Troopergate and Palin

Witness flips in troopergate.

A private contractor now admits under oath that she was pressured by Palin's office over Palin's attempt vindictively to fire her ex-brother-in-law.

Al-Maliki: US Cannot Afford to Stay; Physicians to Carry Weapons

In an interview with the Associated Press, PM Nuri al-Maliki warned that the future is dark if Iraq and the US do not agree on a security pact. And without a pact, he said, all the security progress made in the last year would be at risk. He points out that the alternative is to go back to the UN security council for an extension of Chapter 7 authorization of foreign troops in Iraq, and that UNSC approval is no longer assured because Russia may be in a bad mood after the Georgia tiff. He says Iraq still insists that US troops who are off base and not on a military mission, who commit crimes in Iraq, must be tried in Iraqi courts.

Al-Maliki, who wants a timetable for US withdrawal by the end of 2010, ended the interview with a clever appeal over Bush's head to the American public:

' "If I had enough funds to assist the American economy, I would do all that I can. But unfortunately Iraq cannot solve America's economic problems.

"But what Iraq can do is take up more responsibility security-wise here inside Iraq. And I have told the Americans repeatedly that we are ready to take up responsibility here in Iraq so there are less losses, a decreased number of American lives lost, and I am prepared to present this case before the American people. ...'

Maybe al-Maliki has been reading John Gray, who writes, "The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over . . ."

Al-Maliki is reminding an economically prostrate America that it cannot afford to buck him on the troop withdrawal timetable. Literally cannot afford! As in, best you go home now and let us take care of security, and save what little money you have left. And, oh, thanks for forking over the $1 trillion while you still had it . . . I guess he is not afraid of McCain's forlorn hope of keeping a US military base on Iraqi soil (expensive!).

To paraphrase T.S. Elliot, "This is the way the [war] ends/ This is the way the [war] ends/This is the way the [war] ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."

The Iraqi government will permit physicians to carry firearms. The decree is a bid to tempt back to Iraq 8,000 medical doctors who have fled the country because they were targeted by guerrillas hoping to destabilize the country by crippling its services. The problem I see with this decree is that many of the physicians have been personally threatened by armed militias. So you'd have to believe you were a quick draw, a good shot, and able to mow down several guys with AK-47s before they could get you, before you would go back.

This sort of stunt, and the situation it is meant to address, both prove how terrible is the situation in Iraq still. If it were 'calm,' the physicians would come back without firearms. If the police and government amounted to anything, the doctors would not have to pack heat themselves. Another thing that works against the physicians' return is that they can survive in Jordan and Syria. Even though they cannot get formal work permits,they can hire on to clinics as 'consultants'. If they have capital, they can also invest locally (in Jordan at least, an investment of $100,000 gets you a residency visa).

Sunday's bombings in Baghdad, and the killing of nearly 100 civilians in Baghdad during Ramadan, raise questions for Iraqis. Is this increase in violence a secular trend, a sign of deterioration, or is it just that guerrillas have more spare time during the month of fasting (when typically people do not work full work days, and lots of people circulate for dinner (i.e. breaking-the-fast) parties. Although this Ramadan was 40% less deadly than last year, it was also more deadly than July and August.

Iraq is buying 12 reconnaissance planes from the US. This purchase is a step toward the Iraqi government regaining control of Iraq's skies. Now that it has more of an armored corps in the army, it needs fighter jets and bombers to provide air cover for them. The US is not ready to relinquish Iraqi air space, but PM Nuri al-Maliki probably sees this purchase as a step in that direction.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Monday:

' Baghdad

- Mortars hit Hurriyah neighborhood (northwest Baghdad). Five people were injured with one house was damaged.

- Mortars hit Ghazaliyah neighborhood (northwest Baghdad) near Um Al-Qura mosque. Three people were injured with some houses nearby were damaged.

- Mortars hit Abu Ghraib (west of Baghdad). One person was injured with two houses were damaged.

- Police found one dead body in Saidiyah in Karkh bank (south Baghdad) today.

Mosul

- Sunday night, a bomb was put under a taxi car detonated in Abu Tamam intersection in Mosul city. Only the taxi driver was injured in that incident.

- Around 5:30 pm a car bomb detonated in Nabi Yunis neighborhood in Mosul before the Iraqi army experts defuse it. Nine people were injured including 5 Peshmerga members of the PDK.'

Karzai: Civilian Gov't of Pakistan better against Terrorism; Pakistan Bajaur Campaign Leaves 15 Dead

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai believes that the new civilian government will take more effective steps against the Pakistani Taliban on the Afghan border.

This stance is the opposite of that of John McCain, who supported military dictator Pervez Musharraf (who was forced to resign as president in August under threat of impeachment).

Pakistani forces claim to have killed 15 Taliban north of Khar in the Bajaur tribal agency overnight. The fighting in this northernmost of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is said to have displaced 20,000 individuals to Kunar Province in Afghanistan, as well as hundreds of thousands of local residents to elsewhere in Pakistan.

In a reversal of charges, Pakistan is now saying that Pakistani Taliban in Bajaur are receiving aid and volunteers from Afghanistan. Most often the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments have charged that the Tehrik-i Taliban of Pakistan has aided Afghan Taliban mounting attacks on NATO troops.

Aljazeera English reports on the Bajaur battle:

Kaptur: Playing Wall Street Bailout

Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) on how the Reality Game, "Wall Street Bailout," is played:



See also Chalmers Johnson at Tomdispatch.com on the Pentagon Bailout Fraud.

Bombings in Baghdad Kill 34, Wound 100; Arab-Kurdish Violence in Diyala

A wave of deadly bombings and other attacks swept Baghdad on Sunday, killing nearly three dozen persons and wounding over 100.

The attacks on Shiite neighborhoods were likely intended to remind the Iraqi public on the eve of Eid al-Fitr (the celebration of the end of the fasting month of Ramadan) that the Sunni guerrilla movement is still active and has not been defeated.

The situation in Iraq is dire, and the discourse about Iraq in the presidential campaign is often disconnected from reality. McCain is asserting that "victory" is at hand and rewriting his own history of support for Bush's invasion and policies there. Now the McCain people are trying to claim that McCain called for the resignation of former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, which he certainly did not.

And, the McCain call for "victory," meaning an Iraq that can police its own borders, begs the question of what those borders even are. ("Kurdistan" is not a settled place). See below.

The attacks come days after the Iraqi parliament finally approved enabling legislation for provincial elections. The parliamentarians agreed to postpone elections in the disputed oil province of Kirkuk.

I have long been a proponent of early provincial elections. The Sunni Arab provinces have never had proper elections since the January 2005 polls were boycotted because Bush leveled Fallujah. The elections could create a new post-Baath political elite in the Sunni Arab provinces that has legitimacy and actually represents big constituencies. Some of the trouble in Diyala comes from minority Shiite dominance of a majority Sunni province. If the al-Maliki government wants to find a Sunni negotiating partner (which is still unclear), the provincial leaders to be elected next winter could fit the bill. Some of them will go on to national political careers. A lot of Sunnis are still secular, and could begin the process of moving away from religious fundamentalist parties always dominating.

The likely emergence of significant political rivals among the Sunnis would cause the fundamentalist vigilantes to redouble their efforts to destabilize Iraq further.

On the other hand,that parliament had to postpone elections in Kirkuk is a very bad sign, as is the military and paramilitary conflict between Arabs and Kurds.

Kurds are reversing Saddam's ethnic cleansing drive of earlier decades, returning and expelling Arabs. Not all Kurds going to such regions are returnees, and not all the Arabs being forced out are internal migrants.

Iraqi police and Kurdish paramilitary members seem to have had a shoot-out in Jalaula on Sunday that left a Kurdish politician dead.

In nearby Sa'adiya, a Kurdish mayor was wounded in a bombing.

McClatchy reports details of political violence in Iraq on Sunday:

' Baghdad

- Around 8 a.m. a roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi army vehicle in Mansour neighborhood, killing one soldier and injuring two soldiers and a civilian.

- Around 1 p.m. American soldiers searched an empty house in Zayuna neighborhood and shot randomly, injuring two civilians in the area, Iraqi police said. U.S. military said they had no information about the incident.

- Around 5:30 p.m. a parked car bomb exploded in a busy market in Shurta Rabaa neighborhood, southwest Baghdad, killing 12 civilians and injuring 35 others.

- Around 5:30 p.m. a bomb planted in a car exploded on a main road near Al Bayaa neighborhood, killing one and injuring one.

- Around 7 p.m. a parked car bomb exploded in the busy market area of Karrada neighborhood in central Baghdad, followed by a roadside bomb that killed 19 civilians and injured 72 others.

- Police found two dead bodies throughout Baghdad, one near Al Rasheed Camp and one in Hurriyah.

Diyala

- Around 9 a.m. a roadside bomb targeted Ahmed Samir Zargush, the mayor of Al Saidiyah town, about 50 miles east of Baquba. Zargush was injured along with three of his bodyguards and two civilians.

Nineveh

- Gunmen killed one citizen, a Christian, in Al Baladiyat neighborhood and in another incident gunmen killed a man and injured his brother in Mosul.'

Daragahi: Damascus Bombing Payback from Radical Sunnis

These bombings in Baghdad follow a major such attack in Damascus, Syria, which was probably carried out by radical revivalist Sunnis ("Salafis") to punish the Syrian regime for cracking down on their movements, both into Iraq and between Lebanon and Syria. The Syrian regime, as Borzou Daragahi points out, is also a strong backer of the Shiite Hizbullah militia and at the same time has been negotiating with Israel via Turkey. The Baath leaders of Syria, as secularists from an Alawi (heterodox Shiite) background, were already seen as infidels worthy of death by the radical Sunnis. But this list of charges against them would drive radical Salafis to violence.

Aljzaeera English reports on the Damascus bombing:



Joshua Landis has more.

Obama Won: Gallup/USA Today Poll; 52% Say Obama best to Fix Problems, vs. 35% for McCain

In addition to those two snap polls done just after the debate on Friday by CNN and by CBS, there is now further evidence that Obama won the first debate handily.

A Gallup/ USA Today poll of 701 viewers of the debate done on Saturday found that 46% of viewers said Barack Obama did better; 34% said McCain did. Obviously, there is still a big group of viewers who saw it as a tie or could not decide.

But it is not so important who they thought was the better debater. The big news in this poll is about economic competence, on which over half of viewers gave the nod to Obama while only a little over a third did to McCain

Obama picked up 16 points on the question of how favorably the public views him, whereas for McCain it was a wash. And in this poll viewers were overwhelmingly more enthusiastic about Obama as a steward of the US economy than about McCain

Other scores:

Which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve America's problems?

Obama 52%
McCain 35%

Obama made great strides in public acceptance according to this poll. Although a little over half of viewers said their view of him did not change, 30% said they became more favorable toward Obama after seeing the debate. He lost ground with only 14%

The poll did not advance McCain's campaign. 56% said it did not change their view of him, and 21% said it gave them a more unfavorable view of him, while he improved with another 21%. Since McCain was already behind in the polls going into the debate, this result is very bad for him.

While McCain was dead in the water on favorability, he actually lost ground on perceived economic competence. %37 percent said they had less confidence in his ability to fix the economy after saying the debate, while only 24% said they had more. These figures were almost the reverse in Obama's case, which is to say, he gained 8 points on this issue while McCain lost 15.

On national security issues it was a tie, which is, again, very bad news for McCain! Not so long ago the Republicans were attempting to portray Sarah Palin as having more executive and foreign policy experience than Obama! It was their hope that McCain would come across as a wise elder statesman and Obama as uninformed and naive. Instead, Americans see Obama as McCain's peer on foreign policy issues!

The poll has a plus or minus margin of error of 4%. That means that the overwhelming margin of victory for Obama on competence in problem-solving and ability to deal with the economy, and the massive loss of confidence in McCain on the economy, are very solid findings.

It seems to me likely that the stunt McCain pulled, of trying to cancel the debates, raised questions in the public's mind about his competence. His pick of Palin as running mate (about which he unwisely boasted in the debate) might have shored up the Republican base a little, but that is now only 33% of the electorate, and she will hurt him with everyone else. That 52-35 spread on competence in my view is the big takeaway from this poll.

Gallup is a fine polling agency and I am sure it did its best to weight the respondents by age, income and region. The USA Today article did not provide that information. But the likelihood is that they in fact over-represented the Republicans, because youth and African-Americans are harder to poll, with many of them first-time registrants, and they may well come out for Obama this year, voting in unprecedented numbers because they now finally feel they have a stake in the system, with this candidate.

These results should not make Democrats sanguine. Kerry won his debates with W., but W. went on to destroy Iraq further and then bring down the whole American economy around our ears.

We could still be at war with Iran next year this time, with Captain McCain lobbying nukes at Isfahan from his sub in the Persian Gulf, with all the unpleasant backlash that would entail.

Saudi Oil Moguls fear Hybrid Cars

Saudi Arabia wants lower petroleum prices. As a country with enormous reserves, Riyadh would like to preserve their value. In contrast, countries like Algeria with relatively shallow reserves want to get top dollar for their petroleum while it lasts.

Businessweek provides the telling quote:

' Any threat to oil's leading role as a source of energy is a big worry for a country that sits on reserves of some 260 billion barrels. "We are concerned about the permanent destruction of demand," says a senior Saudi official. "Those who buy hybrid vehicles are not going back to SUVs." '

Iraqi Hopes for US Troop Withdrawal

One of the things that struck me about Friday night's debate on the time line for troop withdrawal was that McCain appeared to believe that how long US troops remain in Iraq and at what strength is a unilateral matter dictated by Washington. The government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki is already trying to negotiate a timetable for US withdrawal as part of the proposed security agreement. A majority of parliament certainly supports a timetable.

Indeed, the Iraqi government wanted a 2010 deadline for withdrawal. Bush pushed for a delay until 2015 in part because he was afraid that agreeing to 2010 would make McCain look bad. The Iraqis were forced to accept 2011.

There is even less tolerance for a long term foreign troop presence among ordinary Iraqis, thousands of whom have lost relatives to US military operations. Aljazeera English reports on the death of a respected Iraqi academic in Baquba, shot at a US checkpoint.



One exception to this yearning to see the Americans go is the some of the Kurds, who as a minority trying to remain independent of Baghdad and able to confront Turkey. Some Kurds would very much like to keep US troops in Iraq. This Kurdish aspiration explains Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari's continual announcements about there being no timetable in the security agreement. Clearly, the Shiite Arabs do want a timetable.

It is not just Iraqis. About 60 percent of Americans want a timeline for US troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Palin Says She did Not Have Money to Travel in Youth; But She went to College in Hawaii!

On seeing this part of the Couric interview of Palin, I suddenly remembered something about her:

' Couric: In preparing for this conversation, a lot of our viewers … and Internet users wanted to know why you did not get a passport until last year. And they wondered if that indicated a lack of interest and curiosity in the world.

Palin: I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world.

No, I've worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture. The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world.'

Video here:



But, but . . .

she went to college for a while in Hawaii!. Do you know how long it takes to fly to Hawaii from Alaska? And do you know how expensive it is to live in Hawaii? Milk is $5 a gallon (not many places to put cows on the islands, so it is imported).

It is a five and a half hour flight from Anchorage to Honolulu, i.e. an hour less than the flight from JFK to London.

So Palin seemed to have money to gallivant around plenty, hopping from college to college over 6 years. Maybe she held down part time jobs as an undergraduate. So do lots of people. Studies show that such students get better grades because they have to organize their time.

I just don't think she was interested.

And, if you think she ever read any books about foreign countries, raise your hand.

Debate Fact Check 5

About that claim by McCain that he warned about the mortgage crisis:

McCain: "But -- but let me -- let me point out, I also warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and warned about corporate greed and excess, and CEO pay, and all that. A lot of us saw this train wreck coming."

In fact, he has already admitted that he did not see the financial meltdown coming.

"But I don't really know of anybody,with the exception of a handful, who said, 'wait a minute, this thing is getting out of hand and is over-heating.' I'd like to be able to tell you I anticipated it, but I have to give you straight talk, I did not."

Debate Fact Check 3

Did Henry Kissinger advise direct talks with Iran at the highest levels?

Yes.

Kissinger gave an interview with Bloomberg Television News Service on March 14, 2008:

' "One should be prepared to negotiate, and I think we should be prepared to negotiate about Iran," Kissinger . . . said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Asked whether he meant the U.S. should hold direct talks, Kissinger, 84, responded: "Yes, I think we should." . . . '

Not only did he advocate such talks, he personally engaged in them!

' "I've been in semi-private, totally private talks with Iranians," he said. "They've had put before them approaches that with a little flexibility on their part would, in my view, surely lead to negotiations." '

Kissinger added:

' "It's not really the willingness to talk, it's so far the inability to define what we are trying to accomplish," Kissinger said. "The negotiations depend on a balance of incentives and penalties. Have we got those right at every point? Not at every point." . . . The Nobel Peace Prize winner said any direct talks between the U.S. and Iran on issues such as the nuclear dispute would be most likely to succeed if they first involved only diplomatic staff and progressed to the level of secretary of state before the heads of state meet.'

So Kissinger envisaged the heads of state meeting. N.B. that would be the US president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Ahmadinejad as president is a lesser figure in the Iranian system.)

He explicitly said that the talks should begin "without conditions."

Kissinger did advise a progression from lower level to higher level, despite his call for no pre-conditions.

Kissinger didn't seem embarrassed at all by the kind of considerations McCain instanced in the debate, of legitimating the Iranian government and the way it talks dirty about Israel by a US president's meeting with its top leaders.

The difference is that Kissinger is a foreign policy realist and McCain is surrounding himself with Neoconservatives.

Debate fact-check 2: The Surge

In the debate, McCain promised 'victory' in Iraq and praised the surge.

First of all, it isn't 'victory' if Baghdad's best hospital doesn't even have working elevators any more.

Second of all, the violence fell in Baghdad because the Sunnis were massacred or chased to Syria, leaving few mixed neighborhoods, not because of 'take, clear, hold' (which is in fact a tactic, not a strategy). Satellite pictures show Sunni Baghdad dark now.

Fact-Checking 1

Fact-checking the debate (transcript available here).

For Pakistan and the controversy over McCain's ridiculous assertion that Pakistan was a 'failed state' in 1999 when Musharraf made his coup, see my "McCain's Holiday from History" from last February (the terms of the debate between McCain and Obama on these issues, interestingly hasn't changed).

But one thing that has changed is that Pakistan made its transition from military to civilian rule, a transition McCain was not enthusiastic about-- he supported military dictator Pervez Musharraf.

By the way, Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister against whom Musharraf made the coup, is the leader of the major opposition party in parliament, the Muslim League. Isn't McCain dissing Nawaz Sharif big time, equating his term as prime minister with Somalia? Moreover, Musharraf kept the current president of Pakistan, Asaf Ali Zardari, in prison for several years and threatened his wife, Benazir Bhutto, with a jail sentence as well, as a way of keeping civilian politicians out of power.

Given this 'failed state' allegation against the civilian politicians now in power in Pakistan, hasn't McCain just screwed up any chance he had of a close working relationship with the new government?

I mean, it would be like saying that dictator Leonid Kuchma of the Ukraine was doing his best and had to act as he did in cracking down on dissent in the Ukraine because it was a failed state, and then saying you hope to have a good working relationship with dissident activist and now president Viktor Yushchenko today! (McCain probably would have adopted that stance if Kuchma had been a right-wing dictator instead of a Soviet holdover.

And, imagine, McCain accused Obama of poisoning relations with Pakistan by saying he'd take the shot at Bin Laden if we found him!

Debate Fact Check 4

McCain said in the debate:

' So we have a long way to go in our intelligence services. We have to do a better job in human intelligence. And we've got to -- to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don't ever torture a prisoner ever again.'

Last winter, McCain voted against a bill that would have disallowed waterboarding by the CIA.

US Intelligence Chief Mike McConnell has essentially admitted that waterboarding is torture.

The bill McCain rejected would have constrained CIA operatives from violating the interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual, a public document.

McCain wanted the CIA to continue to be able to deploy secretive interrogation techniques not mentioned in the Army manual. Of course, we don't know what those are or whether they meet the definition of torture. In any case, McCain had a chance to force Bush to stop waterboarding and he declined to take it.

McCain continues to say he is against waterboarding, which makes his vote hard to understand.

Here is McCain on Bill O'Reilly last May:

'CHANNEL "THE O'REILLY FACTOR" INTERVIEW WITH SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN
(R-AZ) INTERVIEWER: BILL O'REILLY SUBJECT: WATERBOARDING, IRAN, IRAQ WAR, PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN TIME: 8:37 P.M. EDT DATE: FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2008

(Begin videotaped interview.)

MR. O'REILLY: Let's take war on terror first. You're opposed to waterboarding.

SEN. MCCAIN: Yes.

MR. O'REILLY: And I disagree with you on that. I think the president of the United States, just the president, should have the legal authority to order waterboarding in extraordinary circumstances. Now, according to Tenet and to President Bush, used three times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah. All three times, the men broke when they were waterboarded, and they gave out information, according to the Bush administration, that saved thousands of lives.

SEN. MCCAIN: Well, first of all, the scenario you're talking about is one million to one. Second of all, well, you know that when torture anybody, we know, that they'll give you things only that that they want you to --

MR. O'REILLY: These people gave up very good information.

SEN. MCCAIN: They gave up very bad information, too, according to some sources. But the point is, do you want to abrogate the Geneva Conventions? In the next war that we're in, if you want an American tortured, a service man or woman, by some foreign country when we're in another war and because we did it to the people in our captivity --

MR. O'REILLY: (Inaudible) -- not soldiers, though. They're not entitled to Geneva Conventions.

SEN. MCCAIN: Yes, they are.

MR. O'REILLY: No, not a one.

SEN. MCCAIN: The Geneva Conventions apply -- oh, in all due respect, I'll send you the information. Geneva applies to every person who is held in captivity by another country.

MR. O'REILLY: Even criminals?

SEN. MCCAIN: Even criminals if they are in combat. Now, there's a difference between uniformed combatant and non-uniformed combatant.

MR. O'REILLY: Do you think 9/11, they were combatant soldiers, though?

SEN. MCCAIN: I think we're in a war against radical Islamic extremism, and I think that war is all over the globe. And I believe, as Colin Powell does and these military officers who have spent an entire career, that the Geneva Conventions call for a prohibition --

MR. O'REILLY: They apply to everybody.

SEN. MCCAIN: -- a prohibition for inhumane, cruel and degrading treatment. And their concern is what happens to Americans in future wars if they are held captive.

MR. O'REILLY: Now, we're not fighting a nation now.

SEN. MCCAIN: We are fighting a conflict. And the Geneva Conventions have clear applications.

MR. O'REILLY: We'll have a gentleman's disagreement on that one. Dick Morris wants me to ask you this question.'

(Uh, O'Reilly cannot have a gentleman's agreement with anyone; he is not a gentleman. Even if it weren't for the Great Loofah Scandal, he obviously supports torture.)

CBS Poll of Independents: Obama Won

Keith Olbermann just read out the results of a snap poll of 500 uncommitted voters commissioned by CBS News just after Friday night's presidential debate:

(The snap poll is here):

Obama won: 40%

Tie: 38%

McCain won: 22%


46% of independent voters said their opinion of Obama had improved

55% said McCain would make the right decisions about Iraq

49% said Obama would make the right decisions about Iraq

And:

' Forty-six percent of uncommitted voters said their opinion of Obama got better tonight. Thirty-two percent said their opinion of McCain got better.

Sixty-six percent of uncommitted voters think Obama would make the right decisions about the economy. Forty-two percent think McCain would.'

That's a pretty impressive 20-point lead for Obama on the economy, now the most important issue in the race!

I have to say I thought the debate was closer than that and am surprised these uncommitted voters gave it so lopsidedly to Obama.

TPM has a CNN snap poll of a mixed audience that was watching the debate:

These were the statistics from this snap poll that seemed to me most interesting:

' Next, regardless of which presidential candidate you support, please tell me if you think Barack Obama or John McCain would better handle each of the following issues:

• The war in Iraq: Obama 52%, McCain 47%

• Terrorism: McCain 49%, Obama 45%

• The economy: Obama 58%, McCain 37%

• The current financial crisis: Obama 54%, McCain 36%

Thinking about the following characteristics and qualities, please say whether you think each one better described Barack Obama or John McCain during tonight's debate:

• Was more intelligent: Obama 55%, McCain 30%

• Expressed his views more clearly: Obama 53%, McCain 36%

• Spent more time attacking his opponent: McCain 60%, Obama 23%

• Was more sincere and authentic: Obama 46%, McCain 38%

• Seemed to be the stronger leader: Obama 49%, McCain 43%

• Was more likeable: Obama 61%, McCain 26%

• Was more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you: Obama 62%, McCain 32% '

This audience trusted Obama much more on the economy than McCain, saw him as almost McCain's equal on security issues, and found Obama far more likeable and intelligent and strong.

Gee, maybe this really is a win for McCain.

Of course these snap polls are really flawed as social science instruments, and it will be the middle of next week before we get something more reliable. Unfortunately, the further polling will be contaminated by the bad economic news if there isn't a deal in congress soon.

Palin's Russian Roulette

On being a Russia expert by virtue of contiguity:

"We have trade missions back and forth," Palin told Couric. "We, we do, it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where, where do they go? It's Alaska."

Putin rears his head and comes into US air space? Is she Dr. Strangelove?



The LAT blog notes,

'In fact, a veteran reporter from her home state, Hal Bernton, reported in the Seattle Times this month how Russian politicians had sought more contact with Palin, but in vain. The governor cut funding and her office's participation, it seems, in the Northern Forum, which promotes relations between regional governments in the Northern Hemisphere.'

Note that Russia is not in the top 20 trading partners of Alaska.



I am not sure if it is the witch of deceit or of inarticulateness that is afflicting her,but I don't think this guy finished the job:

US Helicopters Fired on By Pakistani Troops

Pakistani troops fired on US military helicopters on Thursday. Pakistani officials insisted that the helicopters, which were not hit, had strayed into Pakistani territory. The Pentagon denied this charge. President Asaf Ali Zardari, meeting with US Secretary of State Condi Rice, attempted to paper over the incident, asseting that the Pakistani troops had only been firing flares to mark the border for their American colleagues.

If the Pakistani troops had managed to hit the US helicopters, the latter would have fired back, creating a serious international incident.

In fact,such an exchange of fire took place this past summer between the US and Pakistan, leaving 11 Pakistani troops dead. The cover story at the time had been that the Pakistanis were killed accidentally.

Apparently, along the border there has been a hot war going on for some time between US and Pakistani forces, since Pakistani border patrols support the Taliban over the foreigners.

These incidents do not affect cordial US-Pakistani relations, since everyone knows they are not ordered by the prime minister or president in Islamabad.

Afghanistan has called for joint patrols with Pakistan along their mutual borders.

Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan reaction to the US presidential elections. AFghan elders advise against increasing the number of foreign troops in the country.



NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer answers questions about the mission in Afghanistan. Scheffer disagrees with the Afghans interviewed above, and wants more troops in Afghanistan. He predicts that Afghanistan will be a central issue for the next American president.

McCain Rushes Campaign to Nowhere

Mao Zedong announced the adage by which John McCain is clearly living now: "The enemy advances, we retreat. / The enemy camps, we harass. / The enemy tires, we attack." Mao was describing not a conventional but a guerrilla war, and McCain is now unexpectedly playing the Filipino insurgents of 1899 to Obama's America. Guerrilla wars are waged by the weak but wily. McCain has all but announced that his conventional campaign has crashed and burned. We do not know if the prepping for the debate was a disaster, or it turns out you really can't let Palin be interviewed freely by normal people, or whether terror set in that a second great depression will turn the country starkly to the left for the foreseeable future.

Far from challenging Obama in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado, McCain is suddenly behind substantially in all three (McCain 45% to Obama's 49% in Colorado; McCain 44% to Obama 51% in Michigan).

McCain thus threw off his stiff officer's uniform and donned the silky black pyjamas of the guerrilla, beating a hasty retreat before the Obama surge. The retreat was dressed up as a "suspension" of the campaign and a "postponement" of the debate (a debate that would have been McCain's Waterloo. Forced to debate a charismatic policy wonk on top of economic issues on the very week of the financial meltdown, the economically challenged McCain would have gone down flaming to decisive defeat.

Thus McCain's Long March back to Washington and his suspension of a campaign he cannot win by conventional means.

The panic of Wall Street and its Republican ventriloquists is palpable. What must be running through their heads? Is this another 1929? Will they lose everything? Is Obama another FDR, with a New Deal in his coat pocket, which the public is now primed to demand? Is the Iraq gravy train really finished? Is universal health care an assured thing? What will happen to their vacation homes in the Hamptons, or the pieds-a-terre in Jamaica, or the private jet for spontaneous partying in Rio? How will they ever get ahead again if they have to pay their fair share of taxes? Could Obama and Biden preside over 16 years of Democratic Raj? Could their entire fate for decades have been sealed as early as Friday night?

Nothing is more difficult than to execute an orderly retreat in the face of superior enemy firepower. The troops are constantly tempted to break and run, in which case the army is lost. Mustafa Kemal (later Attaturk) pulled off a fighting retreat in northern Syria as the Ottomans withdrew to Anatolia, thereby saving his army.

McCain made several perhaps fatal mistakes on his Long March. He allowed Sarah Palin to be interviewed on television again, this time by Katie Couric. It is therefore McCain's fault that Palin was permitted to respond to a question of whether the US faces a second Great Depression, "Unfortunately, that is the road that America may find itself on."

It is not a message that from a Republican party strategic point of view, should, in such stark terms, have been delivered to an already anxiety-ridden public here is the video:



The greatest calamity of all struck the McCain camp on the David Letterman show, when David found out that contrary to his assurances, McCain was not on his way to Washington. Rather, McCain had deliberately substituted a serious interview by tv news anchor Couric for a more light-hearted appearance on Letterman.

David Letterman, among the more feared interviewers on television, who has reduced Cindy Crawford and Paris Hilton to tears for the fun of it and went mano-a-mano with Madonna over their respective headgear, was not a man to be trifled with.

He actually got hold of video of McCain getting made up for the Katie Couric interview, having not left for the airport in any case. It was one thing for McCain to cancel, it was another for his campaign to blow off Letterman in favor of Couric.



McCain's retreat has been hasty and poorly planned, so that it looks more like a rout than a clever guerrilla movement. Not all guerrilla wars succeed, after all-- the Philippines was subdued by US forces with long hard fighting. McCain, having lost to a guerrilla war, may now face the irony that he is not only not successful in conventional struggles, but has not mastered the form of his greatest enemies.

And the American public, who had expected him to stand his ground and fight, had been expecting an Eisenhower, not a Ho Chi Minh, will hardly be delighted.

Cole in Salon: Bashing Ahmadinejad

My column is out at Salon.com:

"Obama goes over the top in bashing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:"

Once again, U.S. politicians, including both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, pile on the Iranian president. Why does Larry King (!) sound like the adult in the room?

excerpt:

'As for the imposition of economic sanctions on Iran, it might be worth considering for a moment whether the U.S., with its faltering economy, is even able to cause a major oil exporter such as Iran much harm through a unilateral boycott. The law passed by Congress at the insistence of the Israel lobby, placing sanctions on firms doing business in Iran, does not punish those who merely distribute or import Iranian petroleum. Does Obama want to go even further with sanctions? If Congress really could close down Iran's production of 4 million barrels a day, it would cause the price of petroleum to soar and throw the U.S. into a deep recession or depression. From the point of view of a reality-based foreign policy, this sort of step is known as "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Russia and China are now balking at placing any further sanctions on Iran via the United Nations Security Council. (Russia is not exactly in a cooperative mood after the drubbing it took from U.S. politicians over its intervention to protect South Ossetia from Georgia.)

The sanctions have in any case had no effect on Iranian policy, though they are keeping Iran's gas fields from being developed by American and European firms, a task that may fall to Russia's Gazprom or its Chinese counterpart instead. (One would not advise a President Obama to threaten to cut off economic cooperation with China over its Iran investments, given how much U.S. debt Beijing holds.) Since natural gas is a global market, this boycott of Iran harms American consumers twice, causing the price of gas to be higher than necessary and making sure that the development of Iranian gas creates no jobs for Americans and brings no profits into this country. '

Read the whole thing.

McCain admits Country has no current President

McCain says he will suspend his political campaign on Thursday morning and is calling for a cancellation of the debate.

Joe Barton (R-Texas) just came on CNN and said there are not 50 votes in the House for the Paulson plan. In otherwords,the financial markets are flying on one engine for a while, with no guarantee of swift government intervention.

Isn't McCain's desperate move an admission that there is currently no president? I mean, why does everything hang on a senator from Arizona? Shouldn't it be Bush who is handling this? We've long known that the emperor has no clothes, but McCain is making a "Republicans Gone Wild" video with this grandstanding.

Very suspicious that as soon as Obama is up 9% in the polls, all of a sudden the mess the Republicans made is so important that McCain can't go on competing with his rival.

Palin wasTalking with Karzai about his Son!

You know those ballyhooed meetings of Sarah Palin with world leaders? What if they weren't even talking about foreign policy? Since the press was kept out, how would we know? But the press did get one glimpse:

'The first meeting was with Afghan President Hamed Karzai, and the content was hardly diplomatic dynamite. According to a CNN producer who was let into Mr Karzai's hotel suite after earlier being barred, Mr Karzai was talking about his son. Ms Palin was nodding, and asked his name. Mr Karzai replied his name was Mirwais, meaning "light of the house". The media were escorted out after about 40 seconds.'

He was talking about the meaning of his son's name? So this conversation mints her as a foreign policy expert?

Then I heard some guy on tv today saying that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili had remarked after meeting her that Palin had 'asked the right questions.'

Isn't that the guy who launched an aggressive attack on South Ossetia, provoked a Russian response, started a war and then got his behind handed to him by Putin?

Is he the one we really want vetting our politicians for how sharp they are?

McCain's Aide's Lobbying for Criminal Failed Mortgage Firm

Michael Tomasky writes:

'The lobbying firm of Rick Davis, the manager, was being paid $15,000 a month by Freddie Mac until last month. That fact is a direct contradiction of words McCain had spoken Sunday night. At that time, responding to a Times story being prepared for Monday's paper revealing that Davis had been the head of a lobbying consortium led by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae until 2005, McCain said Davis had done no further work for either mortgage giant. Someone's lying – either Davis to McCain, or McCain to the public. I trust you see the problem here.'

What I cannot understand about the Obama campaign is that when I turn on the television I see McCain blaming Obama for the real estate melt down (which is of course ridiculous) but I have to read a British newspaper to see this item put bluntly. I mean, it is not as if it is an unfair smear or something. There are two big issues: 1) big money going to a McCain aide to lobby for firms now under FBI investigation, which helped destroy the US economy and 2) lying about it. Where's the Obama ad making these points?

I don't get it.