08OCT08

26 days to go..... so anyway, due to work and household duties, I missed most of the debate last night. I caught the last fifteen or twenty minutes and I was thoroughly underwhelmed. The debate reacts I've seen so far have been predictable: each side says their man won. I think McCain missed a golden opportunity right at the end on quite possibly the stupidest question of the night: "What don't you know and how will you learn it?" to which he replied "What I don't know is what all of us don't know. Unexpected things will happen at home and abroad. But I know dark times. It is my honor to serve. I'll rest on my record." He should have used Fred! Thompson's line from the convention: "Just exactly who is Barack Obama and can he be trusted with the Presidency?" The link tracks back to Gabriel Malor's excellent debate summary over at Ace of Spades HQ. McQ at Q and O has some thoughts, as well: I find the Democratic party, as it is presently configured (i.e. trending harder and harder to the left) to be the most dangerous of the two parties. Elsewhere, the gloom continues: I am particularly concerned about bad policies because significantly higher taxes have been proposed by Barack Obama. His plan would raise the marginal tax rate on the most productive workers more than 10 percentage points -- an increase that would bring us near Western European levels. His plan would also raise capital income taxes, taxing capital gains and dividends at 20%, compared to a 15% rate under Sen. John McCain's plan. A five percentage-point difference might strike you as small, but it is not. I have calculated that a five percentage-point difference in overall capital income taxation over the long haul is equal to a difference in the nation's capital stock of about 18%. This means a 6% difference in GDP and a 6% difference in the average wage rate. This means that real GDP and the average wage would fall, gradually but persistently declining about 6% after 25 years. That's not quite a Great Depression, but a significant step towards one. In today's Sarah Palin news: The e-mail hacker has been indicted: David C. Kernell, 20, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Knoxville, Tenn., for "intentionally accessing without authorization the e-mail account of Alaska governor Sarah Palin," the Justice Department says. Kernell's father is Tennessee State Rep. (Democrat) Mike Kernell. ...Kernell, if convicted, faces five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three year term of supervised release. I had to add the party affiliation, ABC news forgot to include it. Camile Paglia slaps the "Palin-bashers" around: The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality. In movie news: it looks like there is an effort afoot to tank the box office numbers for "An American Carol". Theaters are omitting the title from their marquees, listing it as "Rated R" (it's PG-13), or selling you a ticket to another movie to suppress "An American Carol's" box office take. Mpower pictures and Vivendi are starting to hear complaints about unorthodox treatment of An American Carol by employees of theaters that are carrying the movie. So far, ten theaters have been implicated in irregularities regarding the handling of this movie in cineplexes and other theaters—particularly as regards ticket sales. Unrelated, but just too good of a line to leave on the cutting room floor: Joe Biden?!? Seriously — Joe Biden?!? Joe Biden is a creature composed entirely of mouth and stupid. more soon