Matt Ortega

This is embarrassing, even by National Review standards where Jonah Goldberg is the editor, but Kathryn Jean Lopez is a little slow on the uptake.

COINCIDENCE? [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Question from a reader:

Does the selloff on Wall Street have anything to do with the increasing likelihood that Obama will be our next president?

Note that the two trends — the financial meltdown, despite passage of the bailout, and the solidification of Obama’s lead — are coinciding.  At a minimum, the market’s behavior is not a vote of confidence in an Obama presidency.

10/06 01:03 PM

American voters, by leaps and bounds, believe the economy is the most pressing issue facing the country right now and trust Senator Barack Obama over Senator John McCain on the issue. In the latest CBS News poll, “economy/jobs” was named the top priority almost five times more than the second-place answer: terrorism.

SkyNews in the United Kingdom seems to get it, not sure why Kathryn Jean Lopez or National Review readers are having a tough time understanding trends.

(Hat tip: Whiskey Fire)

In response to a weekend full of news articles stating that the Republican presidential ticket will roll out an increasingly negative campaign, the Obama/Biden campaigned released a 13-minute documentary that looks at the Keating Five scandal that nearly ended Senator John McCain’s (R-Arizona) political career early through the lens of the current financial crisis.

In just three hours, the video is nearing 200,000 views on YouTube. (Ed. note: There were audio issues with the original YouTube and a new version was posted, but the original surpassed 188,000 views.)

On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, the McCain campaign reversed nearly 20 years of repentance with the absurd claim that “McCain did nothing wrong” and that the Senate Ethics Committee investigation was just a “political smear job” against McCain.

But as many observers of McCain’s career will note, the Arizona senator fashioned himself as a reformer who was turned by his own brush with corruption — even admitting poor judgment in the matter. Now his people say he did nothing wrong. So does that mean the “maverick reformer” image was all built on a lie to puff up McCain’s once fledgling political career?

John’s post below contains the stunning admission from the McCain campaign that the Keating 5 investigation was an attempt to politically smear John McCain. For years, we’ve been hearing that McCain’s “reformer” image came from his claiming to have made amends for that scandal, which sunk 1,000 banks and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. But, now we know that McCain’s reform mantle is a fraud. McCain isn’t sorry for what happened. He’s sorry he got caught.

More on McCain and Keating here.

Governor Sarah Palin (R-Alaska), the Republican vice presidential nominee, released her tax records from fiscal years 2006 and 2007. But if you asked the Washington Post and Politico what economic class the Palins would fit into, the answers would vary.

Washington Post: “Palins’ Assets Are Worth Up to $2.1 Million.”

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, have assets worth up to $2.1 million, and they paid $24,738 in 2007 income taxes on total income of $166,495, which came from her salary as governor of Alaska and money he earned as an oil worker, fisherman and snowmachine racer, documents released by her campaign yesterday show.

Politico: “Tax returns show Palin’s middle class.”

Since presidential aspirants began disclosing their tax returns, no candidate has released filings quite like those that Sarah Palin made public Friday afternoon.

The IRS filings, covering 2006 and 2007, bolster the Republican vice-presidential candidate’s frequent assertions about her family’s membership in the middle class, albeit in the upper end of the class.

Apparently the Politico shares Senator John McCain’s idea of “middle class.”

I guess they’re fresh out of bootstraps on Wall Street.

–Manuél Guzman
(Latino Político, 09/30/08)

Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek, ripped Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) in the latest issue for selecting Governor Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) as his running mate and called the decision “fundamentally irresponsible.”

Citing the CBS News interview with Katie Couric as evidence, Zakaria latched onto her explanation for the “Alaskan proximity to Russia is foreign policy experience” argument the governor and others made:

There is, of course, the sheer absurdity of the premise. Two weeks ago I flew to Tokyo, crossing over the North Pole. Does that make me an expert on Santa Claus? (Thanks, Jon Stewart.) But even beyond that, read the rest of her response. “It is from Alaska that we send out those …” What does this mean? This is not an isolated example. Palin has been given a set of talking points by campaign advisers, simple ideological mantras that she repeats and repeats as long as she can. (”We mustn’t blink.”) But if forced off those rehearsed lines, what she has to say is often, quite frankly, gibberish.

And on her answer about the economy, the financial crisis and the bailout legislation:

This is nonsense—a vapid emptying out of every catchphrase about economics that came into her head. Some commentators, like CNN’s Campbell Brown, have argued that it’s sexist to keep Sarah Palin under wraps, as if she were a delicate flower who might wilt under the bright lights of the modern media. But the more Palin talks, the more we see that it may not be sexism but common sense that’s causing the McCain campaign to treat her like a time bomb.

Zakaria further blasted Palin as the vice presidential candidate on CNN: