EdCone.com

The Obama campaign texts: "Rally w/ Jay-Z this Saturday! NC A&T University, North Steps Memorial Student Union, Greensboro. Gates: 2:30pm. Free & open to the public. MyBarackObama.com/NCJZ"

"These ground campaigns do not bear any relationship to one another. One side has something in the neighborhood of five million volunteers all assigned to very clear and specific pieces of the operation, and the other seems to have something like a thousand volunteers scattered throughout the country...John McCain's ground campaign is just not happening." Much more here, including a link to this much-discussed story.

Meanwhile, ground-game-driven early voting numbers in NC are already almost twice the total for 2004, and tomorrow's hours have been extended to 5 PM.

Dole doubles down with new "godless" ad. It says Kay's faith is not the issue, but makes it sound an awful lot like she's one of the "they" who want to "take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance and our everyday lives," the latter, I believe, being beyond even the mission of the Godless Americans PAC. The North Carolina Council of Churches has written to Dole to protest the "appalling" message of first ad.

Lou Dobbs and friends have a chuckle at "desperate" Dole's expense, but Ed Rollins should know that Congressional Club co-founder Carter Wrenn is no big fan of the ad. The part about Charlie Black is interesting, though.

TV Guide once out-earned the programming it listed, leading Nicholas Negroponte to observe that "the value of information about information can be greater than the information itself." That's still true, but things have changed fast for the once-valuable magazine.

The story of the Archimedes Palimpsest, intriguing on its own merits, reminded me of the bit-rot problem.

As it turns out, that problem was on the project team's agenda, too.

"Things are getting so bad in the magazine industry these days that they no longer wait until Friday to sneak out the bad news." Fun times in my little corner of the economy.

"Nouriel does not expect another Great Depression." Woot! Perhaps the most cheerful statement in a Roubini newsletter this year.

Before you break out the champagne, he does expect:

Tsunami of corporate defaults;  2-year U-shaped U.S. recession that threatens to turn into an L-shaped one if policymakers do not regain control of the financial system;...not even the strongest emerging markets such as Brazil and China will escape global re-coupling;  vicious cycle of deflation in goods markets, labor markets, commodity markets, financial markets, corporate and household earnings, and aggregate demand;  de-leveraging to reduce excess debt in municipalities, households and some firms;  U.S. stock markets declining another 20-30%, bottoming fall 2009 at the earliest, then moving sideways for years post-recession if growth remains anemic as it did in Japan after its 1990s real estate and equities bust;  U.S.unemployment rise to reach 8-9%;  the demise of the shadow banking system.

He also says we need $3-400 billion in economic stimulus; Krugman is beating the spending drum, too.

More from Bruce Schneier: airline security is not particularly secure.

Apparently there are better ways to go about it than taking away your deodorant and frisking Granny.

Congratulations, America, you're about to buy an automobile industry! "A coalition of six of the nation's state governors sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke Wednesday requesting immediate action to address an escalating liquidity crisis in the U.S. auto industry."

State Auditor's report says Lady Easley's luxury travel was excessive.

The little people just don't understand.

Auditor Les Merritt: "What is the culture that would let such items be charged to the state? It just shouldn't be, and that's what we want to see changed."

UPDATE: Hagan files suit against Dole and her campaign.

"The advertisement is defamatory because Defendants know, and knew prior to the production, approval, and publication of the advertisement, that it contains both false statements and false implications about Plaintiff...Defendants intended for these statements to be defamatory and for the average person to interpret the advertisement in a derogatory fashion."

The voiceover at the end, in which a woman's voice says "there is no God" while Hagan's face is on the screen, is cited as "egregious..clearly presented to appear to be Plaintiff's [voice]...an intentional attempt by Defendants to deceive the citizens of North Carolina and malign the Plaintiff."

I'm not comfortable with the atheism=unfit-for-office equation implicit in this whole debate, and I'm starting to wonder what the ads would look like if a Jew ran for statewide office.

McCain says Obama is not a socialist.

Fortunately he still has four days to come up with a new campaign theme.

UPDATE: Got one. "Sen. John McCain on Wednesday sought to steer the presidential-campaign conversation to national security."

A 63-year-old white native of a part of North Carolina even realer than this one interrupted himself while telling me how excited he is about deer season to say that he was not happy with McCain for picking Palin, because she's just not ready to be President, but that he would like to go hunting with her.

I asked security guru Bruce Schneier about those troublesome voting machines and the mindset that foists them upon us.

It was not a very encouraging conversation.

I'll post more from Schneier soon, including his views on airport security, which will not make you feel much safer.

The road was paved with decisions like ones by FASB that allowed banks to keep shifting assets into blind spots outside the view of shareholders and industry overseers.

I'm starting to think that letting the bankers hide all that risk was not such a great idea.

But at least we know what's going on with the public funds used to clean up the mess, right?

The American International Group is rapidly running through $123 billion in emergency lending provided by the Federal Reserve, raising questions about how a company claiming to be solvent in September could have developed such a big hole by October...

...A.I.G. has declined to provide a detailed account of how it has used the Fed’s money.

McCain can still win, despite that whole Phillies thing.

Lots of high-res poll porn here.

The last time the Phillies won the World Series was in 1980, immediately before a presidential election that changed the direction of American politics.

Coincidence? Maybe.

But consider this: "Philadelphia Phillies" is a perfect anagram for "Barack Obama."

Just sayin'.

Obama in Raleigh today, in words and pictures.

Update: Horrendous blunder could hurt Obama.

"[I]t was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me... as a real nation-building enterprise, the Islamic Revolution in Iran has been an abject failure." An opportunity arises for our next president.

The best thing we can do as oil prices decline in a contracting economy is keep on acting like gas costs $4 a gallon.

Landmark couldn't sell its local dwindling asset back when potential buyers could still line up credit, so now it's stopped trying.

"Frank Batten Jr., Landmark's chairman and chief executive officer, said the company will continue to operate its businesses for the next several years before restarting the sales process. The company will consider offers in the interim. Batten did not specify how long it would be until it resumed seeking formal bids."

Word is that the mood in the newsroom is not cheerful.

Yes! Weekly's endorsement issue does not endorse a presidential candidate. I received an anonymous email saying the presidential endorsement was spiked by publisher Charles Womack, allegedly because he is a McCain supporter and did not want his paper to endorse Obama. A subsequent, not-for-attribution interview with another source close to the weekly paper said the same thing.

I called Womack, who said he had "no comment." I asked him again if he had ordered the endorsement spiked, and if so, if that was because he supports McCain. Again, "no comment."

From the tipster:

Charles Womack ordered the staff not to endorse a candidate. In the past, he's tried to spike the entire endorsement issue at the last minute: This year, he successfully nixed the presidential endorsement.

It's easy to guess why: The staff would have reached a consensus supporting Obama, and Womack did not want that. He actually stated he would rather not publish that week than allow the paper to endorse a candidate he disagreed with.

Worse yet, he banned any mention of the endorsement at all. [Editor] Brian Clarey's hands were tied: he couldn't even explain why there was no endorsement. The omission is glaring.

Clarey had no comment.

Seems like an odd place for the publisher of a generally liberal alt-weekly to flex his muscle.

UPDATE: Will a similar divide between publisher and edit staff keep the N&R from endorsing a presidential candidate? Or was the plug pulled in Norfolk before it came to that?

Dear Liddy: Enough.

From a letter FedExed to Senator Dole and her campaign manager, Marty Ryall: "You have clearly stooped to a level that is not protected speech and has no place in our public discouse."

Garrison v Lousiana -- "calculated falsehood" -- is cited.

I take a very broad view of free speech, but even to the extent the cease and desist letter is a stunt it makes sense to call attention to Dole's descent.

What a sad chapter in Elizabeth Dole's public life. May it be the last one.

UPDATE: Carter Wrenn says, If Kay Hagan does an ad, puts it on TV, looks Elizabeth Dole in the eye and says, Elizabeth, that’s not my voice, I never said that, your ad's false – Dole’s ad backfires.

Here’s a worse scenario: What if Jim Hunt makes that ad? What if former Governor Jim Hunt looks into the camera and says, I’ve known Kay Hagan ten years; she’s an elder in her church and a Sunday school teacher, and Elizabeth Dole, your ad crosses the line of decency and fair play. You owe Kay Hagan an apology.

My guess is the next sound you may hear will be the roof falling in on Liddy Dole.

And Pearce looks at some NC campaign lawsuits.

Joe the Plumber springs a leak on Fox News.

I was on a panel the other night with Orson Scott Card, as hard-line a hardliner on the Middle East as can be found (sample argument: We had to invade an Arab country after 9/11, we had no choice), and even he allowed that Obama would support Israel.

Scott was a good panelist and an affable dinner-table companion. Our conversation on the issues never got to Teh Gay, a subject that makes Scott's head explode, and I politely disagreed when he tried to blame the whole economic mess on loans to poor people (he politely allowed that the situation was indeed more complicated), and I differed somewhat more sharply when he said nobody comes up with well-articulated, reasoned criticisms of GW Bush. We agreed on plenty of things, and I think we (along with Ogi Overman) kept the crowd awake.

Stocks are no longer very expensive as measured by Graham and Dodd...but a recession will hurt the E and thus make the P too high again...but investors may still support shares at levels above historic lows, and cheap money makes dividend-paying stocks attractive.

Which is to say, "If that is your time frame — decades, rather than months or years — this will probably turn out to be a perfectly good buying opportunity. In the shorter term, though, it's a much tougher call, and it involves a lot more risk."

That I could have told you before reading the article, but spending a little time every day with Graham and Dodd is probably healthy anyway.

Meanwhile, Gray Medlin says the apportioning of public money to banks "has the unintended effect of making the strong stronger and the weak weaker." Is it really unintended, or are the feds picking winners and culling the herd?

"The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent." The evidence of socialism on the part of both McCain and Palin is deeply troubling.

Kos: Slightly less crazy than advertised.

I suspect this is understood -- and feared -- by the O'Reillys of the world, which is why they protest so much.

An alert reader (and McCain supporter) writes:

There's a small bus going up and down Spring Garden street through UNCG with a megaphone on top, encouraging students to "get on the bus," picking them up, and taking them down to vote early for Barack.

The Obamaids also have a table set up in the Student Center.

McCain, Dole ... nothing.

The megaphone is kind of driving me nuts, but I am in awe of the Obama campaign. I have never seen anything like this on the UNCG campus in 20 years.

Christian Science Monitor to drop print edition (thnx to Esbee for the tip), MTV doesn't quite launch a video site, and other newish-media news here.

The descent of Dole (continued): "It's not just to save this seat; we are trying to save the values that we care about in America. We’re trying to save honesty and integrity and hard work and personal responsibility and love of family and love of God. That's what this is all about, and it's a serious time."

"His achievements were Promethean and unparalleled in the last century, but having said that, as the show proves almost despite itself, Picasso ended up often mired in vain, backward-looking riffs on grander achievements."

I'm not a fan of megashows, but if anyone wants to send me to Paris for a second opinion, I'm game. You can see some of Picasso's work closer to home at the Weatherspoon Museum. At left, a work on paper from the museum's collection, (After) Pedestal Table with a Guitar and Score.

BB&T: We don't need the money, but we'll take it.

"BB&T, one of the strongest [sic] capitalized financial institutions in the U.S., will receive $3.1 billion from a government capital infusion plan aimed at restoring liquidity and easing credit in the financial markets."

Bitter to the last drop: "At the Bush administration's direction, the Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would weaken pollution regulations for power plants, allowing them to increase emissions without adding controls...

"...EPA was expected to decide in November on another eleventh-hour rule that would allow more power plants to be built near national parks and wilderness areas...

"...Rules finalized more than 60 days before the administration leaves office are harder for the next administration to undo."

"A defiant Sen. Ted Stevens is returning to Alaska on Wednesday to resume his re-election campaign, despite being convicted of felonies that carry the potential of years in prison."

More: "Stevens could win, and then resign, allowing the Republicans to put up a candidate in the special election. That's a potential scenario state party officials are talking about to keep the seat out of Democratic hands."

Meanwhile: "Palin did not respond when asked if she will vote for Sen. Stevens next week and promptly boarded her campaign plane."

UPDATE: McCain and Palin call on Stevens to resign.

How the "systemic margin call" led to a plain old margin call.

There's a reason it's referred to as a deleveraging crisis.

It's the reason I called this post, "Starts with an L, ends with an everage." That was back when we were hearing that suprime was just not big enough to hurt the larger economy. Now the argument is that suprime was the root of all evil, and it was nourished by Fannie/Freddie/CRA. Can't wait to hear the next story.

"The souring economy helped pack overnight shelters this summer and fall, worrying officials that cold weather will drive more homeless to shelters unable to house them."

More here from Jennifer Fernandez, here and here from Michele.

The global language ain't Esperanto:

The bundling of consumer loans and home mortgages into packages of securities -- a process known as securitization -- was the biggest U.S. export business of the 21st century. More than $27 trillion of these securities have been sold since 2001...That's almost twice last year's U.S. gross domestic product of $13.8 trillion.

The growth over the past decade was made possible by overseas banks, which saw the profits U.S. financial institutions were making and coveted the made-in-America technology, much as consumers around the world craved other emblems of American ingenuity from Coca-Cola to Hollywood movies. Wall Street obliged, with disastrous results: two-thirds of a trillion dollars in bank losses, about 40 percent of them outside the U.S.

"Securitization was based on the premise that a fool was born every minute,'' Joseph Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University in New York, told a congressional committee on Oct. 21. "Globalization meant that there was a global landscape on which they could search for those fools -- and they found them everywhere."

"...the good news is that this level of volatility has a good track record of signaling important market bottoms."

And the bad news is that the quote is from February.

NYT: "North Carolina may have the country's worst [ballot]. It is already causing confusion with early voters. And if the presidential race is close, it could change the outcome...

"...Not surprisingly, North Carolina has an unusually high rate of undervotes, ballots that do not record a vote for president. In the last two presidential elections, the rate has been about double the national average."

Previously: Getting the word out as part of the ground-game strategy.

OMG Kay Hagan wants your kidz to catch the gay! Also, she hates God!!

Sad to see Liddy Dole's friends at the NC Republican Party trolling the sewer.

Also: Liddy said it was bad for Erskine Bowles to lend his campaign money, but that was then, and this is now.

FT endorses Obama.

Buncha damn commies.

Big brains discuss the network effect, power laws, and the future of cloud computing; I take notes.

Junior Johnson wants North Carolinians to vote for Obama. The campaign email, replete with racing metaphors, focuses on small businesses, gun ownership, and leadership.

The Obama campaign site says, "Our strategy for winning comes down to one thing: We have to get as many Obama supporters as possible to vote early." That seems to be going well. 

Both candidates will be in-state this week, along with surrogates including Carmela Soprano.

Old hands and national observers expect NC to go for McCain. Maybe so, but the fact we're still talking about it eight days before the election -- and that McCain still finds it necessary to put time and resources in the state -- is pretty remarkable.

Previously: Ralph Stanley speaks to the people of Virginia.

"The coloreds are excited, but my friends and I plan to write in Hillary’s name."

These are not gentle lands for Mr. Obama...

..."Close friends, real close, tell me they can’t get past his race," said Mr. Pisano, flashing his give-me-a-break look. "If Obama were white, this would be a landslide around here."

Race and reality in western PA. What a coincidence that the phony attack on a white woman happened, er, didn't happen in Pittsburgh.

"Bernanke and his colleagues may eventually have to drive the benchmark overnight rate close to zero to resuscitate the economy." Cheap money helped get us into this mess, so free money is all that's left.

[A]nalysts now say the economy may shrink more than 2 percent in the final quarter of 2008, its steepest decline in at least 18 years. "We're heading south big-time,'' says Lyle Gramley, a former Fed governor.

Jobs are an issue: "What worries many economists is that labor markets usually reach their weakest point after a recession has ended...But the current weakness comes as the country heads into a recession that is now forecast to be deeper and longer than previously thought."

Sue retires from ConvergeSouth. Ben Hwang helped birth the idea, and I was a performing monkey on game-day, but Sue made it happen. Greensboro and the web community owe her a big Thank You.

I would have quit long ago if she'd have let me, and since she's stepping aside I guess I can, too.

This year was in many ways the best one yet. Good to go out on top. It's been a lot of fun, and a positive thing for Greensboro, despite that fact that establishment Greensboro, which pretends to be interested in creative culture, paid only grudging attention to the grassroots creative conference that happened here.

If anyone wants to pick up the mantle, I'm happy to help. Otherwise, CS will join its progenitor, BloggerCon, in conference heaven, which is fine by me -- we did what we set out to do, and more.

UPDATE: Hoggard, a co-conspirator in the original Piedmont Bloggers Conference, host of one of ConvergeSouth's signature events, and occasional songmaster, joins the list of retirees. In the comments, Ben Hwang says he's stepping up to lead a new team for CS '09.

A home loan gone bad: "I had to have 100 percent financing no matter what," she said. "But we had a chance to get a hell of a lot better deal than that."

Why would anyone put together that kind of deal? "Mortgage brokers were often making up to 5 percent of the loan amount."

The article follows the loan from Sacramento to a mortgage-backed security packager in Charlotte until it disappears into the hidden recesses of the global financial system.

I don't think newspaper endorsements matter that much, but I'd guess they are more important in state and local races than the presidential campaign.

Still, this pro-Obama editorial from Alaska's largest paper has to smart.

I wouldn't expect most Americans to be overly impressed by al Qaeda's pick of McCain.

In North Carolina, Hagan gets the nod from all the big papers, and McCrory is the strong favorite.

First it was scary black men attacking our white women, now it's Obama as precursor of another Holocaust. Pennsylvania is going nuts.

I know a lot of white people, and by some standards I am one myself.

Many of the white people I know are from right here in pro-America America, and I am in fact a native of the very place where Sarah Palin proclaimed our union to be thusly divisible. I know wealthy white people and working white people and am related by marriage to white people from the parts of Virginia that are said to be more real than the unreal parts to the north.

And I agree with Frank Rich that "The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots." Many of the Real Americans I know are not bigots, and they don't like being taken for them just because they are white people who live in the south.

Still, I would not overlook the effectiveness of such manipulation in the very recent past, or its foundational role in the current campaign, or the reality of bigotry and fear as elements of our culture and probably also our nature.

I spoke this weekend with several well-to-do white people who in years past would almost certainly have voted Republican. Some will do so again this year. Only one made an overtly racist comment while discussing the campaign. Others just want to hang on to the money for which they, or their forebears, worked hard, but in this group there are some who wonder if continued GOP stewardship of the economy really offers the best option on that count. Reverse Bradleyism was in the air, along with a smattering of hitherto-unlikely overt support for the Democrats.

McCain campaign's push of hoax story showed "...not just a willingness to believe it but an eagerness to incite a ... racial backlash against the Obama campaign."

McCain needs to fire his PA communications director before this gets even worse.