by Pejman Yousefzadeh.

"Only in Berkeley: Tree Sitters Accused of Racism."

Elsewhere in the news from the town that reason forgot, "Code Pink declares victory and folds tent", according to the This Ain't Hell blog.

I think Code Pink's "victory" over the Marines (one which sees Code Pink backing down and the Marines staying put) is an example of that "Peace With Papier-Mache" that Nixon was always talking about...

This rapidly developing story just in to the Tiffany Network:

CBS 'Early Show' Newsflash: Okay to Be Gay in Hollywood

Now if we can only get more groups out of the closet there...

"Dear Editor," Sarah Palin wrote in 2002. "San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase 'under God' away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words."

David Levinson Wilk of Politico claims that "Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats"--and he should know:

I am partly to blame.

On Jan. 8, 2005, I purposefully and unapologetically became the first person to ever construct a crossword puzzle for The New York Times that featured this five-letter answer:

OBAMA.

Earlier this week, Steve Schmidt, John McCain's senior campaign adviser, lambasted the Times for being "totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate." The GOP, it seems, is finally catching on to a once-hidden truth:

Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats.

According to the puzzle database maintained by Cruciverb.com, ever since that game-changing day in 2005, OBAMA has appeared regularly as an answer in New York Times crossword puzzles. With its wonderfully convenient alternating series of commonly used vowels and consonants, OBAMA has been the answer to the clues "Senator who wrote 'Dreams From My Father,'" "Future senator who delivered the 2004 Democratic convention keynote address" and "Presidential candidate born in Hawaii."

But what about MCCAIN? Shockingly, not once has MCCAIN been an answer in a crossword in the New York Times, The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. No MCCAIN, no JOHNMCCAIN, no SENATORMCCAIN, not even his most recent sobriquet, the presidential-sounding JOHNSMCCAINIII.

Gee, now there's a shock.

For most on the left, it's always 1968, the summer of Mobius Loops, and the year of the hippie poseur. Not to mention their only marginally more grown-up appearing peers, such as RFK, who said, "The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow." But Edward Blum writes that to voting rights activists, "It Will Always Be 1965."

Kevin D. Williamson writes, "We've heard much from the media about CDOs, CDSs, and other previously obscure abbreviations. But we should be hearing more about this acronym: ACORN":

Imagine if the housing bubble hadn't burst, but there hadn't been all those dodgy subprime loans made and then securitized. We'd be reading stories about how America is having a wonderful housing boom but the poor and minorities are being left out. There's lots of greed and stupidity in this story, but we shouldn't ignore the fact that a big part of what is wrong comes from bad public policy designed to encourage homeownership, particularly among the poor. Unintended consequences are not to be denied.

But we're not going to hear much about ACORN's role in all this, or, by extension, Senator Obama's.

Or as Robert Stowe England wrote in 1993:

QUIETLY, behind the scenes, the Clinton Administration is preparing for the biggest regulatory crackdown of recent years. Attorney General Janet Reno is linking up with banking regulators and with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to end the supposed epidemic of discrimination against minorities in making home loans. The implications for society at large are ominous.

Paging Cassandra. Miss Cassandra to the red courtesy phone, please.

Update: Robert Bidinotto has a recent post chockablock with links, quotes, and updates titled, "Why the Bubble Burst."

Hey, 57 states, 40 days 'til new president's sworn in, FDR on TV in '29--forget it, they're rolling. (Even if the teleprompter isn't.)

Kathryn Jean Lopez posts an update from Sen. Jim DeMint's office:

We've just been alerted that despite House Democrats relenting on extending bans on offshore drilling and oil shale in the continuing resolution (CR) appropriations bill, Democrat Senate Leader Harry Reid has decided to sneak an extension of the oil shale ban through as Congress fights over the financial bailout. Oil shale in America's West is estimated to hold be between 800 billion and 2 trillion barrels of oil -- that is more than three times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia alone.

Here is the text of Reid's proposed new ban on oil shale, that he is trying to add as an amendment to the CR or move seperately as a "stimulus" package, or we should say an anti-stimulus package if this is included.

Sec 1602 continues ban on oil shale. The language follows:

SEC. 1602. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, including section 152 of division A of H.R. 2638 (110th Congress), the Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009, the terms and conditions contained in section 433 of division F of Public Law 110-161 shall remain in effect for the 19 fiscal year ending September 30, 2009.

It would be an insult to all Americans if Senate Democrats worked to bailout Wall Street while damaging our future prosperity by banning development of vast energy reserves in oil shale.

Which may help to explain this headline:

Liberal Democrats vow moratorium on offshore drilling to return in '09

Meanwhile, as Glenn Reynolds notes:

AND YOU THOUGHT JOE BIDEN WAS UNFRIENDLY TO COAL: "Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon."

Will he be advising Obama on energy policy?

Certainly in spirit.

The Northeast Corridor is one giant blue state, so presumably they'll be OK with paying high energy prices come the winter.

Two new multimedia software updates will be making their way into the toolkits of many in the Army of Davids this fall. This week, Adobe announced their latest CS4 lineup of products, updating Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and other Adobe products. Meanwhile, Cakewalk has announced Sonar 8, their more-or-less annual update to their flagship Sonar digital audio workstation platform for Windows.

Along with Adobe's Ultra chromakey program and accompanying virtual sets, recent iterations of all of the above products are what powers my Silicon Graffiti video blog. And speaking of video blogging, I have an article in the September issue of Nuts & Volts magazine on that topic. (No, that's not me on the cover; and unfortunately, the article is only available on dead tree at the moment.)

This video, originally produced in January when I was still getting it all together, gives you a sense of what a product like Ultra 2 can do--this was only the second video I had shot with it; and was still learning my around the program, and yet, I think it does a reasonable job of walking the viewer through what's possible via DIY video.

What's next? RAM power! Lots and lots of memory will soon start appearing in your computers; as the 64-bit computing revolution is still in its infancy.

Hey, forget FDR's 1929 fireside video chats in stereophonic Bidenvision! Independent third party presidential candidate Dave Burge--the Maverick's Maverick--explains the basics of the credit bailout to you in this exclusive man-in-the-TGIFriday debate.

It's sort of like the famous Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate of 1959, but combined with a heaping helping of all-you-can-eat nachos and gallons of half-priced happy-hour Margaritas in genuine polystyrene cocktail glasses.

Newsbusters' Brent Baker writes, "Couric Scolds McCain for Palin's 'Great Depression' Scare -- Which Couric Proposed to Palin."

And meanwhile, Joe Biden's Pangea of gaffes this week continues to pay dividends--as blogger "Right Wing Professor" noted, Katie never batted an eye during Joe Biden's wacky Depression-era-flashback on Monday.

Mark Levin writes, "I hope McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick":

Ok, let's say the debate is suspended by both camps. Then what? Bush is pushing hard for some kind of massive bailout deal, and will do so in his speech tonight. The conservatives in Congress are resisting all of this - and good for them. McCain says we have to get something done and work together, which means some kind of massive deal that is unlikely to satisfy conservatives. I hope McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick.

Jonah Goldberg adds, "Mark makes a good point. If McCain does go to Congress and helps rally reluctant Republicans (and they really are reluctant). It will in effect become the McCain bailout, at least as far as conservatives are concerned."

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl has some advice--and who amongst us doesn't, these days?--for McCain:

Let the Left laugh, with Obama saying he wants to continue campaigning and debating, I'd do two things were I McCain.

1) Say you can understand Obama's point of view as he has never been engaged in anything this serious on Capitol Hill, or anywhere else.

and 2) Volunteer to let his VP nominee sit in for him against Obama on Friday.

Yes, I realize the media is still all about Palin - who cares. I'd make the offer.

Maybe Palin would be better off debating this bitter resident of Pennsylvania.

Update: Welcome Riehl World View readers; check out this interesting chess game being played out in the Senate, with Harry Reid being forgainst John McCain returning to the Senate within the space of 24 hours, as Ed Morrissey of Hot Air notes:

[Reid] wanted McCain on the hook so that Reid could blame McCain for the political fallout. When McCain called Reid's bluff -- and that's what appears to have happened here -- Reid did what Reid always does: retreat.

I think Reid fears more than just the idea that McCain will "risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation's economy." What Reid fears is that McCain will return to lead the Republican effort to reach a compromise, and the Senate and House GOP will let him do it. If McCain takes ownership of the bailout effort and manages to get his suggestions on limiting executive compensation and so on as part of the finished product, he will be able to trot McCain-Dodd on the campaign trail as yet another reform he's accomplished by working across the aisle. And in a time of crisis, no less.

And what will Obama be able to say? He gave a couple of speeches and raised cash for himself while McCain went to work for the nation.

If that's what McCain and the Republicans have in mind, this could be the coup of the entire campaign. While Obama went out and sucked up to fundraisers, McCain built the bipartisan compromise that saved the American financial system. If he succeeds, McCain will have trumped Obama on what should have been the Democrats' best issue.

This post started with a quote from Mark Levin hoping that "McCain and his advisors have thought this through beyond today and tomorrow, gimmick or no gimmick." It seems--at least to some extent--that they most certainly have.

Richard Miniter calls McCain's campaign suspension "a shrewd move for the McCain campaign", if not necessarily an example of "country first."--Read the whole thing.

Details at Hot Air; politically, it seems like an interesting move, somewhat reminiscent of this earlier time out. But how will voters--not to mention the junior senator from Illinois--respond?

Update: Well, that was fast:

However a senior Obama campaign official said Obama "intends to debate. The debate is on."

An Obama campaign official said the Democratic presidential candidate called McCain this morning to suggest a joint statement of principles.

McCain called back this afternoon and suggested returning to Washington.

Obama is willing to return to Washington "if it would be helpful." But Obama intends to debate on Friday, an official said.

And thus McCain's next YouTube ad writes itself.

Sky News: "Singer Bette Midler Quits Touring To Help Save The Planet."

Glad to see that at least one celebrity has taken my advice after Al Gore's Live Earth concert last year:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

As Daltry told the The Sun, "I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel". Each concert will require massive transportation efforts involving jet planes and tractor-trailers, hundreds of thousands of watts of electricity to power the lighting and sound gear, and the deforestation required to print at least couple of hundred thousand souvenir programs (and many more no doubt, for sale afterwards). And heck, just think of all of the methane emissions coming from the stadiums' rest rooms, where, no matter how much the audience promises, the Sheryl Crow Rule is incredibly difficult to enforce.

But in the minds of its participants, a cause like Live Earth is worth it. But a generic, everyday, run of the mill concert shouldn't be. So go out with a bang, rock stars--and then, don't be hypocritical puritans; take the sort of pledge that even the Goracle won't.

More news regarding energy and an even bigger celebrity, here.

Last week, Ace had some thoughts on polls:

We haven't lost -- but we are behind.

Four or five twists to go, and we need two or three of those twists to go our way.

BTW, I am not getting into the constant these-polls-are-wrong/oversampled/etc. game. I played that all through 2006 and wound up looking like a chump.

My general take is to buy polls -- especially as regards direction, if not exact numbers -- unless there's some clear problem with them.

The constant complaining that any poll I don't like must be flawed is a mug's game.

I think Ace is right about the polls--but I think we can make an exception for this one.

When an already closed loop is hermetically sealed:

Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase "God damn America." Wright's comments were widely reported and widely discussed beginning with an ABC News report six months ago. Barack Obama even had to give a much-publicized speech because of those words, and others. But the newspaper of record has never seen fit to publish Wright's quote in its news pages. Until today.

If my search of the Nexis database is correct, Wright's quote first appeared in the Times in a column by Bill Kristol on March 17. It was mentioned again in a column by Maureen Dowd on March 23. It appeared in an editorial on April 26. It appeared in a column by the public editor on May 4, and also in an article in the Week in Review section on that same day.

But never in the front section of the paper. Until now. As with the April 26 editorial, today's mention of "God damn America" is in the context of reporting on attack ads targeting Obama. But still, it's there, on page one, for the first time.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama's Wikipedia page being vandalized highlights the excesses of the sclerotic Gray Lady's polar opposite--How's that "anybody can edit it" thing working out for Wikipedia?

The hacking of Obama's Wiki page puts him in interesting company, alongside Sarah Palin, Mike Love, Mike Bloomberg, and former RFK associate, John Seigenthaler, Sr--and no doubt, many more who have entries within The Faith-Based Encyclopedia.

Related: At City Journal, Adam Thierer explores both closed and open information models and writes, "The Internet Isn't Dying--On the contrary, the Web is just catching its second wind."

Jonah Goldberg spots the media playing the race card on Obama:

I have no doubt that the Bradley effect is real. But the Bradley effect does not reflect racism; it captures voters' fear of appearing racist. There's no reason to assume those who lie to pollsters are racists. But for Obama supporters and the media, poll results are some kind of sacred, binding covenant. If voters don't keep their promise, the media have no problem seeing racism at work.

The media's obsession with race in this election is probably fueling the Bradley effect. Repeating over and over that voting against Obama is racist only makes non-racist people embarrassed to admit that they plan to vote for McCain.

Another rich irony is that the only racists who matter in this election are the ones in the Democratic Party. News flash: Republicans aren't voting for the Democratic nominee because they're Republicans. A new AP-Yahoo News poll claims that racial prejudice is a significant factor among the independents and Democrats Obama needs to win, specifically among Hillary Clinton's primary voters. According to the pollsters' statistical modeling, support for Obama may be as much as 6 percentage points lower than it would be if there were no white racism.

I'm skeptical about those findings, as well as the overemphasis on race generally. But to the extent that race is a factor, here's the richest irony of all: Obama's problem is with precisely those voters the Democratic Party claims to fight for, working- and middle-class white folks. Of course, Democrats can't openly complain that their own vital constituency is racist.

I don't know--Nora Ephron's complaint on that topic was pretty darn out in the open during the primaries.

Update: As is this article from Monday's edition of the typically uber-liberal (if I recall the tone of the paper correctly from when I was living in the Delaware Valley until a decade ago) Philadelphia Daily News.

As Kathryn Jean Lopez writes, this election wouldn't be the same without Joe Biden. In addition to the aforementioned Barack-Olian Cluster-Gaffe--which actually snowballed to true classic proportions after Joe's appearance on CBS last night, this was Joe's other moment of greatness from his interview with Katie Couric, transcribed by the Politico's Ben Smith:

Joe Biden's denunciation of his own campaign's ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.

He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed," Biden told Couric. "He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

As Reason's Jesse Walker footnotes it: "And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, 'Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?'"

Actually, you'd probably be wondering what happened to Felix, but still: If Sarah Palin had said this, CBSNBCABCCNNMSNBC would be running it on a never-ending loop today.

Update: "At any rate, it looks like Biden learned his history from Faber College." Hey--knowledge is good.

More: "What's funnier is that Katie Couric didn't catch it."

I think this might be the first presidential campaign gaffe equivalent of a music mash-up, as multiple unforced errors by both a presidential and vice-presidential nominee get chopped down into a fine, fine puree by the patented Obama campaign's Super Gaffe-O-Matic '76 blending machine. First up, via InstaPundit, here's Joe Biden on the 6:30 PM CBS News, complete with video:

Barack Obama's running mate says a campaign ad that mocked Republican presidential candidate John McCain as an out-of-touch, out-of-date computer illiterate was "terrible" and would not have been done had he known about it.

Obama, McCain's Democratic rival, launched the ad earlier this month, part of an aggressive push to slow McCain's rise in the polls after he chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate. It included unflattering footage of Sen. McCain at a hearing in the early '80s, wearing giant glasses and an out-of-style suit, intersperse