Rep. John Murtha looks like a Chow Chow

Compare:

Photos lifted from here and here.

Looking up

So far, this has been my favorite campaign image:



I really like how the taller kid seems to be carrying himself--not boyish at all, well-dressed, holding his ground. I like to think that some day he'll grow up to be someone important--maybe even President--and he will have this remarkable photo of himself intersecting with history.

(PS: the website, Yes We Can (Hold Babies), is pretty hilarious...thanks Lisa for pointing it out to me.)

It reminds one of T. Herman Zweibel

There is a wonderful feature over at that pro-Garfield rag, the New-York Times News-paper. You should check it out.

Additional note, about carbon pricing

Looking at the post below, you get an idea of how difficult it is to a) calculate the ecological impact of spending behavior, and b) actually follow through on adhering to an optimum spending behavior once you figure out what it is. At the end of the day, it's very convoluted and difficult to keep track of, and all sort of hopeless because people, by and large, are not going to exert the effort required to eat sustainably--and if 90% of the people aren't on board, then what's the point of trying?

This is why carbon pricing--i.e., factoring the ecological cost of products into their price via a tax--is such a beautiful idea. What you do is target a few key carbon producers way "upstream" in the chain of production, so that the increased cost of carbon filters down into the price of everything. For example, say you were to slap a carbon tax on barrels of oil sold. This would result in higher prices--and less demand--not just for gasoline, but, say, for a toy manufacturer that transports stuffed dolls halfway around the world in a fuel-ineffecient fleet of boats and trucks. If you slapped a carbon tax on energy, then suddenly everyone's electricity bills would rise and you would see alternative energy sources like solar, wind, gas, and nuclear start to become competitive with coal. Competition in the free market--rather than arbitrary government grants and subsidies--would then determine which alternative energy source becomes dominant. Shopping at the market, you would have to look no further than the price tag to compare the ecological impact of different foods; if a food is very carbon intensive, then this will naturally be reflected in a higher price.

As it is right now, the costs of climate change end up being socialized, because it is tax-payer backed governments that fix (or in the future will fix) the damage. These costs should not remain external to the market, but should instead be internalized into the market, via a carbon tax, so that the costs are distributed proportionately to those who are causing the problem.

More data

Nothing gets by you guys! Patrick--who remains curiously astute after knocking back a few--rightly gets to the heart of the matter, which is the comparative greenhouse gas intensity of different kinds of foods. Luckily, the study (pdf) underlying the Ezra Klein post has a chart that captures precisely this information:
(You may need to click the image to read it without squinting.)

Now, I'm not any kind of trained statistics person but I'm pretty sure that by "normalization by X" they mean the greenhouse gas (GHG) output expressed as a rate of "CO2-equivalent emitted per X". So for example, the second dataset means that red meat results in about twice the amount of GHG per dollar as chicken/fish/eggs--i.e., $5 worth of red meat has the same footprint as $10 worth of chicken/fish/eggs.

I imagine the measure we ought to be most interested in is the GHG per kCal figure (third dataset), since we are trying to figure out how to lessen the GHG impact of our diets regardless of cost and, er, food weight. Viewed this way, cows are definitely the biggest culprit: red meat looks to be about 2.5 times more GHG-intensive per kCal than chicken/fish/eggs, and dairy is slightly worse than chicken/fish/eggs as well. So the biggest gains, it seems, can be had by replacing most of our red meat with white meat or vegetables, and replacing dairy with...not dairy.

(Note: some greenhouse gases affect the climate more than others--hence the generic unit of measurement "CO2e", or CO2-equivalent.)

Anyway, in case all that wasn't very clear, here's the abstract to give you the main idea:

Despite significant recent public concern and media attention
to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the
United States have systematically compared the life-cycle
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with food production
against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.” We find
that although food is transported long distances in general (1640
km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average)
the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the
production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S.
household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption.
Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle
GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail
contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range
in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-
intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary
shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average
household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.”
Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories
from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a
vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying
all locally sourced food.

Where does he get those wonderful charts?

You can always count on Ezra Klein for a good chart. Here is one that breaks down the greenhouse gas impact of different kinds of food as it moves from the production phase to the transit phase:

As you can see, the first three colors--the ones that cover the greenhouse gas impact of the transportation of the food from the farm to the supermarket--are just a small sliver compared to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during food production. In fact, according to this report, a mere 11% of greenhouse gases emitted because of food consumption are attributable to the transportation of the food. And so this whole "locavore" movement, while tasty, does not have much of a ecological impact.

If you really want to cut back on the ecological impact of your diet, you'd do well to keep cows out of the picture, as they account for about half of all greenhouse gases emitted from food production:


So all you vegetarians out there, this is your free pass to take longer, hotter showers.

Ok that got weird.

EDIT: Eric sensibly asks how much of the total greenhouse gas emissions are caused by food. The report says: "For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home." So food transportation accounts for 11% of 13%, or 1.4% of every U.S. household's emissions.

John Hodgman, member of reality-based community

Phil says "pssst" and gestures to this AV Club interview with John Hodgman (who is, incidentally, currently guest-blogging at Boing Boing), where he gets into some interesting insights into the campaign:

The thing that I find so compelling is that right now Obama's whole campaign strategy is simply [to] speak to people as though they were adults and trust that the truth of the world situation will be evident to them.... So much of the past eight years in politics, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you have to acknowledge is based on what the Bush people to themselves have described outside the reality-based community. That the words they were speaking had no basis in reality and they felt no compulsion to exist in a real world. They were creating a world of their own imagining. They were writing their own book of fake trivia and that's a fine way to make a living, but I don't know that it's a very productive way to run a country. And I think we are seeing the results of that right now. So from a very selfish point of view, I'm enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that. I've found that to be astonishing and especially now that we are in the end game and you see basically the McCain campaign has nothing left but conspiracy theories to throw at Obama. It really has become a fight between fantasy and reality, and although I don't make my living off of it, I endorse reality.

The "reality-based" community concept comes from this famous quote from a Bush aide in the political glory days following 9/11, which appeared in a New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Creepy--and so, so wrong. Has any President been spanked harder and more repeatedly by reality than George W. Bush?

Captcha breaks auto-complete

Today I was copying the random string of characters into a Captcha, and auto-complete started suggesting previous Captcha strings that started out the same! That's basically flawed!

Mac tonight

Tonight, I bought a MacBook--my first Mac ever. So far, so good. Probably the most interesting innovation from a UI standpoint is the buttonless touchpad, which many people fail to realize is itself one big button. It takes a moderate amount of force to push the thing down, but I imagine I'll get used to it soon enough (and if it were too sensitive, that would be really annoying).

Anyway, I certainly see the benefits, from a design perspective, of vertical integration. Everything fits and works together seamlessly, and the machine and OS are gorgeous. And I can readily see how some features, like Spaces and the multi-touch gestures, offer tremendous improvements over Windows.

I'll let you guys know if I come across any issues.

USA #1

I can't tell if this t-shirt is awesome, or fucking awesome, or what:


Via Warren Ellis (yes, that Warren Ellis).

Our man Rogers

You should probably check out a list of choice Mr. Rogers quotes that Lindsay painstakingly collected and posted on her blog. I never quite realized that the Land of Make-Believe, with its mix of silly logic and emphasis on propriety, is sort of an Alice In Wonderland geared towards the under-6 set. Good stuff.

Coolio breaks free. He expands to new territories. He crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even.. dangerously, but and...well, there he is.

It's like there's some kind of law of efficiency in our pop culture, where a discarded star, rather than going to waste, gets recycled and reused as a sort of second-generation post-modern ironic parody of itself, typically in a low-budget context like reality TV or, in this case, a cooking show:



What the creators of the show didn't realize is that... Coolio can open doors.

EDIT: Via Ezra Klein.

Progressive capitalism

I thought it was worth pointing to this Matt Yglesias post, because it really gets at a political angle I find intriguing: leveraging capitalism to achieve progressive aims. That's why I'm interested in ideas like congestion pricing, a carbon tax, and real estate deregulation--the ideological justifications for these solutions are sitting on the shelf, and there's good empirical reason to believe that they will be effective.

Credit freeze is...melting? So we're starting on a...credit meltdown? Wait

Not sure which metaphor to go with, but it appears that credit--once frozen--is now...unfreezing.

This is good, because the lack of affordable credit (or in some cases the lack of any credit at all) is the actual problem underpinning the financial collapse. Krugman attributes the improvement to the bank recapitalizations by governments around the world, spearheaded by Gordon Brown.

So, if all goes well, Depression II will be averted, and we will undergo a mere run-of-the-mill recession--which sucks, yes, but is better than a whole bunch of people having to live in their cars.

How can we win when fools can be king? Don't waste your time or time will waste you

Seeing as how we're in the endgame of the election, it behooves everyone who is thinking about making a donation to just figure out once and for all how much more money they want to give and give it now, in toto. I know a lot of us have had a sort of ad hoc donating strategy, but time's up--it's now or never.

And, yes, I will use a fancy-pants Latin phrase whenever the opportunity arises. And, yes, I realize that this is the intellectual equivalent of being one of those guys who wears a hat--i.e., that it doesn't work, it impresses no one, and should be stopped--but I just don't want to face reality on the matter. I obstinately fold my arms and say "qua" thus.

Say hebbo

Marian showed this to me--I think from Boing Boing--and I thought it was pretty great:



It's from the Look Around You guys, I believe.

The importance of "intellectual vigor"

As you might have already seen, Colin Powell has given an as eloquent an endorsement of Obama as ever you'll find:



One thing I find very interesting is Powell's emphasis on Obama's intellect: his "intellectual curiosity", his "intellectual vigor". Powell cites these things as key because he knows, more than most, that a President that lacks these qualities is one who can be easily manipulated by a small cadre of advisers with sufficient presidential access. This is, in fact, precisely what occurred in the Bush White House during his tenure as Secretary of State.

Let me relate to you an excerpt from the (excellent) book I'm reading, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, and you'll have an idea of what I mean:

Afghanistan, like the United States, had signed the Geneva Conventions, but the President's lawyers argued that this was of no conern because the country was now a "failed state".

...

At the State Department, Powell and his legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV [!], fought a rear-guard action against Bush's lawyers and lost. This fierce fight took place almost entirely outside the public's view. In a confidential forty-page memo to [Office of Legal Council lawyer] John Yoo dated January 11, 2002, Taft argued that Yoo's analysis was "seriously flawed." Taft told Yoo that his contention that the President could disregard the Geneva Conventions was "untenable", "incorrect", and "confused." Taft disputed Yoo's argument that Afghanistan, as a "failed state", was not covered by the Conventions. "The official United States position before, during, and after the emergence of the Taliban was that Afghanistan constituted a state," he wrote. Taft also warned Yoo that if the United States took the war on terror outside the Geneva Conventions, not only could U.S. soldiers be denied the protections of the Conventions--and therefore be prosecuted for crimes, including murder--but President Bush could be accused of a "grave breach" by other countries, which would mean he could be prosecuted for war crimes.

...

Taft sent a copy of his memo to [Alberto] Gonzales, hoping that his dissent would reach the President. Within days, Yoo sent Taft a lengthy rebuttal.

...

But Taft's access to the President was no match for that of Cheney, who, as an administration source put it, "always got both the first and last bite of the apple." It remains unclear, in fact, whether anyone ever fully explained the countervailing arguments to President Bush before he signed off on the plan. According to top State Department officials, Bush decided to nullify the Geneva Conventions on January 8, 2002. This was three days before Taft sent his memo to Yoo. Evidently, the State Department was too far out the loop to catch up. [Emphasis mine.]

...

After losing the battle to uphold the Geneva Conventions, Powell concluded that Bush was not stupid but was easily manipulated. A confidant said that Powell thought it was easy to play on Bush's wish to be seen as doing the tough thing and making the "hard" choice. "He has these cowboy characteristics, and when you know where to rub him, you can really get him to do some dumb things. You have to play on those swaggering bits of his self-image. Cheney knew exactly how to push all his buttons," Powell confided to a friend.

Colonel Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, was more scathing. "You can slip a lot of crap over on someone who doesn't read a lot or pay attention to the details if you have no scruples," he said.

[Mayer, Jane. The Dark Side, pp. 122-125.]

So what happened is George W. Bush was given some very radical and unsound advice from a select group of advisers--Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and a few others--and acted on this advice before even seriously entertaining any dissenting arguments. Had Bush taken an interest in the Geneva Conventions or read about them, or had he been pro-active about making sure he has heard all sides of the debate on the issue before issuing a decision, it may well be that the United States never would have abandoned the Conventions.

Undoubtedly, Colin Powell sees Barack Obama's deliberative way of coming to decisions and now-legendary insistence on hearing all sides of an argument as insurance that a President Obama's powers will never be hijacked by a radical faction within his administration. And, just as certainly, he must see John McCain's volatile temperment and impulsive decision-making as antithetical to a properly-functioning Presidency.

PS: Extra props to Powell for going out of his way to reiterate that, not only is Barack Obama not a Muslim, but it is wrong--and un-American--to think that there would be anything wrong with him if he were a Muslim. Also, his story about the Muslim mother weeping at the grave was very powerful, and one I hadn't heard before.

A time to spend

Says Krugman:

It’s now clear that rescuing the banks is just the beginning: the nonfinancial economy is also in desperate need of help.

And to provide that help, we’re going to have to put some prejudices aside. It’s politically fashionable to rant against government spending and demand fiscal responsibility. But right now, increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about the budget deficit should be put on hold.

It's somewhat counterintuitive but true: federal deficit spending is good in a recession, because it gets money flowing in the economy. Moreover, since lenders have lost confidence in the private banks, they all want to lend to the federal government--even if it means lending at an interest rate of a fraction of a percent. So the government essentially has a credit card with a hyper-low interest rate of, like, 0.15% that it can use to get money flowing in the economy in various ways: by increasing unemployment benefits, by cutting taxes, and by investing in infrastructure improvements. The idea is that you keep spending until the economy recovers, at which point tax revenues also recover and you can balance the budget and pay down the debt.

"Guest Week"?!

I'm pretty excited about Dinosaur Comics this week.

But what I want to know is, on Friday when the xkcd guy guest-authors--will Alex and Nimesh's heads explode??? Or will they simply think that the strip is of medium quality?

Reporting the vector

I think a deficiency of campaign reporting is that it tends to report not the point, but the vector--which is to say, the story is not how well a candidate is doing in an absolute sense, but whether that candidate's electoral fortunes are rising or falling. It is the direction and speed of movement that is emphasized rather than the actual location in space. Nowhere is this more apparent than in coverage of debates, where the punditry judges the candidates' performances against the meaningless baseline of how well the punditry expected them to do going into it. Thus, if a candidate--like Sarah Palin--is deeply in the negative, but does better than expected and rises a little bit, then the candidate is rewarded with very positive coverage, and the viewer comes away with the belief that the conventional wisdom is that the candidate indeed "won".

This, I think, contributes to the pendular nature of campaign reporting, where you will get a week or two of coverage that seems to favor one candidate, followed by a subtle shift in positive coverage to the other candidate for a time. At work is a positive feedback loop, similar to the one that drives the booms and busts of a speculative market: positive motion gets reported as positive news, and positive news in turn drives positive motion, and so on, creating a sort of media bubble. But the higher that bubble wafts, the more routine and expected--and not-newsworthy--it becomes that the candidate will do well, thus causing the engine that drives the bubble upward to run out of steam. In the meantime--and because of the zero-sum nature of campaign coverage in a two-party system--expectations for the other candidate will be so low that any modest improvement results in a large vector of movement, which will result in significant positive news, in turn causing more positive motion, etc., until this other candidate becomes the one propelled by a bubble effect.

This process, though, only seems to occur in the absence of hard information that would otherwise be driving each candidate's fortunes. As bloggers like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias often observe, what decides elections is not this or that gaffe or campaign ad, but rather external events, like financial collapses or terrorist attacks. But this, again, is similar to what we see in markets: a speculative market occurs when there is uncertainty: people start using the behavior of others as a proxy for real information, piggy-backing on their presumably sound analysis, and the result is a herding effect. But when some real information emerges, the market reacts to it and prices quickly snap to reality. In this campaign, there has been an abundance of "real information" generated by the unfolding economic crisis, and so voters are responding to this rather than piggy-backing on the analysis of campaign reporting. As a result, the fortunes of the candidates has been marked not by the boom-and-bust cadences of campaign reportage, but by the performance of the stock market (which for many is the de facto barometer of economic health), which this chart from Ezra Klein strikingly illustrates:



It is worth mentioning as an aside that all of this explains why the McCain campaign is desperately--and futilely--trying to change the subject away from the failing financial system. So long as the election is determined by outside events, the McCain campaign is powerless to help its candidate win.

Through the looking glass

A thing that struck me when Sarah Palin first came on the scene was that everyone's immediate reaction was: hey, she looks just like Tina Fey! And so from the get-go, there was this weird post-modern thing where Tina Fey--and by extension Fey-doing-Palin--was culturally prior to Palin herself. Because of this, I think that Fey's sketches lampooning Palin have had a special kind of authority to them, which has been good for Democrats.

Now, though, the whole thing is being taken a step further, because Palin has agreed to do a guest-spot on SNL a week and a half before the election. So the whole thing is sort of upsidedown--as if in the early 90s, Dana Carvey had appeared as George H.W. Bush, but on Meet the Press. Or something.

TED spread still on the rise

The higher the TED spread, the less credit there is in the world:

Sometimes, America doesn't make any sense

From the excellent George Packer article in the New Yorker:

At one point, he had doubted that Obama stood a chance in Glouster. “From Bob and Pete’s generation there are a lot of racists—not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism here that Obama’d never win.” Then he heard a man who freely used the “ ‘n’ word” declare his support for Obama: “That blew my theory out of the water.”

In an election between a black man and a white man, even the racists are undecided. Now that's a testament to the weakness of Republican policy proposals.

The modern Republican platform

Showing a little leg

Check out the weird language in this NYT article about Obama's even-keeled temperament:

At the town hall debate Tuesday night, Mr. Obama largely stuck to facts, figures, and programmatic detail as he talked about the economy and domestic issues. He didn’t take advantage of the town hall format to show a bit of leg, humanity-wise.

Yeah, Obama should really be showing off those gams--empathy-wise.

Debate commentary peeve

It's been bugging me that lots of commentators, when "scoring" debates, muddle the distinction between how a candidate did in the debate and to what extent the debate helped the candidate. It could be the case that a candidate was soundly beaten in a debate, but that the debate nevertheless helped the candidate because it, say, disproved the prevailing notion that the candidate could not form coherent sentences. By the same token, it could be the case that a candidate handily won a debate, but that this did not improve the candidate's chances in the overall election because everyone already expected this to happen (the debate victory was, you could say, already factored into the price of the candidate's stock).

Just looking at Sullivan's debate reax summary, we can see a couple of examples:

No heavy punches landed. The format scarcely helped. In fact it helped snuff out any threat of life or spark or conflict or, damn it, interest. And so, because of that, Obama, leading in the polls, won. (Alex Massie)

Gah! If the debate was a tie then it was tie, and nothing about anyone's positions in the polls is relevant to that. What Massie ought to be saying is that Obama's position in the polls makes it the case that a tie is favorable outcome for Obama. One more:

At this stage in the race, a tie goes to leader, and this was not a tie. (Fallows)

Bah! My Philosophy BA is rolling in its grave.

Powerful tools

It turns out that C-SPAN has a pretty robust website. You can embed any video they have in their extensive (and very searchable) library, like so:


And if you go to their site and use their custom Flash player, you will see that they put the transcript text right along side the video. Moreover, since the transcript and video are synced to the same time line, you can actually search the text and then jump to the corresponding part of the video. It's pretty damn neat (but still Beta--I couldn't get it to work in Firefox but it's fine in IE).

(The video above is tonight's debate, in its entirety.)

EDIT: There is also this curious "time line" view--obviously in need of a real UI--that seems to let you view smaller segments of video. You can link to each segment, but there is no option to embed.

When the economy just stops

A must-listen TAL that gives us intelligent-yet-non-economist types an explanation of the financial crisis that we can sink our teeth into.

Labor pains

I have a few larger posts in the works but they're all undergoing various birthing complications. In the meantime, I advise you to check out this interesting NYT article about the little-appreciated world of artistic baseball field groundskeeping.

(Oh, and while on the topic of baseball: how 'bout them Dodgers? I guess it just goes to show that one team's billy-goat curse is another team's billy-goat blessing.)

Why Bill Simmons continues to hold Most Readable Sportswriter title

Some good Page 2:

HERM EDWARDS (-3) over the Unintentional Comedy Scale
Did you see the Hermster in the locker room after K.C.'s upset of Denver? If you missed it and want to get a feeling for what happened, scream the next two sentences at the top of your lungs and see how everyone else at work reacts ...

"Let's build on that! LET'S BUILD ON THAT!!!!!!"

THE IHOP ON SUNSET & MANSFIELD (+9) over the IHOPs everywhere else in Los Angeles
Right now, I'm writing this column and eating corn pancakes at -- you guessed it! -- the IHOP on Sunset and Mansfield. Two strippers are sitting 10 feet away from me, discussing their next month of gigs and occasionally sneaking me those "If you have enough money on you right now, we might add you to the list of gigs" looks. A group of five hungover guys in their 20s are sitting behind me and recapping last night on the town, which included a bedroom story so over the top that I don't think I could have even printed it on my old Web site. Two tables over, an old lady complained that she ate too much and started coughing/retching, then her nurse provided her a plastic bag and the old lady threw up in it for three solid minutes. If that's not enough, "Even the Nights Are Better" by Air Supply is playing on the jukebox. Top that, every other IHOP in L.A.! Let's build on that! LET'S BUILD ON THAT!!!!!!"

Also, I like the idea of going to an IHOP in LA and being like, "Dude, is that Bill Simmons writing a column? Hey Bill, fuck the Celtics!" It would be great.

Oh nos

The economy is continuing towards collapse: credit markets are still completely seized up, with the TED spread at a record high. (See my attempt to explain the significance of the TED spread here.)

Without credit, people cannot buy cars and houses, and businesses cannot cover operating expenses during a slow period, purchase expensive equipment, or expand (and, of course, entrepreneurs cannot get the loans they need to start new businesses). Ultimately businesses are forced to lay off workers, and consumer spending goes down--which in turn causes businesses to fare even worse and lenders to become even more tight-fisted--a vicious cycle that, if left to go past the point of no return, lands us in a bad recession or even depression.

Hopefully the government's $700 billion investment in the financial system will instill confidence in lenders that their loans will be repaid, and there will be enough affordable credit available to break that vicious cycle before it really gets going.

When it's all said and done, you have to admit: Bill Clinton is good

Here's Bill Clinton at his best: making an impassioned yet clearly informed case for a certain set of economic policies. I've always thought that Obama could learn a thing or two from Bill Clinton with regards to rhetoric: whereas Obama's points tend to fizzle into platitudes ("this is just more of the same Washington game..."; "blah blah blah Wall Street blah blah blah Main Street"), Clinton simply made the case and let his folksy charisma do the rest.



(Hat tip: Coates)