From today’s Boston Globe:
Campaigning on her own, the Alaska governor also said Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama “wants to raise income taxes and raise payroll taxes and raise investment income taxes and raise business taxes and raise the death tax.
“But John McCain and I know that’s not the way you grow the economy,” she added.
In fact, independent groups such as the Tax Policy Center have concluded that four out of five U.S. households would receive tax cuts under Obama’s proposals.
Either she doesn’t know that she’s wrong….or she does. Choose your poison.
[By choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate,] “McCain has rendered himself unfit to run a branch of Starbucks, let alone the White House.”
—Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times of London.
After spending a lot of time “thinking about what happened” at Citigroup and across Wall Street, Mr. Prince said he has concluded that the credit crunch and its painful consequences were unforeseeable.
—Former Citigroup chairman and CEO Charles Prince. Citigroup shares are down 60% in the past year.
Did you see her dead-on impersation of Palin on SNL? Neither did I.
(Good for us-we had better things to do on a Saturday night than watch TV. Right?)
Here it is……
Just days after a Times story alleged that Barack Obama was having trouble meeting his fundraising goals, the Obama campaign set a new fundraising record with $66 million for the month of August and 500, 000 new donors.
While the amount surpassed the previous record of $55 million set in February by Mr. Obama, it is in line with ambitious goals his campaign set in June, when he decided to back away from his pledge to take public financing. Mr. Obama may need to match or even exceed the new record this month and next to compete with Senator John McCain and the Republican National Committee.
My prediction: the choice of Sarah Palin will energize fundraising for both campaigns, perhaps slightly more so for Obama. The sense of urgency among Obama supporters I know is palpable.
A beautiful—but deadly—lionfish. (Tulumben, Bali)
For some time now I’ve believed that racism is costing Barack Obama about five to ten percentage points in the polls, and that if Obama were white, this race would be a blow-out.
I can’t point to many tangible things as evidence of that, but I did agree with New York governor David Patterson that, when Sarah Palin repeatedly and sneeringly referred to Obama as a “community organizer,” at the RNC, everyone present knew exactly what she really meant: “scary black guy who hangs out in scary black inner cities.”
Here’s another little bit of evidence, from the Globe:
Activists at a conservative political forum snapped up boxes of waffle mix depicting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a racial stereotype on its front and wearing a turban-like headdress typically worn by Arabs, on its top flap.
Values Voter Summit organizers stopped sales of Obama Waffles boxes yesterday, saying they had not realized the boxes displayed “offensive material.”
Uh-huh. Sure they didn’t.
Obama is portrayed with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly….
Then again, now that I think about it, maybe they didn’t. I’m not sure which option is worse…
The website Muckety (new to me, pretty great) praises Robert Kaplan’s performance as interim head of the Harvard Management Company.
Robert Steven Kaplan may be the equivalent of a fill-in head coach who takes his team to the Super Bowl and wins….
David Foster Wallace, one of our most talented and ambitious (in a literary sense) novelists, has committed suicide.
Wallace was one of the few modern writers who merited the hype that surrounded him. This is a real loss.