That’s my take on his sudden retreat from going after Obama on his shady associations and his “You don’t have to be afraid…” of Obama as President comment.  Why would McCain think he’s seeing the writing on the wall? Because this is what’s written on it:

This is a chart of John McCain’s tracking numbers overlaid with the S&P 500’s closing numbers.(created by State of the Union blog) It paints a pretty compelling picture. I have read that McCain’s internal polling paints an even grimmer picture.

It looks like Obama and the congressional leadership think he has it sewn up as well.

McCain, in his interview with Charlie Gibson (who managed to keep his frown and grimace rate to about a quarter of the Palin interview level) was asked: “Do you think this economic crisis is hurting you with voters?”  McCain’s answer was typically horrible and fumbling and unhelpful. Here’s how McCain should have answered:

“Well Charlie, in a fairer world it would be hurting my opponent, because it was the policies of his allies in his party that largely created this mess, while I and some of my fellow Republicans, including President Bush, have been warning about it for two years. But we don’t live in that fairer world. So, yes, it’s hurting my campaign, in part because you and your colleagues are in the tank for Obama and won’t report the truth.”

But McCain isn’t going to say anything like that because he’s a poor candidate. In fact, he’s the worst candidate the Republicans had for running against Mr. Cool.–just as Bob Dole was the worst choice among the contenders for running against Bill Clinton. Of course at the time McCain clinched the nomination, it wasn’t clear who the Dem nominee was going to be.

Of course, things could turn around. One wild card is the “Wilder Effect“–the tendency for many extreme sufferers of “white guilt” to tell pollsters they’re voting for a black candidate but do otherwise in the secrecy of the voting booth.

I suspect that the more the Democrats have shouted “racist” at every person who criticizes Obama, the more potentially pronounced the Wilder Effect has become. If the markets stabilize this coming week AND gas prices continue to come down AND some other unforeseen event actually works to McCain’s benefit (for a change)–the race could tighten back up.

If it does, it will be in spite of McCain the campaigner, not because of him.

“May you live in interesting times,” goes the old Chinese curse.

And things do indeed just get curiouser and curiouser. For example, today I see that the son of William F. Buckley, Christopher, a writer of humorous novels and self-described conservative/libertarian, has announced his intention to vote for Barack Obama.

Read it for yourself but his reasons can be summarized as follows.

• He’s disappointed in the strategy and ads of the McCain campaign over the last few weeks.
• He loathes Sarah Palin with a deep and burning detestation– but for reasons that he doesn’t bother to articulate but assumes all sensible people share.
• He thinks Barack Obama seems smart and that it’s cool that he writes his own books.
• He’s saddened that John McCain has changed some of his positions on the campaign trail, ostensibly in order to help himself get elected. (Of course, Obama has done much more cynical triangulating since winning his party’s nomination than has McCain but this, for some reason, doesn’t bother Buckley in the least.)

So how does a smart man who claims to value small, non-intrusive government decide to vote for a guy whose entire political record and every utterance on the campaign trail has uniformly promised bigger, more-intrusive governemnt? That’s simple:

Blind hope and (faithless) prayer. Seriously:

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Well, there you have it. Buckley hopes President Obama will “surely understand” that everything he has said and believed over the last 20 years is wrong-headed, once he is seated in the Oval Office.

This level of child-like (secular) faith would truly be touching if it didn’t involve my family’s finances and security. Why, it’s a faith so big that it can believe that when the new liberal Democrat super-majorities in the House and Senate led by Pelosi and Reid start sending President Obama bill after bill calling for a sweeping increases in the size and scope of government, he’ll courageously veto them.

Now that’s some audacious hope, right there my friend.

You can be sure that all of the liberals cheering Buckley in the comment thread below his little essay believe precisely the opposite. In fact, they are confident that any backtracking from ultra-liberal positions Obama may have done in the course of the campaign are purely expediencies demanded by the election process. They’re counting on the fact that Buckley’s faith is misplaced, even as they praise him for holding it.

Look into the url address window on the web site that published Buckley’s cry for help and you’ll see they named the file, “the-conservative-case-for-Obama.”

But there is no “case” anywhere to be found in Buckley’s words. Just emotion and pique. How very sad. I pray (non-secularly) that Buckley has a crisis of faith on election day.

Focus people.

. . . is old hat when you’ve been Queen Esther or a ballerina-angel on many occasions.

Or been a bride, bridesmaid or flower girl.

Homecoming queen that is.

Female Offspring Unit #2, a Senior this year, was up for homecoming queen at last night’s festivities and, to her great surprise, won.

It was a big night.

This YouTube video has gotten quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere today.

Update: The video has been taken down by the producers (for obvious reasons) but you can still find an archived version here.

Aside from the disturbing, North-Korean-style-“Dear-Leader”-worship meets Children-of-the-Corn vibe of the thing . . . the other striking thing about it is that the people who participated, produced and published this thing truly think they’re helping.

Those people aren’t “grass roots” activists from the heartland. As this blogger points out, they’re wealthy Hollywood moguls and L.A. beautiful people types.

Did you notice the big Obama poster on the wall of that room? I thought it looked familiar. Could this have been the inspiration?

I repeat. These people sincerely think this will help the Obama cause. The truly troubling thought is: “What if they’re right?”

 . . . in our century.  Behold our partners in trade, the Chinese.

And here are some thoughts I had about modern slavery in a previous post titled, “Our New Age of Slavery.”

This video won’t win any Golden Globes for its production values, but it does a pretty good job of explaining 20 years of bad liberal policy making in 10 minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/themouthpeace

Also: Here is an article in the conservative “City Journal” from way back in 2000 in which Howard Husock accurately predicts this utterly unnecessary fiasco.

A few months ago I explained in this space that I was selling my house and getting completely out of debt because I believed things were about to get weird. Well, I think it’s safe to say that things have officially entered “weird” territory.

So how did we get here?

You can ignore most of the finger-pointing from the media and liberals. The current banking and credit crisis is a direct result of the most merciless of all historical forces–The Law of Unintended Consequences. This law dictates that whenever the federal government takes it upon itself to “fix” a problem, the fix will invariably produce effects (usually negative) that Congress never foresaw.

Stan Liebowitz explains it here.

Mark Krikorian summarized it along these lines: Back in the Clinton years, the federal government purposely began to equate sound lending practices with racism. That’s why he’s calling this “The Diversity Recession.”

Just as the depression was an unintended consequence of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act (1930), which was a government response to the stock market crash of 1929; and just as that depression become “The Great Depression” as a result of the wrong-headed government attempts to “respond to the crisis”; so you can be sure that the current problems are a direct result of big government liberal social-engineers efforts to craft utopia a decade or two ago.

And you can be equally sure that any “fix” the Democratic leadership in Congress has in mind today, will blow back with a vengeance a few years down the line.

That lady standing in the shadows as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi craft a government response? That’s Ms. Law of Unintended Consequences. Look closely and you’ll see she’s smiling.

[Boy, I’m just “Mr. Cheer” today. Move over Norman Vincent Peale!]

If you love books as I do (actually the word “fetish” comes to mind), or have an interest in the book publishing business, as I do, you my want to take a look at this long esssay from “New York”magazine online:

The End: The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after.

It paints a pretty bleak picture of the future of book publishing.

Not helping is the prospect–highlighted in this USA Today essay–that precious few among the current crop of high school students are likely to be interested in reading anything longer than a text message or Twitter post as adults.