Some Economic News:

LA Times: “Los Angeles County poverty rate fell in 2007, census data show: Other Southern California counties also show slight declines. The effects of the sharp economic downturn and rising unemployment since last year are unclear.”

LA Times: “A gauge of consumer confidence has its biggest increase in two years this month.”

NY Times: “Average U.S. Income Showed First Rise Over 2000”

Then a LAT article asks:

We have a market paradox on our hands. Consumer confidence is close to a 40-year low, suggesting that the economy is in worse shape now than in times that seemed far darker, such as the early 1980s, when both inflation and unemployment crept into double digits. Yet many of the current economic indicators, including inflation and unemployment, are rather positive — or at least not as negative as consumer sentiment implies.

So why are consumers, myself included, so gloomy?

The article goes on to suggest that consumers helplessness in the face of larger economic challenges drives the negative sentiment.

I’ll suggest an alternate answer – and actually pass on the obvious one which that the media is bearish on the economy – like they are on foreign policy, the environment and everything else – out of partisan loyalty to the Democratic party. Personally, I’ve heard this, think it’s interesting, but don’t buy it.

I’ll suggest another reason:

New York Times Co., the third-largest U.S. newspaper publisher, reported revenue fell 10.1 percent in July as a slumping U.S. economy led to the steepest monthly declines in retail and classified advertising this year.

Ad sales decreased 16.2 percent to $129.4 million from a year earlier, led by drops of 30.1 percent in classifieds and 13.3 percent in retail ads, the New York-based company said today in a statement. July revenue was $235.9 million.

The people whose job it is to shape our attitudes about our economy are among those getting slammed the worst by the current – admittedly complex – economy.

I can’t help but believe their own tribulations bleed over into their perceptions of the wider world.

I’ve said for a long time that the economy is like a Napoleon – what the French call a mille-feuille (thousand layer pastry). The layers are loosely connected to other layers, but connections are much more strong within the layer itself.

Just food for thought.

In a hotel watching TV. Hillary’s going on stage…

…admit it. You want her to tell her supporters to cut loose, mount a coup and force a vote tomorrow. A little real history at one of these freeze-dried conventions…

Update: You know she’s actually giving a stemwinder of a speech…

Go read Michael Totten on the spark that ignited the Georgian war:

Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.

Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.

This is going to continue to be interesting for some time…

Blackfive and NZ Bear at Victorycaucus have pictures up – go check them out. And I’m holding the damn AR15 out “like a Prada purse” because I’m wearing my suit pants – thanks to United Airlines losing my luggage – and didn’t want to get gun lube on them. So there.

Play the video of the drive on B5’s site it was a hoot.

And, oddly, when NZ sent me the email telling me the post was up, TG and I were watching one of the movies he referenced – Buckaroo Banzai, which she’d never seen.

I’ve always wanted to be Lord Whorfin. But I do compulsively floss my teeth for days every time I see the film.

I’m going to start doing a running set of posts on interesting Obama / McCain posts from here and yon. Not a lot of commentary, but a link and a snippet. There’s a lot of interesting writing going on out there…

Telegraph UK – ” Obama won’t lose for being black but for not being American enough ”

It is that core of experience – of growing up American – which Obama lacks. His problem is not so much that he is an African-American in the modern political sense of being a black American. It is that he is an African-American in the literal sense of being half African and only half American, who spent much of his boyhood abroad and who borrowed a consciously constructed black American identity from the south side of Chicago.

TAP – ” The Democratic Education Divide ”

Ultimately it is policy makers — supported by parents — who must rise to these challenges and recommit themselves to educational equality. Teachers’ unions have a role to play, but they aren’t either the villain or the fix-all of education politics. What the unions remain, however, is a key Democratic constituency. Surely, convincing, cajoling, and encouraging are better tactics to win over grass-roots teachers than hectoring them with anti-union rhetoric. After all, if folks like Nancy Ruth White and the generations of teachers following her embrace of the Democrats for Education Reform agenda — giving up tenure in exchange for higher starting salaries and merit pay tied to student achievement — the unions will have to get with the program. If they don’t, they’ll risk becoming irrelevant to their own members.

Andrew Sullivan quoting Robert Caro on LBJ’s absence from the convention:

Caro is now at work on the fourth volume of his epic biography, about Johnson’s White House years. “I am writing right now about how he won for black Americans the right to vote. I am turning from what happened forty-three years ago to what I am reading in my daily newspaper…and the thrill that goes up and down my spine when I realize the historical significance of this moment is only equaled by my anger that they are not giving Johnson credit for it.”

Joe Klein on an undecided focus group – ” Focused ”

So this is Obama’s task on Thursday: To convince people that he is a man of substance, not empty promises, that he has ideas–despite his lack of experience–about running government in a way that will be more effective. A tall order, I’d say.

Kevin Drum on the Klein article:

I just finished writing a short essay on more-or-less this very topic, so I won’t anticipate myself too much here. But the nickel version is this: the goal of this election shouldn’t be just to win, it should be to talk a big chunk of the electorate into becoming friendlier toward liberal goals and ideas. Not just friendlier toward change, but friendlier toward specifically liberal change. That means a public that, at least at the margins, is more convinced that we need universal healthcare and that Obama can deliver it; that we need to withdraw from Iraq and reboot our foreign policy; and that some sacrifices are acceptable in the service of a serious energy policy. So far, though, Obama has simply been too cautious about standing up and really hammering home a simple, easily understood case for these and other specifically liberal goals.

Modern journalism at its finest once again.

William Saletan has a (risible) piece up at Slate challenging the Olympic 100m butterfly victory of Michael Phelps.

Sorry, but none of these assurances holds water. The scoreboard doesn’t tell you which swimmer arrived, touched, or got his hand on the wall first. It tells you which swimmer, in the milliseconds after touching the wall, applied enough force to trigger an electronic touch pad. As to whether Phelps touched first, there’s plenty of unresolved doubt.

The human eye, in real time and basic video replay, suggests Cavic won. But that could be an optical illusion. Cavic takes one big stroke toward the wall, then glides to it with fingers extended. Phelps does the opposite: He shortens his stroke so he can squeeze in one more truncated stroke. He gambles that the speed he gets from the extra launch will make up for the additional time it requires. Cavic leads but closes the distance to the wall slowly; Phelps trails but closes the distance fast. In ultraslow-motion replays, it looks as though Cavic has reached the wall while Phelps is still closing. But these replays break down Cavic’s glide to such short increments that you can’t really tell whether he has stopped.

I’m kinda speechless here.

Because even media-disconnected me managed to get to see the Sports Illustrated (yeah, not a mainstream magazine that big-time journalists like Saletan might have looked at in doing his research…) spread on the finish?

Remind me again why I’m supposed to take mainstream journalists seriously?

Seriously,. the problem with trivial stories like this one is that it cracks the mantle of credibility that the journalists need – because it’s really the only thing they have to sell.

…is neatly summed up with Slate Editor in Chief’s personal opinion piece – “If Obama Loses : Racism is the only reason McCain might beat him.”

It’s a pretty clear insight into how he thinks.

What with the Bush legacy of reckless war and economic mismanagement, 2008 is a year that favors the generic Democratic candidate over the generic Republican one. Yet Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?

If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama’s missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.

Now, obviously – in his universe – we’re blessed that Obama has chosen to step forward as the potential leader of the world, and certainly it’s true that his handsomeness, brilliance, and cool are gifts that he deigns to allow the rest of us to glimpse – kind of like Brittany allowed the photographers to glimpse her best – or most interesting to Google searches – gifts back during her partying days.

But you know, for the rest of us? We just want to elect some person as our President for four or eight years, and we want to believe that at the end of those years, the country will be a little better off than it is now, and that we’ll be able to fend off the challenges we face and not hand them off to our grandkids.

And while it’s absolutely true that there is some (I believe small) slice of voters who will let their inner Bull Connors out when the curtains close on the polling booth, I think that they are matched by both the absolute solidarity that Obama will get in the African-American vote and by the very real group of people – kinda like me – who are in no small part favorably disposed to him because of his skin color.

Look Obama doesn’t even have the resume of a Jack Kennedy to run on. He made it to this point in no small part because of the African American politics of South Chicago which teed him up as a state legislator and then helped him step forward as a Senator.

So when journalists like Weisberg echo my buddy the Gallery Guy, you have to wonder how those kinds of attitudes bleed out into the quality of work that they produce. I believe that they are professionals, and see themselves as working for organizations less marginal than, say, Mother Jones, and so they make efforts to balance hiring and coverage.

But I also believe that the toxic pall of smug is something our journalistic – and political – worlds would be far better off without.

It looks like an agreement is close between the Iraqi government and the US government on a schedule for ramping down the US military presence in Iraq – a timetable. Many of the antiwar folks who have been pressing for the US government to announce such a timetable have been – to use a charitable term – crowing, including my grudgingly approved candidate, Senator Obama:

“I am glad that the administration has finally shifted to accepting a timetable for the removal of our combat troops from Iraq…”

The difference, of course, is between a timetable that we unilaterally impose regardless of the desires of the Iraqis and the conditions on the ground, and a timetable that is arrived at as a consequence of agreement between our government and the Iraqi one. It seems to me such an obvious thing, and yet no one else seems to be raising it.

Kevin Drum has a good cautionary comment, and links to another good one from Megan McArdle.

From the Las Vegas Sun, here’s a nice snapshot of the complex bundle of issues that the war represents in this election:

By 2006, however, as the war continued to rage, the public had lost patience. On Election Day, voters punished Republicans across the country for mismanaging the conflict.

Overjoyed, Democrats believed their time had come to ride the wave. They opened the 2008 campaigns brimming with confidence that the war would propel their candidates into the White House and Congress.

But now, with just 11 weeks remaining in the campaigns, that assumption is being tested.

Interviews with 20 voters this week found the war has evolved into a much more complicated issue than in the past two elections.

Many voters said they think the war was a bad idea, which is consistent with findings of national polls. But with the war no longer front and center in the national consciousness, the interviews suggested the issue is no longer an automatic boost for Democrats.

Instead, the war is at times cutting against stereotype.

Was just part of a junket which culminated in a meeting with the president of Blackwater (yes, that Blackwater…). I’m still digesting a lot of it, and will have more comments. But one thing he said really hit me – that with 300 of his troops (the news story says 250, but his comment was for 300) and 600 elite troops they would pick and mentor from the AU forces, they could shut down the genocide in Darfur.

I didn’t ask what he charges for his forces, but imagine that it’s $50,000/month/pair of boots. That’s $15 million a month – $180 million for the year. Why aren’t we having a telethon with Hollywood celebrities raising money for this?

Spencer “Flackerman” (sorry, couldn’t resist) just reopened the Beauchamp kerfluffle. He met with Beauchamp and his ex-TNR wife, and – shockingly!! – it was all true and Foer was a wimp for not telling all of us who criticized his stories to pound sand.

Or not, according to Bob Owens and the facts. Ackerman’s going to have to do better than this to go back to becoming “Attackerman.”