Election fatigue has really set in this last week. I have started several blog entries only to feel dispirited and end up canceling them. I have dutifully collected dozens of links for those entries, and I feel like I should share them in rapid-fire fashion just to get them out of my consciousness:
- "How Capitalism Will Save Us": Steve Forbes weighs in on the current financial crisis. This is a great explanation of how we came to be where we are along with a prescription for what we need to do once the crisis is resolved, which he predicts will be by next spring. Reading this essay, I lapsed into a daydream about what if he had been elected president back in 1996 or 2000. He makes every presidential candidate of either party seem like an intellectual lightweight (except for maybe Al Gore). I may disagree with him at times, but I know that his arguments are genuinely held, well informed, and thoughtful. I hope he runs again; if he did, I would volunteer much more hardily than I did in his previous presidential adventures.
- "Checks on 'Joe' more extensive than first acknowledged": this plus the legal intimidation (the entry's a little hard to read, but the controversy seems to surround temporary Obama campaign workers registering and voting) and the media freeze plus spells out how dissenters might fare under an Obama administration. He does not handle opposition well.
- "Obama's Moving Tax Threshold": when someone says that they want to close the gap between the rich and poor, there's only two ways to do it: spread the rich's wealth around to make the poor richer—the Robin Hood model—or redefine rich down so that the spread is nominally smaller. It's a rare candidate indeed who does both.
- Prepared Remarks of Senator John McCain in NH: it's a decent speech complaining about Obama's tax plan. It's just too bad that he contradicts it all the time by wanting to tax "windfall" profits and denouncing corporate greed. That's McCain in a nutshell: a contradictory, unprincipled demagogue.
- "White People Shouldn't Be Allowed to Vote": this will be a common refrain should Obama somehow lose. The racist voters just weren't up to the challenge of voting for a black man. It's definitely not that he's the most liberal candidate put up by either party in the last twenty years or that he associates with anti-American radicals, or that he's a Chicago politician of the worst kind. Nope, we're just as racist as ever.
- "Obama's Carbon Ultimatum": and this is one of the biggest reasons I'm afraid of an Obama administration. He's bad enough, but the people he'll bring to Washington amplify and expand his reach. The Senate is already prepared to fast track any nominees he puts forth. That includes packing the courts.
That's about half the links I've been collecting, sadly. So expect another link dump in a few days.
[UPDATE (11/1/2008): You mean the checks on Joe's child support records were politically motivated? No way!]