To me, it looked like a wash. Neither candidate embarrassed his supporters, both appeared competent enough. But I think Obama allayed fears among fence sitters about his presidentiality. That means the debate was a win for Obama, because the fence sitters are ready for change, but they’re afraid to change too much. Now Obama looks more like a president to them, so they will lean in his direction.

McCain got a lot of facts wrong but that won’t have any effect on his supporters, they either won’t know or will shrug it off. For all the complaints about how presidential debates are not really debates, they’re too much like a dog and pony show and all that… well, this debate was pretty debaty. Especially Obama, to me he came off as wonky, Clarence Page said “professorial.” There weren’t any campaign changing soundbites from either of them, Obama seemed focused on actually debating the points, while McCain had a more political focus, except that it wasn’t delivered particularly well.

Visually, Obama was charming as usual, McCain was a little creepy with his fixed smile and his not looking at Obama ever. But to his supporters McCain probably looked okay.

Kind of a disappointing debate really. Didn’t learn anything new, didn’t have a Dan Quayle moment or a Ronald Reagan moment. Well, there’s the VP debate and another presidential debate to look forward to. Maybe Obama will pull out the stops for that one.

“I’m tryin’ ta think, but nuttin’ happens!” - Curly Howard

There was an incident here in Dallas some years ago, it was a hailstorm, a big one out over the western part of the county I think. Golf ball sized hail destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cars at dealerships close to the highway, and softball sized hail fell in some parts.

On the news there was a family that got caught up in in it, right up in it, and there was a little girl about 5 years old, shaking, cut and bruised, and wet. They panned back to show a ’70s model Chevy Impala, a huge car with a thick steel body like they used to make, and Daddy was telling the story about how “The hail started a bustin’ up the windshield and I just tol’ ever’body to bail out - ‘BAIL OUT! BAIL OUT!’ I said to ‘em. And we all bailed out. It was sumthin’!”

So ever after that all of us in our group of friends would talk about the Bailout Family, whenever such an occasion arises, where people bail out without thinking about the consequences.

How the money supply and how financial markets work are about as easy to understand as the Tao, or quantum electrodynamics - only it’s quantum physics in reverse: easy to comprehend at the micro level, but abstruse and counterintuitive at the larger level of global economies.

This is why it seems like we’re about to make a huge mistake on the financial markets bailout, one way or another. Because so few people really understand how the financial markets work, it would be easy on the one hand to do exactly the wrong thing, as has happened many times before. Or it would be easy for someone to pull the wool over our eyes and rob us blind without us even knowing how they did it, or even if they had done it.

But here’s an article THE BIG LIE: The Supposed Paulson ‘Bailout’ Plan by Robert Wenzel in the Economic Policy Journal that may explain it better than most. It so happens I do hold a degree in Physics and I used to be a Taoist in good standing, but I’m still not going to say I really understand financial stuff. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of articles out there now that purport to be telling the real story behind the financial crisis we’re in now, each of which contradicts the other partially or entirely.

Basically what I think Wenzel is saying is that Treasury Secretary Paulson wants $700,000,000,000 of taxpayer money to go to his buddies in banking and finance. Wenzel says it’s obvious that money isn’t going to save troubled banks, so Paulson says “Ummm… we need it to like, unfreeze the credit markets by adding huge amounts of new liquidity to the system.” And Wenzel goes “Whoa, dude! Injecting money into the economy is what the Fed is all about! They don’t need any help from Congress or the taxpayers for that.”

Wenzel says Bernanke is a dillhole who needs to get his head out of his ass and stop holding down both the money supply and interest rates. One at a time, please! He says Volcker knew what he was doing, and brought us out of the economic crap we were going through since Nixon laid price and wage controls on the US economy back in the ’70s.

Oh, what? Republicans with their financial socialism even way back then? What did I say about it not being clear why rednecks should vote for Democrats?

Anyway, back to Wenzel. To make a long article a little shorter, I’ll go straight to Wenzel’s bottom line:

In summary, there is nothing “bailout” about this $700 billion Paulson plan. It would be more aptly called, Feeding Pigs At The $700 Billion Trough.

The public uproar over this $700 billion money grab is completely justified. One question remains. Does Congress have the balls to resist their insider masters and do something noble for a change and kill the Big Lie?

With that much money, Paulson could give 700,000 people a million dollars, or he could give 70,000 people 10 million dollars, or 7,000 people 100 million dollars. So how many friends does Paulson have, and how rich is he going to make them?

I made a Zazzle store front for Obama Redneck products using Zazzle Store Builder. It’s pretty easy, but I kind of used my programming skills to shoehorn it in there without making it into a plug-in. So now I have to find out how to do that and offer it up to the Wordpress community.

So, I left off last week with my previous post claiming I was going to tackle the question of why a redneck should be for Obama, and then the whole bottom fell out of all the Republicans’ devious plans.

Last time I said rural folks were mostly for Democrats because Republicans were for the wealthy, and now we see it revealed plain as day, they haven’t changed. When the going got tough, the people who had benefited most from the banking and finance deregulation designed mainly by Phil Gramm were found to be wimps. Their house of cards tumbling down around them, their point man’s plan was to become financial Dictator in the classical Roman tradition.

Even with all that, I can’t say there’s really a pat answer for why a redneck should be for Obama, there’s still nothing about Democrats that fits right in with redneck thought or lifestyle, in my opinion. The Democratic Party’s persona is in flux, transitioning away from the Politically Correct, Great Society, moderately leftist ideologies of the ’60s, into a more pragmatic theme which Obama represents.

At the Democratic caucuses here in Dallas, there were at least 1000 times as many people participating as at any time in the past, and that is not an exaggeration. I was one of the new participants, having never been there before because I never really liked the Democratic Party before, even though I usually voted for them. Well, I liked some of their policies, but I wanted them to put more emphasis on small government, individual responsibility and self-reliance, and less emphasis on nanny government.

Judging from the people I met at the caucuses, and the people I saw there whom I knew as friends and acquaintances, I’d say that many more people like me have joined up and will be making policy in the Democratic Party as time goes on. People like me are attracted by Obama’s pragmatism as much as anything else. And despite false Republican claims, Obama is not the most liberal Senator, he does emphasize individual responsibility and self-reliance.

These are still vague reasons for most… but come on, man! Momma didn’t raise no fools! You want your President to be smarter than a fifth grader!

It’s obvious now that while Republicans talk a big game and are able to fool a lot of people into believing in them despite their record, in fact Republicans are the most profligate spenders - Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility. And Republicans spend your money on their friends - bailing out Wall Street, subsidizing oil producers, handing out contracts to the likes of KBR and Halliburton. Not to mention that under the Bush administration we have seen the largest incursions into the privacy and freedoms of American citizens since before the Revolution.

Is this the kind of thing rednecks are for? I don’t think so. I believe rednecks are for fiscal responsibility, self-reliance, personal freedom, and a balance between collective and individual responsibility. I know the Republicans aren’t for those ideals, and it’s true that plenty of Democrats are not for those ideals either, but at this point the Democratic Party is the way to go if you believe in those things.

Why not the Libertarian Party, or the Constitution Party? Hmmm… maybe tha will be my next post.

I put some Adsense ads up, and most of them are anti-Obama. I’ll leave them there anyway. Remember, the people who bought them only have to pay if you click on them.

Why should the term “redneck for Obama” be surprising? It seems like an oxymoron, the way the media and the Republicans have hyped it up, only urban Democrats who consider themselves the intellectual elites should be for Obama, along with most Black Americans and some other minorities.

Rednecks are supposed to be for Republicans because Republicans don’t whine for the government to give them money, they don’t try to teach Ebonics as a second lanuage, they aren’t jealous of rich people, they don’t let criminals go unpunished, they aren’t always spending money they don’t have, they don’t expect the government to bail them out when they make a mistake…

Oh, wait.

In the past, rural folks were Democrats because Republicans were for the wealthy, and the wealthy were considered robber barons without family values, people who spoiled their children and were bent on forcing people to work for low wages, on manipulating markets to their advantage, always to screw the little man.

Then of course in the South, rednecks were Democrats because the Republicans belonged to the party of Lincoln. Republicans were carpetbaggers, and scalawags who came to the South to take advantage of the post-war conditions, to buy up land cheap, and rob people of their life savings.

But with the huge numbers of newly college educated young folks coming into adulthood in the ’60s, the Democratic Party changed course and went too far afield of values of its rural roots. It became the party of city folk, which you can see clearly in the Purple Maps which became popular after the 2004 election. These maps show clearly that even in largely rural states like Texas, which people think of as a “red” state, there are still concentrations of “blue” voters in the cities. So that’s why it’s surprising that there should be such a thing as rednecks for Obama - because the red-state/blue-state thing is really more of an suburban-rural/urban thing.

Now, I mentioned the whininess of Democrats, and their tendency to call for nanny state government as reasons why rednecks, who value self-reliance, wouldn’t want to associate themselves with that Party. I’ll have to address that in my next post.

Hell yes! Well, in fact I’m not exactly a full-blood redneck, having grown up and lived in the big city all my life. But I have tons of relatives out in west Texas around Coleman and San Angelo, and my family owns some farmland near Kaufman, and… I have an Uncle Bubb! You can’t hardly get more redneck than that.

Anyway, I saw something in reddit about Rednecks for Obama and thought I’d join the bandwagon, and maybe help build the wagon to some extent. To that end, I have put up some artwork at Zazzle and CafePress.

On Zazzle, I have a Rednecks for Obama store at http://zazzle.com/obamaredneck, and on CafePress my store is called LoonyBuns, after a funny Youtube video, at http://cafepress.com/loonybuns.

I have four basic designs, but they took down one of them on Zazzle because they thought my replica of the Obama “O” infringed on the copyright. CafePress doesn’t seem to care about that. CafePress makes it easier to create a whole slew of products from one design and its variants, so for example, the header design for this site needs to be wide for a bumper sticker but fat for a t-shirt.

Zazzle makes you create entire separate products for each such design, but they let you choose if customers should be able to customize, so you can go in with some art and put it on anything you like.

Later I’ll have more about politics and less about my side business.