The root cause:

The Archbishop of Lima, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, said this week the financial crisis in the United States and the rest of the world is a consequence of the idolatry of money and power.

This idolatry has manifested itself in the network of corrupt officials who were greedy for more and therefore did not properly carry out their roles, Cardinal Cipriani said.

“They adore money and therefore, they engage in deceit. They issued a series of mortgages that had no value, and that, multiplied by millions has led to this flood of fraudulent corruption,” the cardinal said on his weekly radio program.

The cardinal warned that idolizing power and money has reached “very troubling levels in the world.” When money and power are “the only objects of our lives, they end in problems,” he said.

“When there is so much desire for money, it is for power, and when there is a desire for power it is for money. All of this just to impose our subjectivism, arrogance and pride,” the cardinal stated.

We will debate this and left will blame right and right will blame left – but, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”. Look in the mirror, and there is our problem. There is much idolatry these days, and much excuse making – and even more turning a blind eye. It is an old saw but a true one which says that for evil to triumph it is only required that good men do nothing.

One of the wisest things a person can say from time to time is, “I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault,

in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do…”. It goes on a bit from there, but the most important thing for us to remember is that there’s no point in congratulating ourselves on not being entirely nasty – we’ve all screwed up and added our aliquot portion to the world’s misery. It is time – and high time – that we started acting like men and women and started to set the world to rights. We can continue down this path, and we can even manage this crisis but, eventually, everything has to be paid for; or we can turn aside and start to live as human beings are supposed to live – with love, and mercy and a quiet modesty which understands the limitations of all people.

Why? ‘Cause only an arrogant, self-centered ass could have thought it was a good idea, though he and his team will never admit that:

…as voter registration is expected to wind down in the next two weeks and the impact of John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, becomes clearer, the Obama campaign is apparently scaling back its outsized electoral ambitions. It has already shifted staff, abandoning some states and putting others on notice. If it once technically played in all 50, it’s now down to 48 — you can cross Alaska and North Dakota off the list — and two other states, Montana and Georgia, are on life support. The choice of Palin not only crushed Obama’s hope of winning the Frontier State — his campaign has withdrawn most of its staff and ceased advertising there — but it also caused repercussions in North Dakota, another hockey-crazed northern state where snow-mobile racing and moose burgers apparently resonate. The Obama campaign announced this week that it is redeploying its North Dakota staff — estimated in some press reports to be more than 50 people.

“We always knew it would be an uphill battle, but because people across the country in red states and blue states are hungry for change, we built a grass-roots movement we are proud of and an infrastructure that will help candidates up and down the ballot,” says Obama spokeswoman Amy Brundage of the decision to pull out. The news isn’t entirely a surprise, as Obama cut advertising in North Dakota by 50% in recent weeks. The move comes as Obama has been forced to mount more serious defenses of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin — states where the campaign spent nearly $1.5 million in television advertisements last week.

Did you catch that? Obama is being forced to defend Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin…and while its not noted, I’ll bet he’s going to have to start defending Pennsylvania and New Jersey pretty quick, with a chance that he’ll have to really pour it on in New York to ensure that State’s electoral votes go his way. Obama can’t win the White House if all he wins is Kerry’s or Gore’s States…he has to win some of Bush’s States, and perhaps a couple that Bush won twice. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s win over Hillary it seemed he was unstoppable, had an unending supply of money and could do no wrong…but he’s being out-hustled on the campaign trail, his fundraising has dropped significantly, he’s been blindsided by the Palin pick, Congressional Democrats are distancing themselves from him, his own VP pick has proven to be a disaster (and will become a Hindenburg sized disaster once the VP debate comes up) and while he’s picked up a little bit due to the financial melt-down, he’s still proving himself unable to pull in middle class and working class voters. Obama will now have to fight – and fight very hard – in order to get to 270 electoral votes and it is a very open question as to whether or not he has the plain grit and stamina to enter that kind of fight with an experience warrior like McCain backed up by the superlative Palin.

Democrats nominated a nobody and it seems that, by so doing, the got a nobody as their nominee…and man who stands for nothing other himself, who does only what he’s told and who can’t step outside the liberal coocoon without slipping up on a regular basis. His only advantage, now, is the fact that the GOP brand (as it were) has been beaten down quite hard over the past couple years. If McCain can keep the debate off the GOP and on just about anything else, then he’ll win this thing – and, I think, if he does win it he’ll end up winning it rather handily.

According to MRG, via NRO’s The Corner:

Michigan is a complex and difficult state to poll in, and one of the few polling firms who seems to “get” Michigan is Marketing Research Group (MRG).

Their latest poll has McCain/Palin up in Michigan by three points. Some interesting tidbits from the press release:

The poll showed that Obama continues to show strong support among women (+2%), young voters (+16%), African Americans (+89%), voters living in the Detroit Metro area (+9%) along with his traditional Democratic base.

John McCain is showing strength among blue-collar voters (+10%), men (+9%), white males (+29%), conservatives (+62%) and voters living in West Michigan (+12%) and the Flint/Saginaw/Bay City Area (+8%)…

…Voters believe the McCain/Palin ticket has more experience (61% – 31%) than the Obama/Biden ticket and they trust their judgment more (48% – 41%). But when it comes to bringing the right kind of change to Washington, the voters are split, giving the Obama/Biden ticket a one-percent edge (44% – 43%).

I find it kinda hard to classify a 2 percentage point advantage among female voters as indicative of “strong” Obama support among women but, be that as it may, if this poll is correct then its horrific bad news for Obama – he can’t be elected President without Michigan’s electoral votes (I was going to say “it is almost certain” Obama can’t win without Michigan, but then I thought about it for a bit and realised that Obama without Michigan victory scenarios would be to put a whole new meaning on “thread the needle”).

While ABC is attempting to boost Democrat morale by putting out an overweighted-for-Democrats poll showing Obama up 9 nationally, the fact that most tracking polls show a toss up and battleground State polls continue to show an advantage for McCain indicates that the shift we saw in the election after the Palin pick is still ongoing, and doesn’t look like it will be undone before the election. Does this mean McCain wins? Not at all – but it does mean that, right now, the battle is evenly drawn with a slight advantage to McCain as the American people tend to root for the underdog and McCain has been that for a year now.

If we win this election I’ll put it down to several factors – McCain, Palin, GOP, American common sense, America’s bedrock conservatism…but I’ll also add that the extreme nastiness of the left (from mere verbal cruelty to outright treason) seems to have turned off a lot of people. In 2008, Democrats should have had this election in a walk over – but they don’t, and their odds of winning are shrinking rapidly (Rasmussen’s market on Obama once had him with about a 65% chance of winning, now its a bit under 52%). Lies (and nastiness) can go from Maine to Florida befor Truth gets it’s boots on, but Truth will out, in the end.

For the Most Unpopular Man in Human History, he sure does seem to be able to whack Democrats at will:

Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

“If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices,” said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

Of course, there was some great work done by the Congressional GOP and the RNC on this issue, and it has worked well for America in that we’ll finally start to get an energy policy which produces, you know?, some energy. In the end, how were Democrats defeated? Simple – they came up against men and women who actually put country first…while a group which puts party first can cause a lot of ruckus, when the chips are down it is those who believe in something sublime who will defeat those who believe in something corrupt and mean.

Come what may this November, I will miss President Bush a lot – and I’m one of the very few people who will admit to this. But it has been endlessly entertaining the past 7+ to watch a man who understands run rings around those who don’t…and adding to the humor of the long-running event is the enormously funny fact that those who don’t understand actually think they are smarter than the man who does. I’ll also miss having a leader of decision and courage – though if the election goes right, that will be less missed than if it goes wrong.

Roger L. Simon thinks they should:

From the days of FDR, the vast majority of American Jews have identified with the Democratic Party almost if it were their religion. This included most especially secular Jews like me whose blasé attitude toward their faith and toward religious observance in general made such a replacement all the more important emotionally. This same Jewish majority also identified with the cause of social justice and, as Barack Obama among many others has noted, were some of the most active participants in the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties. That was all how it should have been and was a perfectly logical and praiseworthy epoch in the development of our country.

Hello – those days are over! The events leading up to Monday’s anti-Ahmadinejad demonstration by Jewish organizations at the UN put the final nail in an already long-moldering coffin. Jews should no longer align themselves with the Democratic Party any more than they should align with the Republicans. They should act and think for themselves, devoid of ideological or partisan bias. They should first be Americans, not Democratic Party Americans…

…The virtual night of the long knives played out between the Democratic Party and various Jewish organizations surrounding the Iran demonstration, including allegations that party operatives were threatening the loss of tax exempt status over Sarah Palin’s appearance, with more unpleasant revelations undoubtedly to come, is obviously causing people to reconsider this allegiance to the Democratic Party that approaches fealty.

I urge my fellow Jews to keep thinking about this and not to retreat into the cocoon-like safety of an outmoded tradition. Change is difficult. But remember that Hillary Clinton – that paragon of the Democratic Party, a woman who calls herself a “progressive” (oh, desecration of the English language!) – was willing to forego the protest of the man who is arguably the most significant enemy of the Jews since Hitler for partisan and (most likely) personal pique reasons. How morally repellent is that!

Strong stuff, but it needed to be said. Remember, once upon a time to be Catholic in America meant to be a Democrat. As far as I can determine, I may very well have been the first descendent of Thomas Francis Noonan to actually register as a Republican, and that ancestor arrived on these shores in the 1850’s. Catholics had to turn aside from the Democratic party as it became increasingly hostile to what Catholicism teaches – Jews will have to do the same. That is, all Jews who hold to an actually Jewish identity will have to do so – plenty of fallen away Catholics adhere to the Democratic party, but the more rock solid the Catholic, the more likely he is to be non-Democrat (even if he’s also non-Republican). Jews who are concerned with the morality of Judaism and the unique role Jews have played in western civilizaiton – and, of course, the defense of the one absolute refuge for the Jews of the world, Israel – should be (and I believe, are) recoiling from a Democrat party being consumed by a leftwing growing more anti-Semitic as it grows more anti-western in outlook.

When it comes to the really crucial issues – faith, family, morality, patriotism – the Republicans far outpace the Democrats. In the end, there is really no contest – and while there is an understandable wariness on the part of some Jews for Christians, and especially devout Christians, the plain fact of the matter is that when push comes to shove, it will be the Christian who will fight for the Jews while the secularist finds a host of reasons for throwing Jews under the bus. This doesn’t mean that all Jews should register Republican (though, its an idea, ya know?), but it does mean that American Jews should consider things beyond the “D” after the candidate’s name when making a voting decision.

The liberal side of the aisle is wasting no time in casting the CEO’s as the bad guys and then attempting to tie the GOP to the CEO’s. This is clever politics and we can’t complain about the Democrats trying this – even though they are far more connected to said CEO’s than we are. What we GOPers need to do is get out in front of this and get the people on our side. I propose the following, with acknoweldgement to Nevada Pundit, from whom I have ripped off part of the ideas:

Golden Parachutes

There is nothing quite so absurd or aggravating for Joe and Jane Average than to see the CEO of a failed or deeply troubled corporation getting out of Dodge with millions of dollars in bonuses and other compensation. The flimsy-as-all-get-out corporate justification for the huge executive compensation is that if the CEO’s, etc don’t feel ownership for the corporation they won’t ensure it performs at peak efficiency. This is utter BS, but lets take them at their word – and rather than going the Big Government, Democrat route of capping CEO compensation, lets enact a law which allows a corporation to pay its executives whatever it wishes, but such compensation decreases 5 percentage points for each 1 percentage point of stock valuation lost in any given fiscal year beyond a 10% reduction (10% can happen for all sorts of reasons outside the control of the executives – but once you get past that loss, you’re starting to get into CEO Bonehead territory).

Corporate Bankruptcy

Everyone with who’s title includes “chief”, “president”, “senior”, “executive” or “chairman” gets compensated at $25 per hour for each hour worked during the fiscal year the corporation filed bankruptcy. Nothing else.

Corporate Layoffs

For each 10 workers laid off the people with the titles noted in “Corporate Bankruptcy” lose one tenth of one percent of their annual compensation for the fiscal year in which the layoffs occured. A corporate boss can layoff workers all he wants, as long as he feels the pain.

Worker Benefits

Cut them all you want, bosses – as long as you lose them, too and, additionally, lose your bonus for the year in which you make the benefit cut, as well as the two years following it. Have a care when passing out the bennies, ’cause cutting back on them will be painful.

These proposals will retain the free market principle, allow generous compensation to corporate executives who score big profits while keeping workers on the payroll, discourage outsourcing of American jobs and encourage corporate executives to seek other routes than bankruptcy when the going gets rough. In addition to this, there’s the simple justice in ensuring that when a corporation falters, everyone from top to bottom takes a hit, not just the worker bees. And, finally, these are nicely populist proposals which will make the American people stand up and cheer without any appeal to envy or hatred, as the Democrats routinely do with their class warfare nonsense.

The fundamental principle missing in corporate America – and its also missing in government-bureaucrat America – is a connection with the concerns of average Americans; there is a lack of empathy for those who are effected by a corporate downsize or a pettifogging bureaucratic regulation. In addition to what I’ve proposed here, government employees should only get pay increases tied to the growth in personal income, less government transfers, amongst the American people – regulate us into stagflation and you’ll only be hurting yourselves, bureaucrats. Bill Clinton said he felt our pain – which was nonsense as he was insulated from any pain other than the self-inflicted wounds of his immoral actions. I say: lets make everyone feel the pain, and while we won’t eliminate pain, we’ll at least get people who will think carefully before they cause any.

A couple months ago, this was an impossibility…now, its just something with little chance, but that still works to McCain’s favor:

Post-convention swing state polls are tipping toward Sen. John McCain, the TV pundits are waxing about “The Palin Factor,” and Sen. Barack Obama’s California supporters are freaking out about a race Democrats were uncommonly confident about only a month ago.

Conversely, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s addition to the GOP ticket jolted Northern California Republicans out of what one described as their “Underground Railroad” existence in one of the nation’s most liberal regions. Ever since her speech to the Republican National Convention on Sept. 3, party officials say volunteers have been contacting California GOP offices in numbers unseen since Ronald Reagan was on the ballot for the White House…

…Republicans aren’t giving up on California. California Republican Party chief operating officer Bill Christiansen said some private polls put the two candidates within five points of each other, and the McCain campaign is staffing 50 offices throughout the state. Four years ago, the Bush-Cheney campaign barely had a presence in California, and spent little money. “But we are fully funded this time,” Christiansen said, declining to give a figure.

The state GOP is making 125,000 voter contacts every weekend, “which blows the doors off of what we were doing four years ago,” said Christiansen. “Sarah Palin has put a shot of energy into this race.”

Last week, the McCain campaign e-mailed supporters to say it was “looking for volunteers who are willing to spend the final 10 days of the campaign helping in a nearby state.” But at the San Mateo County branch of the McCain campaign, 300 people turned out last week for its volunteer kickoff event; the turnout was goosed by Palin, organizers said. Now the office is welcoming first-timer campaigners like Phil Lehman, a 63-year-old Foster City resident.

His reason for volunteering: “Sarah.”

“There’s a realness to her, a believability,” Lehman said. “I think she’s going to eat Joe Biden’s lunch at the (vice presidential) debate.”

The initial boost to the GOP out of California is the number of volunteers who will be available to help the GOP win Colorado and Nevada – making phone calls, donating to the RNC and the State parties. This, in and of itself, is a great things – but there is more here.

Winning California would, of course, ensure a GOP victory – but, lets face some facts here, the chances of actually winning California are very slim. But that’s just it – they are slim, not non-existent; and in this there is the chance that we can force Obama to fight for California. Every dollar and minute spent in California, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York is a dollar and minute not spent in Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Ohio and Florida…in other words, we can move the fight to Obama’s side of the field and thus have a clearer shot at maintaining our 2004 electoral votes, and thus ensuring our win even if we don’t pick off a single blue State.

One thing to keep in mind is what happens when things get competitive. Over the past few Presidential elections, California’s participation has been akin to Texas’ – a bit more than 50%, but nothing to write home about. Why? Because over the last few election cycles the outcome in Texas and California was known months in advance. Turning to Florida, we can see that in 2004 the participation 74%, and it was 70% in 2000. Its a battle, and that gets people out to vote…as it stands right now, we can expect Obama to win California, and to have somewhere around 55% of California’s voters show up to vote. If the election in California becomes competitive, it will turn on who will show up to make the voter total go up to 60, 65 or 70%. My bet would be that Democratic voter participation is higher than GOP voter participation in California, so any increase in voter participation would tend to favor the GOP.

From what I can tell, 2008 is the year to throw out the rule books – forget about which States are solid this or solid that…there are too many variables, and the election could end up won by whichever candidate is most willing to think outside the electoral box.

I’ve been telling you, dear readers, that Obama is a zero to whom people apply whatever they wish to believe about him:

How’s Barack Obama’s narrative going?

Journalists used to tell stories, now they plumb narratives. Narrative is a pretentious borrowing from the abstraction-clotted world of academic criticism, where texts are interrogated, authors are dead and high-toned fatuousness is king. I’ll see your postmodern and raise you a meta.

Mr. Obama’s campaign, however, has renewed narrative’s trendy fizz. It is the very Perrier water (or is it San Pellegrino now?) of the better campaign reportage. Take no hike up Pundit Mountain without it. From the moment, the Obama surge took forceful shape, everyone – reporters, the scholars of blogland, the partisan howler monkeys of cable-news cage matches – has chattered on about Mr. Obama’s narrative.

Trouble is, most of the story of the campaign isn’t so much coming from the candidate himself as it is created by all those who, most in worshipful terms, have talked, written and reported on or about him. The Obama campaign is one great text generator, the grand fable of his fans.

In one sense, this is not surprising. He has a quicksilver quality. Even after two autobiographies, Mr. Obama remains something of a floating, uncrowded presence. His story (and he is so impressively self-aware as to have made the most acute comment on it) is temptingly open-ended, very much a page to be written on. He himself has written, most memorably: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

There is very little to Barack Obama – he’s glided through life without making much of an impact. One of the recent Obama ads I’ve seen (and we here in Nevada are bombarded with McCain and Obama ads – the perils of being in a Battleground State!) has Obama ernestly telling viewers that he wants to change and that change has to be more than just a slogan…as if Obama’s campaign has ever been anything other than a slogan. He offers nothing specific in the ad – though he does say he hopes people will read his plan…and, naturally, when you do go and read his plan you find it thin on details, but that isn’t the point…the sort of people who will be impressed by Obama are people not at all curious about what is really going on, but are very much interested in projecting on to Obama’s blank slate whatever they feel is best.

As I’ve pointed out before, Obama is the “Un-Named Democrat” – the stealth candidate who can be all things to all men without being anything concrete to anyone. You want someone who will heal racial divisions? Obama. Re-unite the people of the United States? Obama. End the campaign in Iraq? Obama. Reverse global warming? Obama. Make foreigners love us? Obama. If there’s something about the past 8 years which has gotten on your nerves, Obama is the guy to fix it…not that he’s told you how he’ll fix it, but by speaking in grand themes and having nothing solid you can point to and either agree or disagree with it. That Obama has given zero indication that he can so much as change a light bulb without assistance is neither here nor there – for the Obamaniacs, he’ll get the lightbulb screwed in just by being there.

Another thing I’ve said is that if Obama can keep his fairy tale out front, then he can win – only if he makes people believe he is Prince Charming come to rescue us does he have a shot at this…unfortunately for Obama, a lot of people have got a good, long look at him and found him lacking. Pity none of his boosters can see this. We’ll have to see how it all comes out, but if Obama loses the hope will be that the Democrats will conduct a purge and get rid of the kooks who have taken Democrats for a ride.

This does explain a lot on why so many in the MSM and on the left don’t understand what is happening in America – from Concerned Democrats for McCain:

Still on the road, but one thing is clear in Manhattan – – they IDOLIZE Obama here. Not support. Idolize. His picture is on every corner. His t-shirt is for sale at every stand. His button is on all the better purses. It’s like Beijing in Mao-ist China.

That’s why the NY based media can’t believe he can’t break 50% (or 80+% among Democrats).

They really need to cross a bridge or tunnel once every so often, and talk to the rest of the country.

Come November 5th if Obama loses I feel confident we’ll come across at least some Obamaniacs who can’t understand how he lost as they don’t know anyone who didn’t vote for him. I’ll bet this slavish deovition to The One is duplicated in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other enclaves of elitist liberalism. A bunch of people talking only to their like but convinced they also know what “the people” want…

Victor Davis Hanson answers it perfectly:

I have been asked by many why I have such confidence in a rookie Alaskan governor, given the rigors of the campaign to follow. (Many Republican pundits apparently do not.) I think we are starting to see the answers to that question. The proverbial “they” hacked into her private email accounts. They swore that her daughter was the real mother of her Down Syndrome baby. They sent legions of reporters and lawyers to Alaska to dig up dirt. They wrote columns suggesting that she was stupid, uneducated, dishonest, a liar, and worse still. All this was the work of moralists, who, in their more extreme manifestations, tried to flood a Chicago radio station to disrupt guests, who doctored photos of McCain to subvert his portrait, who disgraced the Atlantic brand by trafficking in pregnancy rumors, and who now publish the private email of Palin.

And? She is still smiling and apparently unmoved. Had they done this to Biden, he would have gone berserk. Wait—they didn’t do this to Biden, and he seems near berserk in his daily gaffes.

I happened to catch a little bit of Governor Palin speaking in Florida today and there she was – just as fresh, positive and combative as she was during her magnificent acceptance speech at the GOP convention. The people on the left who have been hammering her don’t seem to realise that they’ve got another Reagan on their hands – a calm, confident person who doesn’t need politics for self-validation and, furthermore, who doesn’t care what anyone in the MSM/Leftwing echo chamber thinks about her. For Sarah Palin (as for Reagan in the past), the constituency is God, family, friends and the people…news media, other politicians and elitists of various stripes don’t make the cut.

One day the left will get it – she’s one of us. She’s of that part of America – the overwhelming majority – which believes in God, believes in fellow Americans, loves this nation, would rather a child become a soldier than some bizarre, pierced and tattoo’d weirdo participating in anti-globalization demonstrations, is generous to a fault and is keenly aware of personal failings while conscious of the promise of ultimate redemption. Right now, the left doesn’t get it – because they aren’t of us; and the reason Obama is failing to close the deal in an anti-GOP political climate is because he’s so outside the experience of average Americans. Leftists convince themselves this is due to racism but the truth of the matter is that people who love Condi Rice are dismayed with Barack Obama (and, lefties, Condi Rice – for all her superlative brilliance – is still one of us…she’s risen high but hasn’t cut herself off from the average American).

Meanwhile, the left’s failure to “get it” works to our advantage – though Hanson notes that eventually Obama will figure out that attacking Palin (ie, making the battle “Palin vs Obama”) is a sure loser, we can count on Obama, his Democrats and the larger left to continue to impale themselves upon the conservative spear called Sarah Palin. By the time they turn, bloodied an incomprehending, back to the real battle, it may be too late for them to retrieve the situation.