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When moderator Tom Brokaw opened the Nashville debate by asking both candidates, "What's the fastest, most positive solution to bail these people out of the economic ruin?" Sen. McCain should have responded by saying the first thing we should do is not put in power those who caused the crisis in the first place.

With the next questions, however, McCain started to place his aim where it should be. Asked about the rescue package, he said, "One of the real catalysts, really the match that lit this fire, was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." He pointed out, "They're the ones that, with the encouragement of Sen. Obama and his cronies and his friends in Washington, that went out and made all these risky loans, gave them to people that could never afford to pay back."

He pointed out that the Democrats were whistling past the graveyard on Fannie and Freddie while pocketing political contributions. He said, finally, in a national forum, that "Senator Obama was the second-highest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac money in history." But then he forgot about the issue.

The blame for the most serious economic crisis in recent memory should be laid squarely at the feet of Barack Obama and the Democrats. He and they should be denied the reins of economic power.

There is still one more debate in which to drive that point home.

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It's disappointing that McCain failed to call out Obama on his figures, because he had an opening big enough to drive an Exxon Mobil tanker truck through.

The problem isn't Obama's claim about consumption. The U.S. does go through about a quarter of the oil used across the globe (it also, by the way, produces 28% of the world's goods and services, but that's another story).

But that doesn't include the estimated 200 billion barrels of oil trapped below two miles of shale in the Bakken Formation, a wildly rich reserve that stretches through Montana and North Dakota.

Neither do Obama's shock data include the more than 130 billion barrels off our coasts that Congress had placed off limits, nor the 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of shale oil in the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

And we haven't even mentioned Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where 10 billion to 20 billion barrels of easily tapped oil have been sitting idle for decades because a majority of policymakers are cowed by pressure from environmental groups and won't allow drilling in this remote and desolate area.

Conservative-friendly media better get ready. Should Barack Obama win the presidency and the Democrats control Congress, as now seems likely, they will launch a full-scale war to drive critics — especially on political talk radio — right out of legitimate public debate.

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Conservative-friendly media better get ready. Should Barack Obama win the presidency and the Democrats control Congress, as now seems likely, they will launch a full-scale war to drive critics — especially on political talk radio — right out of legitimate public debate.

A Democrat-controlled Washington will use sweeping new rules to shush conservative political speech. For starters, expect a real push to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

True, Obama says he isn't in favor of re-imposing this regulation, which, until Ronald Reagan's FCC junked it in the '80s, required broadcasters to give airtime to opposing viewpoints or face fines or even loss of license. But most top Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, are revved up about the idea, and it's hard to imagine Obama vetoing a new doctrine if Congress delivers him one.

Make no mistake: a new Fairness Doctrine would vaporize political talk radio, the one major medium dominated by the right. If a station ran a successful conservative program like, say, Mark Levin's, it would also have to run a left-leaning alternative, even if — as with Air America and all other liberal efforts in the medium to date — it can't find any listeners or sponsors.

And Obama does say he wants to tighten media ownership regulations and expand the public interest duties of broadcasters, including by imposing greater "local accountability" on them — that is, forcing stations to carry more local programming, even if the public isn't demanding it (which it isn't).

Obama, like congressional Democrats, also wants to regulate the Internet, the only other medium in which the right does well, via its influential bloggers.

The means here: something called "network neutrality." Neutrality, if enacted, would give government overseers at the FCC the power to ensure that Internet providers treated equally all the information bits surging across the Web's "pipes" — its cables, fiber optics, phone lines and wireless connections.

This measure makes zero economic sense. Broadband providers want to manage more actively — and thus profitably — those information bits. They'd like to offer, for instance, new superfast delivery for sites or users willing to pay more (not unlike how FedEx speeds delivery of packages for a fee), or other new services such as online video or telephony.

Network neutrality would render all that illegal. But why, then, should broadband investors keep building the Web infrastructure needed to keep pace with surging use? Where's their financial incentive?

Not coincidentally, hampering the alternative media with new regulations would leave the liberal mainstream press, which still enjoys full First Amendment protections, comparatively empowered.

Given how the "MSM" has covered this presidential race — fawning over Obama and pummeling John McCain and especially his charismatic running mate Sarah Palin at every opportunity — it's easy to see why many liberals may be hoping for a media restoration.

Obama's problem with his friend, the unrepentant terrorist and communist radical Bill Ayers, isn't just that he bombed the Pentagon. It's what he wants to do to education. He met Hugo Chavez and praised his curriculums.

The home mortgage buy-up has already been approved; Update: McCain camp confirms no additional fund request

First, lenders already have begun modifiying mortgages, including principal, and for very good reason.  Foreclosures create massive losses for lenders, and they’re better off keeping owners in their homes and making payments — even if they take a 10-20% loss on the principal, on paper.  The result will be lower profit than originally expected, but it’s still profit, and right now that looks a lot better than a potential 50-75% loss through foreclosure.

Now that Treasury will buy hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed securities, they in effect have become the lender.  They will own the papers on these homes, and must act in the long-term best interest in managing them.  That will mean negotiating with homeowners just as private lenders have already done, trying to keep people in their homes and preventing as many defaults as possible.  Note that this comes as a result of the legislation Congress already passed, and not any new initiative.  What McCain proposes is a specific strategy of managing the paper to prevent as many homes from foreclosure as possible.  In the end, that strategy could result in considerable long-term profit rather than a taxpayer bath.

Renegotiating the principal on these loans will not directly impact home values, for two reasons.  The action will keep these homes off the market, while home values depend on the sale prices of homes in the immediate vicinity.  Second, home values are already dropping, thanks to the deflation of the housing bubble, excess inventory through overbuilding of new homes, and the anticipated addition of tens of thousands of foreclosures.  Lenders are also not writing too many mortgages these days, making it impossible to buy or sell.  If these foreclosures hit the market, it will not only drastically lower the prices in neighborhoods across America, it will eat into the ability of lenders to grant mortgages in the future — and they won’t have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac backstopping them any longer.

This proposal doesn’t go any farther than Congress has already gone in injecting the government into private lending markets in order to undo their disastrous interventions over the past decade.  It does offer a management strategy for the portfolios that Treasury will buy with that now-existing authority.  The plan follows a fairly straightforward private-sector strategy in an attempt to keep as many people in their homes as possible. Without some sort of renegotiation on these loans, we’ll start seeing massive foreclosures and the rapid deflation of home values everywhere — which is what McCain said he wanted to prevent.

Update: Michelle strongly disagrees.

Update II: I’ve consulted an economist on this point, and he points out that the trouble with MBSs is that they consist of pieces of several loans.  That’s what will make renegotiating terms through the private sector almost impossible — it will require hundreds of people to agree on each one.  He thinks that McCain’s proposal will create a shortcut that will allow for quick renegotiation, which could keep many of these mortgages from going into default.

The McCain campaign confirmed with me that the $300 billion McCain referenced was part of the existing bailout, not an additional outlay.  He wants it redirected into this effort.  I’ve asked for a link, and I’ll add it when I get it.

As I said, the authority to do this was in the plan all along.  It’s not an additional $300 billion — it’s using $300 billion of the $700 billion already authorized to hit more directly on mortgages rather than rescuing investors from their derivatives.  It transfers at least some of the pain back to the people who speculated on mortgages, but in effect gives the derivatives more value through the support of the mortgages on which they’re based.

Video: Welcome our next vice president, John McCain

Barone: Of course Ayers is relevant

Barone’s three reasons:

• Obama stresses his commonality with the American people.  Do most people feel comfortable working closely with unrepentant domestic terrorists who still want to overthrow the capitalist system in America?
• Obama presses educational issues as part of his campaign.  He spent years working with Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which pushed efforts to create primary educational organizations that would create political activists for the Left - and which largely failed in any of its intended purposes.
• Obama has lied and obfuscated about his relationship with Ayers.  Clearly, Ayers was not just “some guy in the neighborhood”, but a political adviser at least on educational issues who provided a key launch for Obama’s political career.

I think the latter two are more compelling than the first.  Perhaps a better way of structuring the first point would be to relate it to Obama’s insistence that he has better judgment than John McCain to lead the nation.  Can anyone believe that a man who worked with an unrepentant domestic terrorist for years and considered him “mainstream” has the judgment necessary for the Presidency?

Did soft bias again affect the debate?

Why high-school debate teams don’t have cheerleaders — or crowds

The consensus after last night’s debate, in both the blogosphere and the commentariat, formed quickly and rather inexplicably that it failed because it was too dull.  Most people I see blamed Tom Brokaw for not spicing it up, and both candidates for putting most of the people watching it to sleep.  Ironically, this comes from the same people who complain about the lack of substance and policy and the plethora of sound-bite gotchas in most political debates.

Last night’s debate shows what we get when both candidates focus on policy and (mostly) avoid sound bites and gotchas.  It was a debate, not the political equivalent of a Roman forum or Match Game with slightly less salacious questions.  Both candidates did their best to lay out their policy preferences and their records, and while John McCain was more aggressive about contrasting himself with Barack Obama on those, both did so mainly by sticking to policies and records.

Real debates don’t make good public spectacles.  High school debates don’t get held at stadiums or gymnasiums on Friday nights in front of massive crowds.  The bands do not conduct halftime shows and cheerleaders do not appear, unless coincidentally a cheerleader is a member of the debate squad.  There is a good reason for this.  Real debates tend to be dull to everyone except the people involved, or those very interested in the topic under discussion.

Everyone complains when the candidates don’t provide substantive discussion of policy, but it appears that the truth is that very few people in the media are interested in a substantive debate.  They need headlines and hooks, and find an actual debate on substance a waste of their time.  The truth is that they don’t want a debate, because a real debate does nothing much more than compare position papers and well-established policy. . . .

. . . Better yet, maybe some in the media will think about their reaction and realize what a waste of time most of these presidential debates are, and how they usually reward glibness and appearance while penalizing substance and        detail. . . .

Debate analysis: Both men improve, McCain wins on points

The second presidential debate goes into the record books, and this time both men managed to stick closer to their game plans.  Barack Obama rid himself of the “John is right” tic that appeared in various forms almost a dozen times in the first debate.  John McCain gave a much more focused response on economic issues.  In the end — literally, in this case — McCain prevailed on his strength on foreign policy and national security.

Obama improved from the first debate.  He kept his voice even and didn’t get as rattled.  Last time, Obama’s voice kept pitching higher when McCain attacked him, and he spent most of the evening defending himself.  This time, Obama stuck to his own agenda, only getting flustered once after a McCain attack, and stumbling when Tom Brokaw shut him down, invoking the debate agreement between the two camps.

McCain also improved, most clearly in the economic debate.  This time he hammered Obama on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and challenged the assumption that “deregulation” caused the financial crisis.  He looked more confident and spoke more clearly on that subject, and didn’t get nearly as deep into populist blather as in the first debate.  On health care, he offered a strong endorsement of free-market principles and providing choice to consumers.  (In fact, I think both candidates did very well on health care, with Obama and McCain making the clearest pitches for their approaches than on any other subject.)

McCain did somewhat better on entitlement reform than Obama did.  Unfortunately, the question came as more of a follow-up than a separate topic, but McCain offered details and substantive proposals, while Obama talked about spending even more money on a series of new entitlements.  McCain also used that to underscore his credentials as a bipartisan agent of change, and noted that Obama has none at all.

Coming into the last 30 minutes, though, I thought the debate was more or less a draw.  That’s when Brokaw turned the debate to foreign policy and national security, and McCain simply outclassed Obama.  Despite the nearly two weeks between the debates, Obama still couldn’t offer a coherent policy on Russia.  He stuck to general themes, and more than once tried to invoke Iraq on completely unrelated topics.  McCain, on the other hand, had extensive knowledge of the subjects and gave detailed answers that demonstrated Obama’s superficial knowledge — to the point that Obama complained that McCain thought he was “green behind the ears”, a flub that will no doubt live in ridicule for the next couple of days.

McCain won, but he didn’t score a knockout by any stretch of the imagination.  Is this a game-changer?  I think not.  It may help narrow the gap a little, but I think the two men are pretty evenly matched in these debates.  I wouldn’t expect a knockout in the last debate, either.