Bob Hayes Online

I am worried about this bailout.

Not just the potential abandonment of the principle that in a free market, companies that make dumb decisions must be free to fail. That’s troublesome, but it’s not like we’ve been honoring free market principles consistently in this country in the last twenty years.

I am reminded of my time at Microsoft, in the long long ago, when I was a junior software development engineer on Microsoft Bob, MS’ ill-fated attempt to create Windows with a human face. Not long after I had joined the team, there was a crisis owing to Bob 1.0’s poor sales – the rumor mill said that the project was going to be canceled, that we would all be out on the street, etc. We had a team meeting (perhaps 40 people) to brainstorm what to do, but when we arrived at the meeting, it turned out that our senior management team – not present at the meeting, and represented by their minions – had already decided what to do. They were going to revise our spec for Bob 2.0 (the project we were working on) so that we could get it done better, quicker, cheaper – all via magic, apparently – and that was going to solve everything and instantly create a huge market for our dog of a product. Although all the previous decisions this team had made had resulted in a steaming pile of fail, they were on the job this time. Our management team was there for us. They were On The Ball.

I remember raising my hand and asking a question that, I am sure, did my Microsoft career no good, but which had a number of the developers nodding their heads. I said “So what you’re saying is, the people whose plans and ideas got us into this mess in the first place, are the same people who have a plan to get us out?”

Perhaps the world will end if we don’t do this bailout. Certainly, a huge contraction of the economy is something that we should avoid if at all possible. But I’m not really sure why letting some incompetent lenders go out of business is going to cause a bigger contraction than taxing the bejeesus out of all of us would.

And I would feel a lot better about the whole thing if the people saying they’re going to save us, weren’t the exact same people who fouled it up in the first place.

A moving story of loss.

I remember, as a teenage boy, working at a pizza restaurant in Del City, Oklahoma. One of the assistant managers was a young woman not much older than me named Alicia, who became pregnant by her boyfriend. She decided to keep the baby despite her fears (the boyfriend was not going to step up, from my remembrance), and as the days passed her fear slowly transformed to excitement. She talked about what she would name the baby, what she would do for the baby. She showed us booties she had knitted. One day she excused herself to go the bathroom and came out not very much later, in tears. She had miscarried, there and then. I remember not knowing what to say, how to comfort her. (Fortunately there were others, more emotionally skilled, on the scene.)

What a tragedy, and what burdens of pain so many of us carry around inside, secretly or not so secretly, but with nowhere to ground them.

This is just really something. Quite good artwork, devoted to the service of a cause that seems laughably sincere. Yes, great artist of the People! Save us from the fundie wickedness that is Sarah Palin with your artistic genius!

H/T Lileks, who I think I saw on the street in Denver but I was too shy to say introduce myself, instead making a couple of jokes at the expense of the bird porn people. Besides, he was working. (Well, I was working, too, in that bizarre kind of “I don’t have to be doing this, but I want to be doing this, so it’s work” kind of way. But he was like getting a paycheck and everything, so I didn’t want to bug him.)

(Although, in retrospect, it occurs to me that even someone of Lilek’s stature in the midst of doing actual reportage on the bird porn people, cannot really say “This was important! Why are you bugging me!?”I shoulda said hi. Damn!)

Last night, I dreamed that Hillary Clinton got lost in a city where (for some reason) I was a resident, and she needed to take the bus to get back to her hotel, but she didn’t know the system. For some reason her Secret Service people were nowhere to be found, although Chelsea Clinton and a boyfriend were tagging along. I offered to take her on the bus route, which I was apparently an expert in, and we had a very gracious and respectful conversation on the route. I think we talked education policy, mostly. When we got to our destination she went off with her Secret Service people.

The same night, my wife had a dream about John McCain, that she was campaigning with him and they were riding on an airplane together, but on the outside of the plane. She worried that they would fall off, especially when the plane came dangerously close to a mountaintop, but they landed safely.

I think tonight maybe we’ll watch “Firefly” episodes on DVD.

Now that just about every attack on Palin has been thumpingly rebutted by well-regarded neutrals, about the only thing left hanging over her head is Troopergate. Unfortunately for Democrats, nobody cares about Troopergate. At worst, she will be seen as bending but not breaking rules in order to get rid of someone who was protecting a wife-beating child-tasering nightmare of a cop. She was entitled to fire the guy because she didn’t like his shifty eyes; that she has any reason at all (even personal reasons) will just make it more OK with the electorate. The library thing had more potential resonance – is she a scary book-burning fundie? – and that, too, is down the drain.

More the the point, at this date she can pretty much come out and refer to Hymietown, slap a wounded returning soldier for cowardice, and take a million-dollar check from Exxon at high noon in Times Square with “bribe” written in the memo field in 100-point type, and nobody will believe it. The shotgun salvo of slime that was fired at her from day one, and which across the board has been resoundingly disproved and rebutted, in some cases humiliatingly for the media “leaders” who drank too much Kool-Aid, made it clear to the electorate that there are big chunks of the media (from blogs to glossies) who will say and do anything to smear her, out of fear that she will derail the crowning of the Chosen One. “Yeah, yeah, what other lies are you going to print today” is now the default reaction to negative Palin news, and I don’t see that changing in time to effect the election.

Here’s my call for the elections.

Obama’s convention bounce was about two points, and it dissipated as those bounces do. There was no bounce from the Republican convention, because the convention (Palin’s speech aside) was a near-disaster. (I’ve never heard more boring Republican speeches in my life, and I’ve heard a lot of boring Republican speeches.) Instead, the post-Palin shift in the polling is structural; it’s a big chunk of purple America deciding that they (a) love her and (b) hate the people who have been smearing her grotesquely from the moment she came onto the national stage, who (rightly or wrongly) are tightly bound up with Obama and his friendly media in the public view. McCain has shifted the race by as much as ten percentage points, permanently, and will go down in history as making the most electorally significant VP pick ever. (And so much for the conventional wisdom that VP picks change nothing.)

The Wilder effect is very likely operative in this election, and is probably worth about four or five points. (Voters are reluctant to tell pollsters they aren’t going to vote for a black candidate, so they lie.) On paper, McCain has been a few points behind for months; in reality, McCain has been a little bit behind or a little bit ahead all through the general season, and is now solidly ahead by at least a few points. He will win in the EC comfortably but not overwhelmingly, and will somewhat blunt the Democratic gains in the Congress.

The “why” of all this is simple. Palin is an outstanding VP candidate, and has won real votes from millions of people who previously leaned Obama or didn’t know who to vote for. In addition, enthusiasm for her has revitalized a GOP establishment which was unenthusiastic at best. On the flip side, Obama is an unqualified candidate, and everyone not enthusiastically waving banners for him knows it. He captured the nomination by winning the hearts of the party’s activist base, but cannot win in the general election. Hillary knew this and she and Bill were both crucified for daring to even allude to it; after Obama’s defeat destroys the hope of a unified Democratic administration and Congress, there will be a great deal of bitter recrimination and a lot more infighting as the finger of blame gets passed around.

Many hard-left news sources (such as the spectacularly unconvincing “Sambo” article  that’s been circling the drain for the last few days) will froth in denial of these new facts on the ground for the next couple of months, but they will convince noone but themselves; there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth on November 5. (“How could this happen when everything I read says that it wouldn’t?”)

You have to love the Democrats; they basically have every advantage they could have short of God himself descending from the Throne and announcing “Vote Democrat, all my children!”, and they’ve thrown it away. No Presidency, and what should have been veto-proof majorities in both houses will instead be just another slight pro-Dem shift. (If the Obama campaign completely implodes as their defeat looms, it might even be a neutral race in terms of Congressional outcomes, as dispirited Democratic voters don’t bother to turn out for the down-ticket races, but I don’t think they’ll completely implode.)

So, it’ll be McCain but not by a landslide, and a range of Congressional outcomes somewhere between modest Democratic gains in both houses to no major shift in either house, depending on how well the Obama campaign handles its slow-motion defeat.

You can apply a wishful-thinking discount to this if you want – I won’t pretend that this isn’t an outcome I don’t want to see. However, I’m already applying a wishful-thinking discount internally, and secretly expect a McCain blowout and no big losses in Congress for the GOP, despite our richly deserving them.

Jesse of Pandagon decides it’s hilarious to mock John McCain as “Manhug McCain” after seeing this photo of McCain hugging Bush.

Jesse doesn’t know – or perhaps he does – that the reason McCain hugs people like that is because while he was fighting in Vietnam, he was shot down, breaking both his arms, which were never properly treated. While he was a POW, he was brutally tortured by the Viet Cong, further damaging his arms. He can no longer raise his arms very high; this is about as good a hug as he can give.

The radical left: bringing class and style to political snark since 1968.