Midday open thread

• Bravo!  And death to that godforsaken PBS "is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president" zombie poll from hell.
• palinaspresident.com
• The Freeway Blogger strikes the Beltway.
• Dick Morris' map this week is a little better than his map two weeks ago. But still, he's crazy. Obama winning Arizona and Tennessee? And he really thinks North Dakota is more solidly McCain than South Dakota? He's using a dartboard to make his picks.
• The last refuge for the political scoundrel: robocalls.

  The McCain campaign and the RNC are pumping new robocalls into North Carolina that question Barack Obama's patriotism by charging that he and his fellow Dems put "Hollywood above America," another sign that Republicans are seriously worried about losing the traditionally red state to Obama.

  The robocalls -- which we obtained from a North Carolina reader -- hit Obama for attending a celebrity fundraiser in Hollywood while efforts to address the financial crisis got underway in Washington.

  A second round of robocalls, also from McCain and the RNC, hits Obama as a tax-hiker, and stops just short of criticizing the big bailout package that McCain has repeatedly taken credit for helping get passed. Both the McCain campaign and the RNC declined to comment.

  Greg Sargent has audio of the call (link above), and notes that the robocalls are also going out in Missouri, Colorado and Wisconsin.

• Right-wing bloggers punk'd again. Oh, and they have a new slogan for this election:

  [T]he Corner argument for voting for McCain and Republicans has now devolved from “The Democrats are worse” in 2004 to “You can not completely destroy us, because it would create a power vacuum in which even worse right-wingers will come to prominence.”

• And speaking of the Cornerites, this is fucking brilliant. Watch Matt Taibbi school Byron York in this live chat:

  B.Y.: I think that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were also major factors. And I believe that many of the problems in the mortgage area can be attributed to the confluence of Democratic and Republican priorities: the Democrats' desire to give mortgages to people, particularly minorities, who could not afford them, and the Republicans' desire to achieve an "ownership society," in part by giving mortgages to people who could not afford them. Again, I believe that if you are suggesting that the financial crisis is a Republican creation, or even more specifically a McCain creation, I think you're on pretty shaky ground.

  M.T.: Oh, come on. Tell me you're not ashamed to put this gigantic international financial Krakatoa at the feet of a bunch of poor black people who missed their mortgage payments. The CDS market, this market for credit default swaps that was created in 2000 by Phil Gramm's Commodities Future Modernization Act, this is now a $62 trillion market, up from $900 billion in 2000. That's like five times the size of the holdings in the NYSE. And it's all speculation by Wall Street traders. It's a classic bubble/Ponzi scheme. The effort of people like you to pin this whole thing on minorities, when in fact this whole thing has been caused by greedy traders dealing in unregulated markets, is despicable [...]

  B.Y.: When you refer to "Phil Gramm's Commodities Future Modernization Act," are you referring to S.3283, co-sponsored by Gramm, along with Senators Tom Harkin and Tim Johnson?

  M.T.: In point of fact I'm talking about the 262-page amendment Gramm tacked on to that bill that deregulated the trade of credit default swaps.

  Tick tick tick. Hilarious sitting here while you frantically search the Internet to learn about the cause of the financial crisis — in the middle of a live chat interview.

  B.Y.: Look, you can keep trying to make this a specifically partisan and specifically Gramm-McCain thing, but it simply isn't. We've gone on for fifteen minutes longer than scheduled, and that's enough. Thanks.

  M.T.:  Thanks. Note, folks, that the esteemed representative of the New Republic has no idea what the hell a credit default swap is. But he sure knows what a minority homeowner looks like.

  B.Y.: It's National Review.