Radosh.net

I've become addicted to NPR's Planet Money podcast — economic news for financial ignoramuses like myself. Last week, the PM team explained why the best way to know how much trouble we're in is to ignore the plunging stock market and keep your on the TED spread.

The spread measures the difference between the interest rate the U.S. government would give you to borrow money and what banks would give you... The idea behind the spread is that if you have money that you're willing to lend and you want to get some interest back, then the safest thing you can do is lend it to the U.S. government, Davidson says. Historically, large banks have been seen as almost as safe as the U.S. government. And for much of this decade, that was reflected in an extremely low TED spread rate that remained around 0.2.

As of this morning, that number is 4.51. You'll want to bookmark that link, and, for good measure, the rate of the three month treasury bond itself. If that number goes up, it means banks are engaging in the normal process of lending and borrowing money. If it goes down, they're hiding their money under the government mattress. A month ago 3 month T bonds were at 1.58. Today, they're at 0.18.

10:56 AM :: Comments (1)

The Obama campaign is famous for its ground game. The question is, does it have a post-game ground game? It's time to consider what happens if Obama goes into the election with an insurmountable lead in the polls, and ends up losing thanks to manufactured chaos at the booth.

The likelihood of the election being stolen — if not directly than by a combination of intentional and fortuitous shenanigans — is increasing every day. Yesterday's chilling New York Times investigation into illegal voter purges is only the tip of a very cold iceberg.

Obama can't allow himself to be blindsided by this as Al Gore was when he lost the 2000 election in extra innings. His campaign needs to be prepared for an immediate mobilization of all forces — communications, legal, grassroots — at the first sign of trouble. He may need to be on top of this before the polls even close, setting the narrative before McCain can. I won't pretend to know exactly what steps he may need to take, but I do know he'll need to have them planned out in advance. McCain certainly will.

One possible model for him to look to: Hillary Clinton's second-half primary campaign. True, her kitchen-sink tactics were appalling in their own context because she had actually lost, but in support of a candidate who actually won, and was in danger of being denied victory, a similar combination of unashamedly aggressive spin and backroom maneuvering would be appropriate and necessary. Not pretty, perhaps, but better than four years of McCain (or, more likely, two years of McCain and two years of Palin).

Relevant Chris Rock bit begins at 2:35

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You know how I always say that playing the "imagine if the other side did this" game is a cheap rhetorical device, only to go ahead and endorse it anyway. At this point, I should probably just admit that while it may be cheap, it's usually pretty revealing. Here's David Talbot on Sarah Palin's anti-American BFFs.

Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago.

Someone should totes ask her about this at her next press conference!

02:40 PM :: Comments (6)

How inept is the McCain campaign? Yesterday, Politico's Mike Allen made the case, with some justification, that reviving the Keating Five scandal wouldn't harm McCain all that much because "McCain hardly hides the affair."

He called it, in his 2002 autobiography, "the worst mistake of my life." He remade himself as a reformer in reaction to the scandal. McCain's case isn't that you should ignore his sin, or that it isn't a sin; it's that he's expiated it.

If the McCain camp had pushed that line, it probably would have been hard for the Obama campaign to get much traction on this front in the press. But it didn't. Instead, it argued today that McCain had done nothing wrong and that the K5 inquiry was a "classic political smear job."

Which means the press pretty much has to get to the bottom of the competing claims by dredging the whole thing up all over again. Even if the consensus somehow comes out in McCain's favor, the process is bound to hurt him.

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Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here for last week's results.

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What do you think of when you think slutty video game nuns with chainsaws? Probably that I needed an eye-catching image for an otherwise dull post that I nevertheless really hope you'll read.

Let me explain.

Next week I'm capping (more or less) my six-month Rapture Ready! publicity blitz with two New York City appearances that promise to be the be-all and end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet. Will you be one of them?

October 16: Free lecture and reception at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

October 19: Special event at the 92nd Street Y. David Rakoff interviews A.J. Jacobs and Daniel Radosh on their experiences as strangers in a strange land.

In case you're wondering how the whole book thing has been going, I'm pleased to say that it's gotten rave reviews (with one really trivial exception), and enthusiastic blog response. And while it may seem to you that I post about the book at Radosh.net all the time, in fact, I've kept most RR! news sequestered here.

If you make it to one of the events, come say hi. It will improve your chances of winning the cartoon contest.

09:53 PM :: Comments (2)

Someone has created an Amazon wish list for Sarah Palin. Down at the bottom of the first page, under "Mom, Dad... I'm Pregnant" and the collector's edition of Red Dawn is my book, Rapture Ready! Fake Sarah's comment: "I want to be just as rapture ready as the author!"

That shouldn't be too hard.

08:55 AM :: Comments (10)

With all the (totally appropriate) jaw-dropping and gleeful snickering over Sarah Palin's inability to name a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade that she disagrees with, people seem to be overlooking the question before that: "Do you believe there is an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution." Her answer, firm and repeated: "I do."

Uh oh. For more than 30 years, the cornerstone of the pro-life movement's legal (as opposed to moral) argument against Roe has been that the court's decision was "based on a new, previously undefined 'right of privacy' which it 'discovered' in so-called 'emanations' of 'penumbrae' of the Constitution." That's a lot of scare quotes, yet none of them have helped sink the message into Sarah Palin's brain. I had previously suspected that Palin was shaky (to be exceedingly generous) on issues that she didn't care about, like the economy and stuff that happens in other countries, but now it seems like she lacks even rudimentary understanding of the issues that are supposed to be central to her.

Indeed, most serious pro-lifers, faced with Couric's question about other bad rulings could have instantly named at least one: Dred Scott. As Tim Noah pointed out four years ago, "To the Christian right, 'Dred Scott' turns out to be a code word for 'Roe v. Wade.'" Even knowing nothing about the law, or the court, she should at least have been familiar enough with pro-life talking points to come up with that.

I still think Palin could ace an interview about the Bible, but I'm less certain than before.

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