Opinion - HuffingtonPost.com

CNBC's Erin Burnett has spent most of the day interviewing the players in Congress and the financial markets, feeding them the gibberish that we are "all responsible" for this economic meltdown.

Where the hell did Cindy hide my Xanax? I need to double down. If I start acting any jumpier, they're gonna put me in a strait jacket.

The apocalyptic tone of this year's presidential race is starting to wear me out.

You hear a lot of laments about the lack of substance in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Facing the prospect of a political bludgeoning Friday night in the first televised debate with Democrat Sen. Barack Obama, Republican Sen. John McCain has announced that he's "suspending" his campaign to work on the economy, and is requesting that the debate be delayed because of the current financial crisis. Seems like the real crisis lies within the McCain campaign.

Forget it. John McCain's transparent ploy to stall the rising Obama campaign should be firmly rejected.

Physicists, historians, and economists talk about "path dependence." Something that is far from ideal persists, only because we are stuck with a particular path.

The Sarah Palin joke must end. Palin herself might be a wonderful person, a great (hockey) mom and a terrific moose hunter. Be that as it may, the Team McCain-orchestrated Palin UN visit was vintage Saturday Night Live satire except that it was meant to be serious. The very idea that an hour with this world leader, ten minutes with that one, somehow amounted to substantive foreign affairs only speaks to the desperation of the candidate at the top of the ticket. A guy who, in the middle of the worst economic crisis in generations, flips between stating the economic fundamentals are solid before flopping a mere three hours later with the acknowledgment the nation is in a meltdown.

Is John McCain's stated desire to suspend the campaign and postpone the first debate a cynical move made of desperation or a genuine response to the economic crisis? Yes.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson spent the past two weeks playing a game of chicken with firms like Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. Now he is playing even higher-stakes chicken with Congress and the economy.

From Karl Rove's criticism of McCain's attack ads as going "a step too far," it would be easy to conclude that even the most devious among us has a point at which his moral compass kicks in. But that would be a mistake. Karl Rove wasn't annoyed with McCain for lying but rather for his amateur way of doing so. Rove prefers lies within the deniable range -- the more of them the better. From a Rovian perspective, McCain went long when he should have gone wide.

If his new plan remains afloat, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, from the Wall Street wing of the GOP, may well have doomed the November chances of John McCain, the presidential nominee of this month's Main Street-oriented Republican national convention.

GOP presidential nominee John McCain said today that if elected he would send U.S. troops to South America in order to invade "one of America's deadliest enemies," Spain.

Both The Hill and Politico.com have reported that a bipartisan "gang" of 20 Senators will not introduce a compromise energy bill before the election. You can read details of the original compromise here: The Gang-of-10 drilling deal is something for nothing.

No one will be able to accuse Sen. Barack Obama of not making his pro-education, pro-prevention, pro-choice values clear in this election.

Until now, I have always thought there was a place for the Log Cabin Republicans within the GLBT movement.

Even the most cynical reader of polls would have to agree with the basic finding that this race is going to be very close. Assuming that is the case, and there is little reason not to assume that, this will be the third straight election which could be described as very close. This is all but unprecedented in American history. With the possible exception of 1880-1888 where all three elections were close in popular vote, but less so in electoral vote, it is difficult to find even two elections in a row which were as competitive as the last two elections or as competitive as this election is likely to be.

I participated last Monday night in the BBC "Economist Debates" on the economic meltdown broadcast from the heart of the City, London's financial district.

A further reflection on comments made by Palin devotees appearing in a Marc Fisher column in the Washington Post on September 11 (and noted in my last week's posting).

I do not need to tell you that our nation is staring down the barrel of a huge energy crisis.

After Sarah Palin was selected by John McCain as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, reporters asked me whether the pick was desperate, brilliant, or risky.

What kind of guy would write, "Here's what the law says," when everyone else in the media read the actual words, which say the opposite? Somebody who can't read? A pathological liar who wants to get caught? Somebody who lacks the capacity to feel embarrassment or shame? A magazine editor with utter contempt for his readers?

The facts were different but the mayoral abuse similar. In 1999, when running for the U.S. Senate, NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to change the rules in the middle of a term. His effort to keep me, as public advocate, from succeeding him under the city Charter was rejected 3-to-1 in a public vote.

What do we democrats have to say about the mess on Wall Street?

"The economy is fundamentally strong." -- President Herbert Hoover, after the stock market plummets in 1929.

The anxiety and bed-wetting that many Democrats have been experiencing about the state of the presidential race over the past few weeks should be subsiding as the Palin effect is wearing off and we're seeing clear signs that the McCain bounce is over and the pendulum is swinging back to Obama. Effectively, the race has reverted to where it stood before the political conventions.

A new study out of Yale University confirms what argumentative liberals have long-known: Offering reality-based rebuttals to conservative lies only makes conservatives cling to those lies even harder. In essence, schooling conservatives makes them more stupid. From the Washington Post article on the study, which came out yesterday:

Washington, DC - House Financial Services Committee Chairman Frank released the following statement today regarding the refusal of the Wall Street Journal editorial board to publish his response to an inaccurate editorial in a timely manner: