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She’s unexpectedly plucked from obscurity by the McCain campaign and, after a couple of rough days of media vetting, she gives a speech at the GOP convention–the first speech she’s ever given with anything approaching this level of prominence–and is universally declared to have hit it out of the park. She is anointed a “political superstar” by every talking head who can get to a microphone.

Now, I don’t know Sarah Palin (obviously), but at this point I suspect she envisioned the next several weeks as a continuation of her coming-out-party/victory-tour. She’d do packed events before cheering members of the GOP base (something she has in fact done), but she’d be a superstar in all the other typical ways, too. She’d be ubiquitous on the tube, doing the “Tonight Show” and “Good Morning America,” and, who knows, maybe even the political shows. She’d be so forthright and funny and charming and genuine that the whole country would fall in love with her. She’d be followed by a media throng that hung on her every word.

Instead, she hasn’t been allowed to give them a word to hang on: no press conferences (until one yesterday that hardly merited the term), a couple of scripted, softbally interviews, and an ongoing effort by the McCain campaign to have her vice presidential debate postponed indefinitely. The obvious implicit message her preppers and coddlers and protectors in the campaign are giving her is: You’re not ready. We don’t trust you. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Don’t ever open your mouth unless you’ve cleared it with us or you might destroy the whole campaign. These are not pleasant things to hear, and Palin has presumably been hearing them (again, by implication) every day for weeks now.

When I compare Palin’s performance with Gibson to her performance with Couric, the biggest difference I see is confidence. With Gibson, she obviously lacked the knowledge one expects at this level, but she seemed to have a glib faith that she could bluff her way through. She may not have answered many of his questions directly, but her evasions were, for the most part, perfectly articulate and comprehensible. In the Couric interviews, by contrast, she often seemed to be stringing along buzz words and sentence fragments that even she recognized to be gibberish. With Gibson, she was tap dancing; with Couric she was drowning.

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In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

They’ll probably pick a date that had a VP debate scheduled, so she can skip that…

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Congressional leaders and the Bush administration reached a tentative deal early Sunday on a landmark bailout of imperiled financial markets whose collapse could plunge the nation into a deep recession.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the $700 billion accord just after midnight but said it still has to be put on paper.

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After declaring he’d return to Washington to help with the bailout negotiations immediately after last night’s debate, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) never went to Capitol Hill today. In fact, McCain stayed largely holed up in his Arlington apartment, leaving only to go to his campaign headquarters just around the block, the New York Times reports:

Asked why Mr. McCain did not go to Capitol Hill after coming back to Washington to help with negotiations, [McCain adviser] Mr. Salter replied that “he can effectively do what he needs to do by phone.’’

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Here’s John McCain’s big plan for the budget: make a whole lot of noise about eliminating of the piece of the budget pie representing earmarks (and remember that most earmarks simply mandate where monies will be spent, they don’t create any new spending):

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Sami al-Haj walks with pain on his steel crutch; almost six years in the nightmare of Guantanamo have taken their toll on the Al Jazeera journalist and, now in the safety of a hotel in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, he is a figure of both dignity and shame. The Americans told him they were sorry when they eventually freed him this year – after the beatings he says he suffered, and the force-feeding, the humiliations and interrogations by British, American and Canadian intelligence officers – and now he hopes one day he’ll be able to walk without his stick.

The TV cameraman, 38, was never charged with any crime, nor was he put on trial; his testimony makes it clear that he was held in three prisons for six-and-a-half years – repeatedly beaten and force-fed – not because he was a suspected “terrorist” but because he refused to become an American spy. From the moment Sami al-Haj arrived at Guantanamo, flown there from the brutal US prison camp at Kandahar, his captors demanded that he work for them. The cruelty visited upon him – constantly interrupted by American admissions of his innocence – seemed designed to turnal-Haj into a US intelligence “asset”.

“We know you are innocent, you are here by mistake,” he says he was told in more than 200 interrogations. “All they wanted was for me to be a spy for them. They said they would give me US citizenship, that my wife and child could live in America, that they would protect me. But I said: ‘I will not do this – first of all because I’m a journalist and this is not my job and because I fear for myself and my family. In war, I can be wounded and I can die or survive. But if I work with you, al-Qa’ida will eliminate me. And if I don’t work with you, you will kill me’.”

Click for full size…

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Can’t get an interview with Sarah Palin? We’ve got you covered.

Odd. The question at the end makes it look like they think everything Obama says is wrong. Does that mean they think McCain was actually wrong every time Obama said he was right?

I would have expected them to end with something like “Even Barack Obama knows…John McCain is the right man for the job” – did they just fumble?

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That’s just what one Alan H. Fishman might have thought when he woke up Friday morning.

Fishman was the new chief executive officer for Washingon Mutual — WaMu — the nation’s largest savings and loan, which was taken over Thursday night by federal bank regulators and quickly dumped in a fire sale to JPMorgan Chase for the Wal-Mart-like price of $1.9 billion.

But don’t cry for Fishman, who reportedly was sky-high — literally — last night, on a flight from New York to Seattle, when WaMu collapsed. Even though he’s only been on the job for less than three weeks, he’s bailing out with parachute worth close to $20 million, according to an executive compensation analysis conducted for the New York Times by James F. Reda Associates.

That’s right, $20 million for 17 days on the job … and his company failed.

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Optimist: an investment banker who irons five shirts on Sunday evening.

MediaCurves: Independents say Obama won 61% – 39%

CBS: Uncommitted voters say Obama won 40% – 22% (with the other 38% saying it was a tie)

FiveThirtyEight is also claiming that Obama won in a CNN poll, a Luntz focus group, and a GQR focus group, but hasn’t provided links yet.

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Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you”. This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually speaking to middle class voters. Per the transcript, McCain never once mentioned the phrase “middle class” (Obama did so three times). And Obama’s eye contact was directly with the camera, i.e. the voters at home. McCain seemed to be speaking literally to the people in the room in Mississippi, but figuratively to the punditry. It is no surprise that a small majority of pundits seemed to have thought that McCain won, even when the polls indicated otherwise; the pundits were his target audience.

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Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal*Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they’re repaying your honesty by taking away your music. Unless you go through a bunch of hoops (that you may never find out about, if you’ve changed email addresses or if you’re not a very technical person), your music will no longer be playable after October 9th.

[..]

Boy, the entertainment industry sure makes a good case for ripping them off, huh? Buy your media and risk having it confiscated by a DRM-server shutdown. Take it for free and keep it forever.

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“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud.”

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Adding to the rocky perception was a McCain campaign web ad released this morning declaring “McCain Wins Debate!” — put out even before the candidate had announced he was planning to debate.

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A news story describing a successful launch of China’s long-awaited space mission and including detailed dialogue between astronauts launched on the Internet Thursday, hours before the rocket had even left the ground.

The country’s official news agency Xinhua posted the article on its Web site Thursday, and remained there for much of the day before it was taken down.

A staffer from the Xinhuanet.com Web site who answered the phone Thursday said the posting of the article was a “technical error” by a technician. The staffer refused to give his name as is common among Chinese officials.

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STEWART: We were in this huge credit crisis, out of money. Then the Fed goes, We’ll give you a trillion dollars, and all of a sudden Wall Street is like, ”I can’t believe we got away with it!” Can you imagine if someone said, ”I shouldn’t have bought that sports car because it means I can’t have my house,” and the bank just said, ”All right, you can have your house. And you know what? Keep the car.” [He throws up his arms joyfully and shouts] ”Yeaaaaah, I get to keep the car! Wait, do I have to give the money back?” ”No, it doesn’t matter.” ”Yeah, I’m gonna get another car! I’m gonna do the same thing the same way, except twice as f—ed up!”

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German newspaper Bild says state police tell them a special commando unit stormed a KLM flight in Cologne early Friday and arrested two terrorist suspects.

The newspaper did not identify its source and the police were not immediately available for comment.

The newspaper says the Cologne to Amsterdam flight was stormed at 6:55 a.m. and police arrested a 23-year-old Somali man and a 24-year-old German born in Somalia.

The newspaper says police say the two had been under observation for months and a suicide note was found in their apartment saying that they wanted to die for the “jihad” or “holy war.”

Bild article is here

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And now we know John McCain does not have the magic ability to fly into D.C., snap his fingers and fix the nation’s economic crisis.

A meeting at the White House this afternoon with McCain, Barack Obama and leaders from both parties in Congress didn’t yield much progress. (“It did not go well,” one senior House Republican aide said.) Reportedly, McCain showed up with alternative proposals for the bailout, apparently trying to start the negotiating process all over again instead of tweaking a proposal that Senate Democrats and Republicans said they had reached an agreement over this morning.

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During the White House meeting, it appears that Sen. John McCain had an agenda. He brought up alternative proposals, surprising and angering Democrats. He did not, according to someone briefed on the meeting, provide specifics.

One the proposals — favored by House Republicans — would relax regulation and temporarily get rid of certain taxes in order to lure private industry into the market for these distressed assets.

How’s that for a broken record? “Deregulate and give tax break to corporations” is the very thing that brought on the mess Wall Street is in… Obama is right:

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“John McCain sought to change the subject from his out-of-touch response to the economic crisis with a big announcement that he was ‘suspending’ his campaign. But the only thing McCain really wants suspended is the American people’s disbelief. In fact, he’s been in full campaign mode the entire time…

“When McCain finally arrived in Washington, almost twenty-four hours after his announcement — and after Congressional leadership announced a deal in principle — he huddled with his lobbyist campaign advisors while his running mate held a political rally and his political spokesmen and surrogates were out in full force, continuing to attack Barack Obama.

“So make no mistake: John McCain did not ‘suspend’ his campaign. He just turned a national crisis into an occasion to promote his campaign. It’s become just another political stunt, aimed more at shoring up the Senator’s aimed more at shoring up the Senator’s political fortunes than the nation’s economy. And it does nothing to help advance this critical legislation to protect the American people during this time of economic crisis.”

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Washington Mutual, the giant lender that came to symbolize the excesses of the mortgage boom, was seized by federal regulators on Thursday night, in what is by far the largest bank failure in American history.

Regulators simultaneously brokered an emergency sale of virtually all of Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest savings and loan, to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion, averting another potentially huge taxpayer bill for the rescue of a failing institution.

[..]

Washington Mutual, with $307 billion in assets, is by far the biggest bank failure in history, eclipsing the 1984 failure of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust in Chicago, an event that presaged the savings and loan crisis. IndyMac, which was seized by regulators in July, was one-tenth the size of WaMu.

update: this presentation from JP Morgan is interesting. Look at page 16. In the top middle there’s a percentage. They’re looking at 20% losses on Alt-A mortgages and 40% on subprime. That is a metric shitload of money. If WaMu is typical, and those number can be translated to national numbers, the $700 billion plan is not going to be near enough…

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This WaMu deal proves the FDIC, Fed and Treasury are running wargames behind the scenes. E.g., if the deal doesn’t pass by such-and-such day, sell this bank to that one, etc. They have no confidence in congress, no confidence in the candidates, no confidence in the president, no confidence in the market to move things forward. Maybe they never thought it would get passed, but thought it would buy a few days in the market to iron out some deals.

The govt isn’t supposed to be brokering deals. That’s what the investment banks are for. Oh, right, we don’t have any more investment banks.

[Quote:]

McCain revealed in an interview with a Cleveland TV station Tuesday that he hadn’t yet read the administration’s three-page bailout proposal.

“I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” McCain said. “I have to examine it.”

So, you really had no fucking clue why you suspended your campaign, right?