I'm not sure how long this link is going to work, but it's a 1 minute SNL sketch that pretty much sums up the way I've been viewing advertising from financial companies these days:

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/reliable-investments/698541/

Also, is anyone else amused by all the commercials for bankrupt companies? Like the WaMu free checking accounts...

The Center for Economic and Policy Research published a short table comparing how we're doing in 2008 with how we were doing in 2000. It's worth a quick once-over, especially since the possibility of continuing the economic policies of the past 8 years is at the forefront of the current election.

I haven't decided if I should post anything about the first debate.

My Helpful Reader

Special thanks to a watchful reader, who, agreeing with my critique of the media, brought the following pair of supporting details to my attention:

First, on the subject of financial reporting that's more ridiculous than informative, a CNN.com article compared $8 billion to the following things:
"– A little over four years of domestic sales of Doritos.
– Approximately two-thirds of the annual gambling revenues in the state of Nevada.
– About three days of US oil imports.
– About a month’s worth of US cigarette sales.
– About ten months’ worth of US lung cancer treatment costs. (A worthy effort to be sure, but one that wouldn’t be nearly as costly if it weren’t for the cigarette numbers above.)"

I especially like the last two. Well played, CNN. You've moved from apple pies on the air to Doritos and a complete tangent in print.

Secondly, at one point during this financial meltdown, ALL TEN "Top 10" news stories on CNN.com had something to do with one or more celebrities (this has been uncorroborated by me, and would be hard to do so--even if it were 8 out of 10, I still think it would strongly support my arguments).

Hackery, thy name is American media! And thanks to my helpful reader for giving me more credibility on top of what I can only assume was an already prodigious amount.

My Dissatisfaction with the Media

The media clearly doesn't know what it's talking about when it comes to the economy. They never did, but it's becoming painfully obvious. I've observed the following headlines/clips/quotes in the past week (note: may not be 100% accurate as I'm doing this from memory):

"Buffet's $5B investment in Goldman Sachs could pay off." Wowzers. The world's premiere investor puts a whopping five billion dollars into a single company's preferred stock and there's actually a chance one of the greatest financial geniuses of our time could MAKE money on such a deal? Jimminy-Gee Willikers!

"Buffet's $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs is good for Goldman Sachs." Thanks. No, really, thank YOU.

"It's as American as apple pie. McDonald's apple pie that is. 2,000 of them. That's how much 700 billion dollars would buy for every single American." All right, CNN. Several questions. How is that relevant? How is that a remotely good comparison? What does it have to do with the situation? Who's going to understand anything better than they did before that? Do enough people think in terms of thousands of tiny pies to make that an accessible analogy? And finally, how does the fact that money CAN purchase apple pies--though in this case the money in question won't--make the situation, the bailout plan, or even the sum more "American"? Lizmonster, I want an answer to at least that last one.

"Bush: U.S. in midst of serious financial crisis." I suppose the fact that this is news to the president makes it news, but I'm pretty sure even Bush was told to say it was a crisis before tonight, when that headline was posted. If you don't have anything productive to say, don't say anything at all.

Which actually brings me to another disturbing media trend: celebrity news. I've noticed a lot more celebrity news creeping into my regular news, in part because most of the real news is economic, and not enough reporters think they can fake looking like they know something about economics. So we get celebrity gossip, which I suppose might also be a marketing decision to make readers feel better ("I don't understand any of these current event headlines, but I totally get that Lindsay Lohan's dad is pissed off his daughter's dating a lesbian stripper.")

Yeah, I figured I'd mention Lindsay Lohan, since her name seems to generate a lot of hits for me. Maybe I should work the word "nude" into this post too. Hey look at that, just did. Anyway, the following celebrity news is almost equally stunning:

From the FRONT PAGE of USA Today: "America loves New York" (actual headline). Now, it turns out they meant America the actress (from the show Ugly Betty), who is apparently filming there and seems to find most aspects of the city acceptable or better. Front page? Really? You couldn't just show a graph of corporate credit spreads to treasuries or a cartoon of Hank Paulson's old Wall Street buddies leaving a bag of flaming poo on his front porch in the middle of the night (you could depict them snickering behind bushes as the bathrobe-clad Treasury Secretary yells at no one in particular--I seriously think this would be a great political cartoon, by the way).

Also, yes, Lindsay Lohan is having a homosexual relationship with a stripper. I expect this to make the news, because it's (a) Lindsay Lohan (b) a stripper and (c) another gay celebrity. But Lindsay Lohan's dad (whose name I couldn't conjure if my life depended on it) is getting as much coverage as the celebrity would get under normal circumstances. First, who cares, and second, how is it news that overprotective fathers might not be thrilled about their daughters dating lesbian strippers.

In other gay celebrity news, American Idol runner up Clay Aiken has announced that he's a gay father--claiming he didn't want his 8-month old son to grow up with a father who wasn't completely honest. Thanks for the update, Clay, but everyone knew you were a gay father from the minute they found out you were a father.

And in further celebrity news, Sarah Palin has met with several world leaders, and is planning on meeting several more, for a total of 9 this week at the UN. This brings the total number of foreign leaders with whom she's exchanged a few words up to 9, and the total number of Americans with more foreign policy experience than she has down to several million.

So I just got back from a ridiculous night of drinking and bar hopping with a Managing Director of a mutual fund company and a State Representative, who gave us an awesome nighttime tour of the capital. My favorite moment came as we were all yelling about national economic policy to a bar-provided soundtrack of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." The people you meet in a Harrisburg.

I also can't wait to be home in what I hope is 18 hours.

My Take on the Bailout

So Treasury Secretary Paulson is asking for 700 billion dollars to buy troubled assets from struggling financial corporations. The process of figuring out if this is good or bad is very much like an ogre, in that there are many layers.

At first, this seems like a huge waste of tax-payer money. Why should public funds to to help private corporations, and worse, taxpayers? Paul Krugman, an economist I respect a lot, takes this view. Especially if we're paying good money and getting junk in return.

But once I delved into it, I started to support the plan. The companies holding the bad assets need liquidity, that is, they need cash they can do stuff with. Their bad assets, while not worth nearly what we thought they were, still will pay out SOMETHING in the long run. If the U.S. Government buys them cheap enough, we'll help the companies while also getting a great return on investment (and it incentivizes leaders to help struggling home-owners, since their plan looks better if not-rich people get to keep their homes). And the US Government doesn't care as much about liquidity...it can borrow quite easily (people love treasury securities these days). We can get a good long term return. And will it drive up the deficit? In this case, I--a deficit hawk--can proudly say, "Who cares?" If we borrow at 5% and invest at 11% (maybe 8% after you adjust for the risk and the defaults we don't expect), we're turning a profit. Sure we have more debt, but it's offset by a good investment. If it's done right, this could be a great for the taxpayers financially in the short run (more solid financial sector) and the long run (a profitable investment that helps offset debt).

But then I read another editorial, by William Kristol, one of the most conservative people in all of media. He actually agreed with his colleague, Krugman, a bleeding heart liberal (well, for an economist) about this plan. So I took a closer look.

Note that I said the plan could be great IF IT'S DONE RIGHT. What Paulson is asking for is nowhere in the ballpark of "done right." There's absolutely NO transparency, NO accountability, and he wants the plan to be subject to the review of no court, no congressional committee, and no government agency. Basically, he's asking for immunity up front so he doesn't have the rush of trying to get it once he screws everything up! He can dole out contracts to private investment managers, play favorites and give fees to Republican party cronies, even purchase the securities for more than they're worth (in which case we'd be propping up shareholder value--the only way this makes sense is if we're buying the securities for LESS than they're worth, since we're also providing much needed liquidity)!

Congress needs to stop and think. I've heard a few interesting ideas. They range from the predictable ("Put in some oversight") to the incentive-based, which I like (such as "No company participating may compensate any officer or employee more than is made by the President of the United States"--a move which should help confine the participants to actually struggling companies, assuming the amendment also bans non-salary non-bonus forms of compensation).

But I don't like a plan that boils down to "trust me," especially when it involves a guy who repeatedly said that the worst is over and the system is "stable" (for over a year now Paulson's been saying stuff like that on and off). I don't trust him; this whole thing happened on his sleepy, deregulating, CEO-friendly, dogmatic watch. I'm being a little unfair to him to make a point, but we seem to have a choice between passing a good bill in a few weeks or passing the bad one that's been asked for quickly. I think the weeks working on a good plan would be well spent, that the markets are resilient enough not to completely collapse or do anything irreversible.

And isn't it suspicious that the ones demanding speed are the same ones who have touted the efficiency and resiliency of markets all along? I wonder why they're in such a hurry now...and that alone is enough to make me question the bailout. Though the plan and/or my analysis may change, right now I think that it's potentially a very good idea that they want to do very badly, and very quickly.

My Conveyance of an Interesting Column

NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd gave her column inches away to writer Aaron Sorkin (of A Few Good Men and Studio 60 fame) so he could write a hypothetical conversation in which Obama seeks advice from fictional former president Jed Bartlet from Sorkin's The West Wing (which he created, and whose first four seasons he wrote). It has a flare of Dowd in it too (he knows her well enough to adapt her style, perhaps to appeal to her regular readers?), so it doesn't quite have the drama and eloquence of a Sam Seaborn crafted speech, but it's still quite interesting. Especially the advice President Bartlet gives in rant form near the end.

Don't know if there are any West Wing fans in my readership other than First Tiger, but I found this pretty interesting. And I definitely like Sorkin better than Dowd.

Feel free to comment here.

PS - It may interest some readers to learn that Sorkin actually made fun of Dowd in an episode. Karen Cahill, a feared NYTimes columnist who takes shoes way too seriously, was a thinly veiled parody of Maureen.

My Arkansas Question (also, something about the economy)

For anyone confused by some of the recent events that have been wreaking havoc with the economy and markets, I highly recommend reading this post, made by two University of Chicago economists on the NYTimes' Freakonomics blog. It covers events through September 17th or so, and is more accurate--and easier to understand--than at least 99% of the stuff being churned out by confused journalists.

Also, on politics, can anyone explain what's up with Arkansas to me? They've got a Democratic Governor, two Democratic Senators, 3 Democratic Representatives (out of 4 reps allotted to the state), and the Democrats have 75% (or better) control of both the State Senate and the State House of Representatives. And yet, McCain is probably going to win the state by 10 to 15 points. What gives? Do they hate their public officials? Did something change since the last round of elections? Are there a ton of racists in the state? What gives?

My Survey of Economists

OK, so it's not MY survey. Interestingly enough, it was commissioned by Dilbert creator Scott Adams. He wanted to do an anonymous survey of respected economists to find out what they thought of the presidential candidates, experts who couldn't be grilled or ridiculed for their beliefs and opinions. So he hired a company to do it right, and a Wharton professor I respect seems to think it was done well enough to report on the NYTimes Freakonomics blog, so I feel pretty comfortable reporting what I feel are the salient details here on mine.

Economists think Obama's plans would be better for the economy than McCain's by a margin of 59 to 31 (with 10% thinking there wouldn't be a significant difference between the candidates). Now, if you only look at economists registered as independents, the numbers come a little closer. Which begs the question, do some of them think what they do because they're a member of the candidate's party, or are they a member of the party because they believe in the party's current economic policies and proposals (I have to think that economic policy is among the top issues for most economists)? Either way, Obama seems to have an advantage.

While they were at it, they asked the economists what the most important issues were, and who would do a better job on those issues. Not surprisingly, they were all pretty economics-related (which supports my above-mentioned theory): education, healthcare, energy policy, and trade. Obama won 3 out of 4 of these. McCain edged out his opponent on trade, but Obama wins on healthcare, education, and energy policy.

So there you have it, 59 out of 100 economists agree, Obama is clearly better for America than McCain.

My Tax Policy Analysis

OK, back to issues. It's time to move away from Sarah Palin's meteoric rise from inexperienced backwater mayor to inexperienced backwater vice presidential candidate. Though she'd be a lot more likely to see action in the Oval than Biden would be, it's not likely either presidential candidate will need to call on a VP (that said, a fair number of Presidents have left office mid-term, two died of illness, one resignation, and four assassinations come to mind). And McCain would be the oldest president ever sworn in, and by all indications he's already started slipping mentally on the campaign trail.

ANYWAY, back to issues. Specifically, tax policy. No one really pays close attention to it, but it's important. According to the non-partisan and well-respected (even by economists) Tax Policy Center, both McCain's and Obama's tax plans would increase the deficit. McCain's would increase it by around 4.2 trillion dollars over 10 years, while Obama's would increase it by 2.9 trillion over the same period. That's 1.3 trillion dollars worse for McCain.

These projections hold a lot of things constant and make a lot of assumptions, but the biggest one is that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire in 2010. Now, Obama has said he wants to keep those cuts for lower-income people, which won't have too big an impact since those cuts don't really affect low-income people all that much (they were targeted at the rich). But Obama wants those Bush cuts gone for the most parts. McCain wants to make them permanent. Which would increase the deficit gap between the plans.

I was going to stop there, but a conversation I had yesterday convinced me to to mention one more thing, and it's probably going to be a common response to my points about the tax plans: there's an argument out there that McCain's going to cut programs to pay for his expensive tax cuts.

McCain has certainly hinted that he'd like to do something in the vague ballpark of that, and he's railed against excess spending, but consider this: researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania (among the world experts in political communication and certainly at least as engaged with a presidential election as anyone) can't find a single example of a program McCain has said he would cut. Not once has he said "If I were president, I'd eliminate (blank)." For all of the out of control spending, there isn't any of it McCain would undo. So basically, he just wants to drive up a huge deficit. Even Obama has mentioned more expenditures he'd like to roll back on (like the hundreds of billions of dollars we're spending in Iraq, or Bush tax cuts for those making over 603,000 dollars a year that we can't afford).

It's also worth noting that even though McCain hasn't named a single program he plans to eliminate should he become president, he has said he'd favor the elimination of the Departments of Education and Energy, which handle what will surely be two of the most vital issues of the next fifty years.

When it comes to tax policy (not to mention budget policy), McCain is lost in the woods and has no idea what the macroeconomic ramifications of his dogmatically bad plan would be.

My Sarah Palin "I Told You So"

All right, I was kind of hoping I was wrong on this one, but: I told you so. Sarah Palin, despite her ridiculous lack of experience, abilities, qualifications, and smart people who actually think she's up for a job with all of two constitutional requirements, seems to have been a brilliant choice. The McCain-Palin campaign has pulled even, and even slightly ahead of the Obama-Biden ticket in national opinion polls. That's what's been getting the most attention, though I think it's relatively meaningless. Here are three specifics that should be even more worrisome for the Obama camp:

1 - Not only are the Republicans pulling even and ahead in polls, they're getting a bigger bump in polls of likely voter than in polls of registered voters. There are two main kinds of these opinion polls: ones that will take anyone registered to vote, and polls that ask people if they're likely to vote, and focus on the likely voters. Palin is to the McCain campaign as a diet of nothing but Red Bull and Coca Cola are to students across America, students like my high school classmate Max Power who got through finals on that cocktail. She has rallied and energized the conservative base of the party, and the people who value social stances above how well someone can lead a nation in a complicated global economy and increasingly internationalized world. With these now-likely voters revved up, the Republicans can count on votes and fundraising from a group of people who will place abortion over every economic and foreign policy issue combined. And, as implied by many studies, once the Sarah Palin excitement dies down, most of these voters are going to stay in the "likely" column. And they're not going to care about the fact that physical proximity to two foreign countries whose leaders she's never met is the extent of her foreign policy experience.

I'm hoping the Red Bull and Coca Cola analogy holds and the McCain campaign winds up crashing and burning, moaning about how stupid they were and possibly having a seizure (like what usually happened to Max Power), but I'm afraid I think that's where the analogy breaks down.

2 - They've gained a few points in national polls, but they've grabbed a key demographic that was up for grabs: white women. According to the Washington Post, Reuters and other sources, the McCain campaign may have gained as many as 20 points among white women (quite a few of whom were former Hillary supporters). And these women are also disproportionately concentrated in a group of states which include Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and possibly even Pennsylvania. All of those states were battleground states (though probably not Indiana anymore), and the election may just be decided by the rust belt and northern midwest. And the McCain campaign just picked up Hillary's ball and combined her ground game with their perennial linebacker blitz (yeah it's 1pm and football just started) of promoting conservative down-home "values." Even if those in their target market for the VP pick think one side of that coin is a crock, they're being drawn in by the other. Obama's gone from winning that demographic by a healthy margin to being significantly behind. So much for women being smarter than that and able to see through it. Women are just as dumb as men in general, and are falling to the only-human instinct to be rendered temporarily even dumber by an understandable, earnest and worthy desire to correct their underrepresentation in government. (I don't mean to be sexist; I think were we in a female-dominated society, men would be subject to the same proclivities, and would become the dumber sex in an election in which one party sought to put a representative from their/our gender in the White House.)

3 - Not only have polls flipped, but futures on InTrade have flipped. For those of you who don't know, InTrade is the most prominent of several online predictions markets. These are markets, which operate like a stock market, in which people buy and sell contracts that pay off when a certain event happens. From the terms and pricing of these contracts, one can easily derive implied probabilities (for example, a contract that paid $1 on heads and expired worthless on tails would trade at $0.50, because the market would know the probability to be 50% and price the asset accordingly). Obama's implied probability of winning went from around 60% before the Sarah pick to around 47% now (if you check my numbers and see that the two don't always add up to exactly 100%, it's because transaction costs prevent absolutely perfect implied probabilities...one might say the "margin of error" is about 4%). Why would anyone care about InTrade? Well, for several reasons. First, the people making the bets are actually putting their money on the line, so they're likely to be better informed than, and not as casual as, a random person who gets a phone call. They're also thinking long term, while those polled can waver and give the opinion of the moment. And empirically, InTrade predictions are more accurate than polling, especially 2 months in advance of an election sure to get lots of media attention. I personally consider InTrade to be more reliable than polling--it definitely has a better record than polling with regard to Senate races (there isn't enough data on presidential races to be statistically significant yet).

So Obama camp, get geared up. I'm here for you if you need me (and I'll start discussing issues more and the horse race you seem to be bungling less).

My Physics Reassurance

So the Large Hadron Collider went online this week in Europe. And for some reason, a lot of people are relieved it hasn't created a black hole that destroyed the world. Now, this may be reasonable, but it's a lot like heaving a sigh of relief after your two-year old hitting his bedroom wall with a plastic hammer doesn't knock down your 5-bedroom brick house. The fabric of space and time isn't that fragile. Certainly not fragile enough to be ripped apart by CERN's first week trial runs.

As a public service, I'm linking to a simple flash presentation that explains a little bit about black holes, starting with how they're formed by collapsing stars thrice the size of our sun. Anyone who's worried can ask themselves "how likely are two colliding particle streams to recreate these conditions in an underground lab?"

http://www.thinktechnologies.com/portfolio/demos/Blackhole.html

My Central Pennsylvanian Restaurants

Central Pennsylvanian restaurants are totally backwards.

Monday night I was at Penn State visiting DeluxX. We went to a corner bar, called the Corner Room in fact. It looked a pub from the outside. It looked like a pub on the inside. The seats, the wooden tables, the outfits the staff was wearing. Except three things were amiss: there were classic red and white checkered diner place mats on the tables, there was no central "bar" area, and the whole place smelled like a diner. Turns out it WAS a diner. In a pub. Looked just like one, inside and out.


Tonight I went to a diner in Harrisburg. Outside was a classic 1950s diner. Inside it was laid out just like a diner. Except the counter area had a ton of booze behind it, all the furniture was in dark wood, and the chairs were pretty elevated off the ground. It was a bar!

Central PA has to get their restaurants straight. It's confusing me. Does anyone know what's going on?

My Uninteresting Numbers?

Some of you may remember a recurring conversation I have about "interesting numbers." The challenge is to think of something interesting about every counting number (basically I start with 0 and count my way up, in integers, and try to think of something interesting about every number along the way).

There's a paradoxical proof that there are no uninteresting numbers. If there WERE, there would be a LOWEST uninteresting number, which would be quite interesting (I assume I don't need to explain how that iterates into the proof).

Then you could also have a least interesting number, or a most interesting uninteresting number (something that's close but doesn't cross the threshold--something like "almost prime" or "if you turn it upside down and add a letter it spells something").

Anyway, some proud nerd or nerds at Stetson University have compiled a list of interesting counting numbers, though they've missed a few, up to 9999. I think some of my facts are a lot more interesting than theirs (some of theirs aren't that interesting, like "X has an Nth root that starts with y.zzzzz"), but they've got quite a few thousand numerical tidbits (1 per number) and while I may have several per number, I stopped working on the problem in the 120s.

Anyway, without further ado, here's the list: http://www.stetson.edu/~efriedma/numbers.html

New poll! On the right of the blog (RSS readers, you'll have to visit me at http://pifry.blogspot.com to see it). I'm just curious to see if my readers need to be talked into anything...call it market research.

Also, I'm thinking of doing a little experiment. First asking readers for whom they'll vote. Then asking readers to PREDICT the winner of the election. Then see how closely the poll results compare to each other and to the actual results. Would an election held among my readers result in the same president (if so, we're wasting a lot of money on the electoral college...)? Can my readers predict better than official polls? Do people predict based on desires and not good guesswork? Do peoples' desires unknowingly but significantly influence their guesses? Too bad I'm not a PhD with an army of grad students I could make explore these issues. That said, I think my readers are smarter than grad students any day (especially grad students in MBA and English Lit programs).

Courtesy of Sergeant Trouser:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D932NC6O1&show_article=1

Words fail me. If you can think of any, feel free to post them in reply.

The first minute and fifteen seconds of this Daily Show excerpt points out what my anonymous source was saying: Sarah Palin's experience really isn't all people are saying it is. It shows to Karl Rove interviews, one in which he talks up Sarah's experience (20 months governor and mayor of a city with 6700-9000 people depending on when you're counting), and another in which he bashes Tim Kaine's experience as governor for about 3 years, plus being mayor of a town of 200,000 (and says that if Obama had picked Kaine, it would have been a purely political choice, because someone with experience like that obviously isn't qualified to be president).

And the rest of the clip is just more funny side-by-side comparisons of conservative commentators praising Palin and bashing Democrats (with nearly identical actions precipitating both comments).

My First First Aid Kit

Today I realized I've had the same first aid kit since freshman year of college. It's a small blue and white box my mother got for me. It's running a little low on supplies, but so far I haven't had to replace any yet.

Those of you who don't know me very well might think this is the beginning of a charming vignette, painted with the imagination brush of a guy who doesn't get injured very often. The story could wind up at fond memories of my mother, and how she taught me to take care of myself or was always looking out for me.

Those of you who know me a little better already realize something is amiss. "Wait a second," you think, "this guy can hurt himself playing Ping Pong or Super Nintendo...and in fact has, multiple times! This makes no sense at all!"

But those of you who know me better still are thinking, "This makes perfect sense; he may hurt himself a lot, but he's really bad at finding stuff and remembering where he put things in his own apartment."

Thanks for looking out for me, Mom. You've been taking care of me by proxy, admittedly quite intermittently, for just over 5 years now.

I wonder if this is some kind of record for longest-lasting-first-aid-kit-owned-by-someone-who-injures-himself-as-much-as-I-do.

My First Anonymous Source, and more on Sarah Palin

My readership has skyrocketed over the past couple of weeks--probably thanks to the election--and I welcome all you new readers. This post promises to be one of the more riveting pieces of political discourse to ever appear on this blog, and here's why:

I'm growing up in the world of fake journalism. I now have anonymous sources! That's right, a source from within the Obama campaign contacted me in response to my posts about Sarah Palin and spoke to me on the record (or as on the record as non-journalists go) and on condition of anonymity. I've always wanted to use that phrase.

My source from within the Obama campaign doesn't think Ms. Palin was as good a pick as I do, and the drama that has unfolded since the announcements and my posts seem to be confirming that. But ignoring her daughter and the Republican Soap Opera currently playing itself out on Prime Time TV, this source's objections were to my analysis.

What follows is my response to the source, in blog form (I got permission to relay his comments and respond this way).

My source from within the Obama campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that my analysis was, "if not wrong, incomplete." Specifically, he alleged that I equivocated levels of experience, and that serving a city of 7,000 isn't the same as all of Illinois. He also mentioned Palin's complete lack of federal-level experience (Governor vs. Senator). He went on to point out that governorships have varying degrees of executive power, none of which come close to the responsibilities of the Oval Office. Lastly, he brought up the difference in their abilities--forget experience. Obama's a very intelligent guy who "has gone to Harvard Law, and U Chicago [where he was] a constitutional scholar." Meanwhile Palin went to, and he quoted Wikipedia so I will as well: "Palin attended Hawaii Pacific College...for a semester...transferred in 1983 to Nroth Idaho Colloege...received a Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism from the University of Idaho...briefly worked in broadcasting as a sports reporter for local Anchorage television stations..."
I'd like to say that on these notes, as a voter myself, I mostly agree. But most of the electorate doesn't dig as deep as my well-informed anonymous source (and my argument was rooted in politics, not policy or leadership), so I think my analysis still holds. I will now defend it.

First, I think "state senator" still seems local and minor league in the eyes of many (and Palin was a "mayor" which sounds pretty good--we have seen a mayor go to Super Tuesday in the 2008 primary). And she doesn't have to be an exact match in terms of inexperience to draw a comparison. Biden and McCain are in the same league in terms of experience, and Obama is certainly closer to Palin's than either of the other Senators on the tickets.

Later he brought up that McCain loses the ability to bash Obama for lack of experience, given that he intends to put someone slightly LESS experienced within one heartbeat of the presidency. On this I also agree: he'll need to do some very impressive verbal gymnastics if confronted with such an argument directly. That said, I think his reply would go like this: (1) if McCain dies in office, it probably won't be until Palin has at least a little VP experience, which would put her ahead of Obama, and (2) if you don't think she's experienced enough, why put someone just--or almost--as inexperienced IN the Oval Office when you could choose to put sucha a person in the Vice Presidency with a much more seasoned hand at the helm? Simply put, McCain has already won the experience argument. Palin draws a nice contrast to those thinking about it, but anyone demanding experience in the White House's west wing is already voting for McCain.

Palin also has the up-and-coming Republican maverick/reformer streak that Obama embodies for the Democrats. This is a way for McCain to say "that's a good idea, I'll make my top lieutenant a young idealistic reformer who can't be told no and is not in any way a Washington insider...but why sacrifice experience in the White House situation room at 3AM when you can get both?" Basically, the west wing gets its young shooting star, but the guy with experience is the one responding to an emergency.

This brings us to the Governor vs. Senator argument. My source thinks Obama's federal-level experience gives him an edge, but I still disagree. Historically, Governors beat Senators almost every time in national campaigns. Furthermore, Obama is trying to be anti-Washington and anti-beltway insiders, playing to the theme of change and attracting voters dissatisfied with the way the federal government is currently run...meanwhile, the Republicans have the only person on the ticket who hasn't been working in Washington (and if you'll check her record, she never has). And finally on this point, even though Bush's approval ratings can typically span the high-20s to mid-30s, congressional approval ratings are even more abysmal (16 to 22 percent approval for the last 7 polls I found). And Obama is part of this congress, like it or not. So maybe someone with no federal experience is a good thing in this election.

Finally, the education argument. Obama has a good education, which he got the hard way, and was a respected professor and scholar at one of the top law schools in the country. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin went to schools in Hawaii and Idaho I had never heard of and got silly jobs talking about sports teams no one cares about or doing commercial fishing. As kind of a brainy guy myself, I vastly prefer Obama's resume, and think the president should be a smart guy. It's a really hard job, for crying out loud! The guy should be super smart. That said, look at the last two election. Politically speaking, I'd say Palin's got the advantage. Hawaii? America's heartland? SPORTS? All that compared to being an elitist liberal Ivy League egghead?

I think Obama and Biden are both MUCH more qualified, and have VASTLY greater abilities than their opponents. That said, I still think Sarah Palin was a great pick for McCain from a political perspective.

That mostly wraps up the debate portion of the post, but my anonymous source had more interesting things to say (I just don't happen to disagree with them, so the argument part stops here).

Apparently, and it has been leaked in more ways than one, McCain really wanted Joe Lieberman for his running mate. This would have raised a lot of issues, for example, "You couldn't find a single Republican as qualified to be your VP as a guy who would have been a Democrat right now had it not been for a primary challenge?" and "You have to be a member of the Republican party to be nominated at the RNC." Also, unless Lieberman exercised his amazing powers of flip-flopping (which every electorate, by the way, just adores in a candidate), the two men on the ticket would disagree about virtually everything outside of Iraq. They disagree on the environment, judicial appointments, energy policy, tax policy, almost everything about the entire economy, and even the role of the federal government itself. But still, according to my source who spoke on condition of anonymity, "McCain truly wanted Lieberman as his VP," and balked only because "it would be political suicide." I guess you have to admire a guy who would pick his buddy over someone he thought would do a good job running the country (though if McCain did think Joe would do a good job, then McCain would probably have to think that he himself would do a bad one...since they'd do almost everything exactly the opposite...either way it doesn't speak well for McCain's priorities or what he thinks it takes to run a country).

What's also interesting is that my source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Karl Rove and his gang were pushing hard for Mitt Romney, the former governor of that state I don't feel like misspelling right now (just kidding , it's Massachusetts, see why it's important to have Ivy Leaguers around?).

And a final interesting point made anonymously is one regarding former Hillary supporters in PA, on which my anonymous source can speak with some authority. My anonymous source doesn't think they'll be won over very easily (and suspects it's true of all former Hillary supporters, though perhaps not as much, especially with Biden on the ticket). Apparently many Hillary supporters are feeling "disgruntled and not sure if they want to vote at all." This would diminish my point about voters wanting to cast a vote for a woman (since presumably a lot of those were Hillary fans), but I think only slightly, because most of the ones I'd be referring to aren't that hardcore Democratic (if at all), and my anonymous source said the more disgruntled ones tended to be of the hardcore Democrat variety (though we are talking about Pennsylvania districts which elect blue dogs--or conservative Democrats who often vote with Republicans, especially on fiscal issues--to congress).

So, thank you to my anonymous source for providing very interesting food for thought, a good debate, and my very first chance to use the phrase "speaking on condition of anonymity." If anyone else out there is reading and would like to talk to the blogger, even on condition of anonymity, I always welcome intelligent discussion (even if you think I'm wrong, as this pleasant anonymous source did). This blogger's anonymity-preserving e-mail is in his profile.

I'm going to go back to my nerdy roots for a moment with another amusing link, before continuing on with politics.

For the nerds who aren't into politics.

My Palin Family Laughter

I was tickled red, white and blue just now to learn that Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol is currently pregnant (the story broke in between my last post and this one). This is especially funny in light of the content of my last post (which is probably apocryphal).

Regardless, this blogger hopes that her situation is a result of abstinence-only education, a broken, demonstrably inefficacious, and generally abominable way of talking to teenagers about sex and its consequences...and also a philosophy inexplicably and deeply held by quite a few Republicans, some of whom try to enforce it on others.

Lilly pointed out to me that her current pregnancy greatly decreases the chance that Trig is her child, given that she'd need to have gotten pregnant almost immediately after delivering her first child.

The New York Times mentioned that the announcement was intended to counter rumors regarding a possible previous pregnancy. Could someone start a stopwatch on Bristol's current pregnancy to see if the stated time frame is accurate?

They also announced she's marrying the father. Poor kid. I suspect that's more the result of the election than anything else. Talk about a shotgun wedding. It's one thing to have your parents there with a metaphorical shotgun. It's quite another to know that Karl Rove might blame you for a Democratic victory and seek revenge if you don't marry the chump who knocked you up. Talk about scary.

OK, I'll have some more substantive stuff soon, really.

Queen Frostine asked me what odds I'd place on the following story being true:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/8/30/121350/137/486/580223

The Daily Kos alleges that Sarah Palin's newest son is actually her grandson. The post makes a very good, though circumstantial and one sided, case for baby Trig being the son of Sarah's 17-year old daughter Bristol.

That said, I don't think it should matter that much in anyone's mind when they're figuring out for whom they'll be voting in November. I think the fact that McCain would be an awful president should play a much bigger role in making that determination.

[PS - What kind of name is Trig? Is he named after Trigonometry?]