New CNN poll, conducted October 3-5, after VP debate. "More Americans appear to have an unfavorable view of Gov. Sarah Palin, and that may also be helping Obama in the fight for the presidency. Forty percent now have an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 27 percent a month ago and from 21 percent in late August, when McCain surprised many people by picking the first-term Alaska governor as his running mate. 'A majority of Americans now believe that Sarah Palin would be unqualified to serve as president if it became necessary, and her unfavorable rating has doubled,' Holland said." More from Pew.

John Harwood: Is era of dominance over for conservatives?

WSJ/NBC: "The Democratic presidential running mates Barack Obama and Joe Biden are doing a better job in the debates, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. By a 21 point margin, 50%-29%, voters said the Democrats had the debate edge over rival Republican running mates John McCain and Sarah Palin, while 10% of respondents said the two tickets were equally as good and 4% said neither was good."

WP: In Florida, Palin goes for the rough stuff as audience boos Obama. "'Kill him,' proposed one man in the audience."

Human Rights Watch's Joanne Mariner: "A group of 17 Chinese Uighurs who have been cleared of the 'enemy combatant' designation should be freed from Guantanamo and given parole status in the United States, Human Rights Watch said today. Their case will be heard by a federal judge in the District of Columbia on Tuesday, October 7."

Time on McCain's Manchurian candidate attack.

The WP's Chris Cillizza on "the Keating fight and why it matters."

NYT: Dow falls below 10,000, for first time since 2004. Oil below $90/barrel.

Congressional Quarterly's Tim Starks' cover story on intel reorganization fatigue.

A reader sends this excerpt from Rolling Stone: "....In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches."

Also worth reading, from the LAT:

John McCain was training in his AD-6 Skyraider on an overcast Texas morning in 1960 when he slammed into Corpus Christi Bay and sheared the skin off his plane's wings.

McCain recounted the accident decades later in his autobiography. "The engine quit while I was practicing landings," he wrote. But an investigation board at the Naval Aviation Safety Center found no evidence of engine failure.

The 23-year-old junior lieutenant wasn't paying attention and erred in using "a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn," investigators concluded.

The crash was one of three early in McCain's aviation career in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials.

In his most serious lapse, McCain was "clowning" around in a Skyraider over southern Spain about December 1961 and flew into electrical wires, causing a blackout, according to McCain's own account as well as those of naval officers and enlistees aboard the carrier Intrepid. In another incident, in 1965, McCain crashed a T-2 trainer jet in Virginia.

After McCain was sent to Vietnam, his plane was destroyed in an explosion on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1967. Three months later, he was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi and taken prisoner. He was not faulted in either of those cases and was later lauded for his heroism as a prisoner of war.

As a presidential candidate, McCain has cited his military service -- particularly his 5 1/2 years as a POW. But he has been less forthcoming about his mistakes in the cockpit.

Howard Wolfson in TNR:

Why won't the swiftboat tactics work this year?

Its easy to lose sight of it in the day to day coverage, but the collapse of Wall Street in the last weeks was a seminal event in the history of our nation and our politics. To put the crisis in perspective, Americans have lost a combined 1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks alone. Just as President Bush's failures in Iraq undermined his party's historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets.

Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the proper role of government for a century. In 1980 voters sided with Ronald Reagan and Republicans that government had become too big and intrusive. Then the economy worked in the Republicans' favor. Today the pendulum has swung ...

WP:

At the Republican National Convention this summer, the family came together to celebrate McCain's triumphant moment. "Everyone," says McCain's old friend and lawyer Bud Day, "was there and jovial."

Everyone except [McCain's first wife] Carol. She declined to join her children and her ex-husband.

It was probably just as well. The buildup to McCain's acceptance speech included an eight-minute video that celebrated his life, work and family. At its conclusion, delegates in the convention hall erupted in applause.

Carol McCain, the woman who stood beside McCain through triumph and tragedy, was never mentioned.

AP: "Plan for US diplomatic outpost in Iran dropped; political concerns among reasons"

The Bush administration has shelved plans to set up a diplomatic outpost in Iran, in part over fears it could affect the U.S. presidential race or be interpreted as political meddling, The Associated Press has learned.

The proposal to send U.S. diplomats to Tehran for the first time in three decades attracted great attention when it was floated over the summer, but has now been placed on indefinite hold as November's election nears and Iran continues to defy demands to halt suspect nuclear activities, officials told the AP.

Two administration officials familiar with the matter .... said a decision had been made to leave the decision to the next U.S. president because it could be seen as a reward for Iran's nuclear intransigence, especially when Iran policy has become a key part of the heated campaign between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.

SNL: Queen Latifa as Gwen Ifill, Tina Fey as Palin, incredible. Guy playing Biden also hilarious (Scranton is just "an awful, awful terrible place.")

Politico: "Branding his opponent as 'erratic in a crisis,' Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is preempting plans by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to portray him as having sinister connections to controversial Chicagoans. ... But Obama isn’t waiting to respond. His campaign is going up Monday on national cable stations with a scathing ad saying: 'Three quarters of a million jobs lost this year. Our financial system in turmoil. And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy. No wonder his campaign wants to change the subject.'" Also from Politico, Obama takes big new lead in Minnesota, 55 to 37. Obama up + six points in Real Clear Politics latest poll average, 49.3 to 43.3.

Miami Herald:

Medley defense contractors who won millions in federal earmarks through Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart employed a Capitol Hill lobbyist who pleaded guilty recently in an unfolding congressional corruption probe. ... The lobbyist, Cecelia Grimes, admitted in July to destroying evidence sought by the FBI in its ongoing investigation of ex-Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. She's the second former Weldon associate to plead guilty and cooperate. Ex-Weldon chief of staff Russell Caso admitted conspiring to help a consulting firm obtain federal funds in exchange for secret payments to his wife.

Court records show the FBI is exploring whether Weldon, once the powerful vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, supported earmark requests in exchange for fees paid to Grimes' lobbying firm. The firm, now defunct, was Grimes & Young. Grimes' partner was Cindy Young, daughter-in-law of veteran Rep. C.W. ''Bill'' Young, R-St. Petersburg.

Records show Mark Two paid Grimes, Weldon's friend and ex-real estate agent, $20,000 in 2006 to lobby the House for ``defense appropriations and authorizations.'' Grimes approached Locust President Enrique J. Enriquez after he spoke before Weldon committees regarding the contracting needs of small companies, said Locust attorney Nick Christin. But Christin said Grimes ``never generated any business for Mark Two or Locust.'' William Box, chairman of both companies, said he didn't know Mark Two paid Grimes to lobby. ''That's news to me,'' he said. ``I'm bothered that we apparently paid $20,000 for nothing.''

More:

Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart has procured millions in federal funding to benefit a small Miami-Dade defense-contracting group that has donated tens of thousands of dollars to his political campaign and that of his brother, fellow U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

Medley contractors Locust USA and Mark Two Engineering began contributing to the Diaz-Balarts' campaigns and political action committees in 2001, the year Locust secured its first small defense contract. Through this year, those contributions totaled more than $67,000.

Locust was awarded $20.8 million in Pentagon research and development contracts from 2001-2007, federal contracting records show.

At least 44 percent, $9.2 million, came through Congressional earmarks sponsored by Lincoln Diaz-Balart, The Miami Herald found. The largest -- $3.7 million -- came in 2006.

Where is the Weekly Standard when you need it, to defend Porter Goss's decision to appoint Dusty Foggo to the number three job at the Agency, now that Foggo has pled guilty to fraud and is going to jail? All that vigorous vetting at those Washington area poker games, never mind the contracts he took affirmative measures to hide that he was throwing at his friend Wilkes, and a few mistresses he badgered to have installed at various CIA jobs, according to just some of the the 28-count Foggo indictment (.pdf). What's a few million dollars in corruption and crony contracts if it's furthering the cause - well, what was the cause, installing chiefly fiercely partisan GOP loyalists throughout the Agency, as the White House was attempting to do at every other federal agency, Monica Goodling/Lurita Doan-style?

And where have Porter Goss and Patrick Murray snuck away? Don't they want to speak up, to defend their decision to appoint Foggo to the Executive Director job? And Patrick Murray especially interesting, since he was wired into the White House national security legal structure from the beginning, having served on the Bush/Cheney transition team, and been appointed by President Bush to serve as associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003 (an appointment the White House seems to have removed from its website), before becoming Goss's right fist at the Agency. That would be the Justice Department that ended up in May 2006 authorizing the FBI to conduct the unprecedented raid on Foggo's CIA office. The humiliating details of the case forcing the White House to abruptly dump Goss, news he was delivered in a phone call from the White House during a Friday May 5, 2006 lunch he was hosting for a visiting group of think tank scholars (he excused himself, and headed for the White House, where he was publicly retired, a decision he did not know about when his lunch began, according to a source of mine who happened to be there for lunch with the Director that day).

Time to speak up, Goss and Murray. First off, on whose recommendation exactly did Goss make the decision to appoint Foggo to the number three job? (This 2006 Newsweek piece worth rereading, which says Foggo had served as a kind of informant for Goss and the Gosslings when Goss headed HPSCI, no doubt at the aforementioned poker games). And what was it about the revelation that the FBI was investigating Foggo that seemed to make Goss's removal of utmost urgency for the White House? And, since partisan hackery over competence, professionalism or evidently ethics was apparently what the appointment was about, do they plan to visit Foggo in jail? Any more card games planned before Foggo heads to the slammer? It all seems so much like the end of Alberto Gonzales, who suddenly doesn't have a friend in Washington. Another case study of cronyism, partisan zealotry, overreach and incompetence for the history books about this sorry era.

WP: How political warfare in Missouri GOP led to prosecutor's firing.

Eric Umansky on the six Gitmo prosecutors who protested.

WP: "With the party already struggling to generate enthusiasm for its brand, Republican strategists fear that an outpouring of public anger generated by Congress's struggle to pass a rescue package for the financial industry may contribute to a disaster at the polls for the GOP in November. ... GOP operatives said the party's declining fortunes are rooted in a series of events over the past two weeks, including McCain's decision to suspend his campaign in order to help broker a deal on the rescue plan and Republican opposition that doomed the bill in a House vote on Monday. Those incidents helped reinforce voter impressions that Washington is broken and that Republicans bear the brunt of the blame, the party insiders said. In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News national poll, more than half of all voters said they were 'very concerned' that the failure of the first bailout vote would cause a 'severe economic decline.' By a ratio of 2 to 1, they blamed the legislations' defeat on Republicans."

NYT: House approves bailout.

"Many lawmakers who changed sides, said they had agonized over the decision amid a torrent of calls and e-mail messages from constituents, and several cited a provision added by the Senate increasing the amount of savings insured by the federal government to $250,000 per account from $100,000."

Krauthammer: "In the primary campaign, Obama was cool as in hip. Now Obama is cool as in collected. He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory. He has not at all distinguished himself in this economic crisis -- nor, one might add, in any other during his national career -- but detachment has served him well. He understands that this election, like the election of 1980, demands only one thing of the challenger: Make yourself acceptable. Once Ronald Reagan convinced America that he was not menacing, he won in a landslide. If Obama convinces the electorate that he is not too exotic or green or unprepared, he wins as well. ...He's got a first class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president." (Via TPM).

Reuters: "Iran would consider stopping sensitive uranium enrichment if guaranteed a supply of nuclear fuel from abroad, an Iranian official suggested on Thursday. ...Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's ambassador to the UN nuclear watchdog, said the reason why the Islamic Republic was enriching uranium was the lack of an legally binding international accord on security of fuel supply. Asked if with such a deal Iran would shelve enrichment, he said that arrangement would be a first step but it would have to be implemented, and Iran would need to retain some enrichment as a contingency in case supplies were cut."

WP: "The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to "engage and inspire" the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government. The new contracts -- awarded last week to four companies -- will expand and consolidate what the U.S. military calls 'information/psychological operations' in Iraq far into the future, even as violence appears to be abating and U.S. troops have begun drawing down. ... The four companies that will share in the new contract are SOSi, the Washington-based Lincoln Group, Alexandria-based MPRI and Leonie Industries, a Los Angeles contractor. All specialize in strategic communications and have done previous defense work."

Post-Debate:

CNN poll said Biden wins 51 to 36 percent among people who watched.

CBS NEWS/KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS POLL
(Uncommitted Voters who watched the debate)

46% of uncommitted voters who watched the debate tonight thought Joe Biden was the winner. 21% thought Sarah Palin won, 33% thought it was a draw… 98% after the debate saw [Biden] as knowledgeable (79% before the debate).

More:

Uncommitted voters who watched the vice presidential debate thought Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden did the best job by a margin of more than two to one, according to a CBS News/Knowledge Networks poll taken immediately following the debate.

However, there was good news in the poll for Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, too. Palin's debate performance improved uncommitted voters' perceptions of her overall, and on a number of specific measures. But uncommitted voters still have doubts about her ability to assume the presidency if necessary and she lags behind Biden on her knowledge and preparedness for the job.

More from Nate Silver; and Harold Meyerson:

Biden, meanwhile, was having the night of his life. In fact, he did two
things that Barack Obama didn’t do nearly as well in the first
presidential debate last week. First, he put the middle class at the
center of his case for the Democratic ticket and delineated a
pro-middle-class economics quite distinct from the Republicans’
trickle-down. Second, he relentlessly attacked John McCain’s voting
record, and linked it to the policies of the Bush administration.
Biden, we should remember, is a scrappy lawyer with working-class
roots, and he came across Thursday night as a more effective,
plausible, nuanced but no-nonsense populist tribune than the Democrats
have had in years. Given the current zeitgeist, he was just what the
Democrats needed. Serious times need serious leaders, and Biden was
surely that.

Palin was the kid from the sticks who was still standing when it was
done. The nation, I think, was grateful for that. If she had gotten
deeply flummoxed, as she had been during the Couric interview, it would
have caused embarrassed cringing in America’s living rooms. Instead,
her performance was a marvel of its kind -- dissociated, jumbled, at
times completely contradictory (“you build up infrastructure and rein
in government spending,” she prescribed at one point: Huh?), with
soundbites appearing and reappearing almost at random, but fast, happy,
almost joyous: Made it through that five-minute question that I know
nothing about without even pausing: Phew!

Politico: McCain pulling out of Michigan.

AP: Obama advisor suggests Robert Gates as possible holdover. Which seems to make a lot of sense.

Gates also gave these interesting, unstarry eyed remarks about the challenge of engaging Iran at a Nat'l Defense University speech Monday (below the fold)

Continue reading ""

WP: Skepticism of Palin growing, poll finds: "With the vice presidential candidates set to square off today in their only scheduled debate, public assessments of Sarah Palin's readiness have plummeted, and she may now be a drag on the Republican ticket among key voter groups, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. ... The 60 percent who now see Palin as insufficiently experienced to step into the presidency is steeply higher than in a Post-ABC poll after her nomination early last month. Democrats and Republicans alike are now more apt to doubt her qualifications, but the biggest shift has come among independents. In early September, independents offered a divided verdict on Palin's experience; now they take the negative view by about 2 to 1. Nearly two-thirds of both independent men and women in the new poll said Palin has insufficient experience to run the White House. ... Palin now repels more independents than she attracts to McCain."

WP:

John McCain's combative interview with the Des Moines Register yesterday has raised questions anew about the Arizona senator's temperament as the presidential race enters its final days.

In a decidedly testy exchange with the Register's editorial board, McCain was at turns caustic and sarcastic when pressed about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's experience and criticism from some in conservative circles of her selection as his vice presidential running mate.

More.

More on former CIA director Porter Goss's Dusty Foggo problem:

... Now, then-CIA director Porter Goss's decision to appoint Foggo to the CIA's number three spot had been a highly controversial and contentious one at the Agency. Foggo was well known in Agency ranks for philandering, gambling, a security issue dating to his Vienna days, and for generally being something of a sleaze. Suffice it to say, that senior Agency veterans left as a direct and indirect result of Goss's controversial decision to appoint Foggo to the Executive Director position, among them the top two operational officers who have since returned. And under Goss's hands off management style, Foggo wasn't just some CIA executive or bureaucrat. He effectively ran the CIA day to day. So you can see that when the CIA realized it had a Dusty Foggo problem, this was actually a rather big problem, and in particular it was a problem for Porter Goss.

And indeed, when federal investigators closed in and raided Foggo's CIA officers and home in May 2006, Goss abruptly resigned. A source who was in Goss's office that Friday morning that the White House announced Goss was going to retire said his "retirement" came as a complete surprise to Goss. But Goss's tenure was simply no longer tenable when it was now front page news that Foggo was likely to be indicted in the wider Duke Cunningham corruption affair and the issue of who had the misjudgment to put Foggo in that position was likely to emerge. ...

Observation from a list I'm on: "The last time that both the White Sox and Cubs were in post-season play, Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House." So, good omen for the second coming of Teddy Roosevelt, or Team Chicago?

Just Out: Black Contracts, Greymail: How to Make a CIA Trial Go Away:

Yes, the stock market was falling apart, but up on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, you could almost hear the sighs of relief Monday thanks to another bit of news: Former top Agency official Kyle Dustin Foggo had quietly entered a guilty plea in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal courtroom. Henry Paulson still has his job cut out trying to rescue the banking system, but Langley's spymasters had just been spared the imminent prospect of having some of the nation's most sensitive secrets spilled in what promised to be one of the more revelatory and cinematic trials of the Bush era. [...]

Go read. A few years ago, I first broke several CIA-related aspects of the wider Cunningham case: the name of the Wilkes' front company to get the secret CIA contracts in a magazine piece, the covert plane network discussions between Foggo and Wilkes in a less formal way here on the blog, Foggo's connection to Wilkes and the CIA water contract at the Prospect's blog back in November 2005, just after Cunningham's guilty plea, a magazine piece that raised potential counterintelligence questions about the case. Thinking back, I had some extraordinarily unpleasant conversations with a CIA spokesman who screamed that I was wrong, that he had marched to Foggo's office and none of what I was saying was true (and I think only the I-was-wrong part was on the record), and they couldn't find any Wilkes' company that had gotten a CIA contract, etc. etc. And then suddenly, they stopped screaming. And I believe it was I who informed at least the public affairs folks that Archer Logistics was a Wilkes' front company, through Wilkes' nephew Joel Combs, and it must have registered as a hit on some database. Then suddenly it was polite ordinary civil discourse that they don't ordinarily comment on who does or does not get CIA contracts. But the tone was utterly different. And this was way back in December 2005, several months before federal investigators raided Foggo's CIA offices in relation to the wider Cunningham probe. (The Foggo indictment confirms much of what I was asking them about and reporting back in 2005).

And when they screamed at journalists when Porter Goss resigned as CIA director in May 2006 just as Foggo's office was raided by federal investigators that Goss' resignation had absolutely, positively nothing to do with Foggo and Goss's ill-advised decision to appoint Foggo to the number three job in the first place against the warnings of others, I was (and remain) convinced that that was baloney, and was amazed that so many major media went with the CIA's utterly facile explanation. 'Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin' eyes,' kind of extraordinary. Under Goss's hands off management style, Foggo effectively ran the CIA day to day during Goss's tenure. The CIA's Foggo problem was Goss's problem and Goss's fault.

More here.

Was wondering what the Fed could do without Congressional approval. Bloomberg reports: pump 600 billion into the global financial system.

The US Navy and the Somali Pirates. Noah Shachtman:

So if the Pentagon decides to take out the Faina pirates, how's it going to go down? Four words: Djibouti (where U.S. Special Operations Command has a base north of Somalia), helicopters, Navy SEALs.

Indeed, one of Faina's captured crewmen, in an interview with a Russian news Website, practically pleaded for the Navy commandos to come to his aid, the AP reports: "At the end, when the reporter asks whether he sees a way out, [the crewman] replies: 'You are so clever that you are understanding everything' and switches to Russian, saying 'kotiki, kotiki, kotiki' — part of the word for 'seals' — an apparent reference to the possibility of an operation by special amphibious forces to rescue the hostages."

CREW files ethics complaint against Kit Bond. Background to complaint here.

David Brooks:

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the G.O.P. as we know it.