I know that Hillary isn't too popular around here. That's fine. I'm not a Hillary fan, and I'd rather see Obama in the White House. But PA confirmed what Ohio hinted at: Obama is having a lot of trouble closing the deal in large swing states, even among Democrats and with considerable funding advantage. This says something, and not good, about his chances in November.

Not, mind you, that I think Hillary could do better. She has led a poor campaign and the famous Clinton money machine has been outmatched by "inexperienced" Obama. Her negatives are sky-high, her fear-mongering disgusting. Yet even a broken clock is right twice a day, and we have to face the fact that we've got a bad situation here.

In the year that we are supposed to take back the White House, the chances of that actually happening are decreasing by the day.

How did we get here?

A few of days ago I wrote Iraq-Centric is What it Should Be, Part I, where I described why I opposed Feingold's "redeployment" proposal, which requires withdrawing a majority of troops by July. Basically, I found his language did not reflect the reality of the situation and is based on a wishful characterization of the Iraqi government.

For this second part I promised an alternative approach which could be called "Surge in Competence". Clinton has talked about "Stop and Think", as a rhetorical antidote to the accusation of "Cut and Run". Either term suits me fine; the point is to work the problem rather than to throw troops at it or simply abandon ship. (I'm not completely familiar with Clinton's actual policy preference, but I like the phrase.)

Before I start, full disclosure: I make no claim to have the answer in Iraq. I'm not in Iraq and never have been. I've only been in the region one time, in Egypt, and I don't know Arabic. I do, however, know the third world quite well.

Like many of us, I've been pondering what to do in Iraq. But most of the formulations I've found attractive, dating back to the Dean era, have had a certain abstract quality. Holding neither house of Congress nor the executive, US political constraints were mostly irrelevant. The thing was figuring out the right thing to do in the war theater, and looking at it this way, the further from DC politics one could get, the better. What mattered was winning the hearts and minds of as many Iraqis as possible, while bush's policies would not have been worse had they been designed to do the opposite.

So hold that thought for a second, and come up to 2007, when we do not have the presidency but we do have Congress. What should Congress do? What can Congress do?

Rice, who not only proved to be utterly incompetent at her job as National Security Advisor, given that 9/11 was on her watch, is also a confirmed liar and derives an unlimited degree of arrogance from the security of her close relationship to bush.

I don't see how rewarding her with such a vote is consistent with being an aggressive reform Democrat. Perhaps someone could explain it to me?

Next, exactly none of these issues is a measure of whether you're "pro technology" or not. They've all got other things mixed in there -- for example voting against restrictions of online firearms sales? If you're for restricting firearms sales you're going to vote against any
avenue of expansion, it doesn't mean you're anti e-commerce for crying out loud.

If November meets us with a Dow around 9,500, oil at $58, and a Euro at $1.27, it will not be good news for bush. On the other hand, it won't be good news for the rest of us or for Kerry: the forces in motion have enormous momentum and 2005 will be a difficult year regardless of who occupies the White House.

Well, it's not November 2 yet, but the Dow is down at a little over 9,700, the Euro hit 1.28 earlier today and is at 1.279 now, and oil is near $56 a barrel in New York today.

What does this mean?

Davinci suggested I post it as a diary entry for easier reference. So here it is.

This is a simply a link to the original diary entry posted about 12 hours ago, for those who missed it. I did not want to repost, in order to maintain the original discussion threads and poll.

Click Here.

Davinci suggested I post it as a diary entry for easier reference. So here it is.

Along with it I'm including some comments made of it, and my replies, in the form of a FAQ.

Some more detalis have been added here, as well.

I wrote the first, much shorter version, originally on Tacitus. Consider this version 0.3. Comments and flames of all kinds are welcome. Any real peace deal will have to absorb much worse than that. I will try to answer good-faith critics and ignore the rest. Remember this is written in the spirit of a set of ideas. I am in no position to do otherwise, and I understand there is foolishness in even attempting to write such a proposal.

But ideas do pop into my head for reasons beyond me, and in any case I don't feel anybody else is doing much better. It seems to me that people who throw rocks at tanks or who build 20-foor high walls have been out of ideas for a long time.

The trigger (supposedly) for this decline of the Euro were the expectations for todays ECB (European Central Bank) meeting. With slow growth in Europe, they don't want a rising Euro to kill off their exports. So the ECB had made all sorts of noises it would stop this one way or the other, but didn't actually do anything. Now, with the Dollar higher, the ECB can hold the line on rates.

From a digital photography forum.

A cop asking for a Social Security Number? Can't take photographs from the street? WTF?

Worth a read.

The Dollar had been stable ocillating between .90 and 0.78€ these past few weeks. This could be an outlier, or it could mark the start of a new slide. As of this writing the Dollar recovered to 0.779, still below the 0.78 mark.

So far, the main direct impact appears to be an implicit policy by OPEC to split the difference and push for higher oil prices (in Dollars), than their officially stated target prices. It is also putting pressure on the Chinese to revalue their currency, and the consensus seems to be that they won't be able to avoid that for much longer.

Also, some time later in the year the revised GDP figures for industrial countries will be available, and thanks to the exchange rate it will be seen that the US per capita GDP took a big hit in comparison to everybody else. I'll have those numbers here at some point.

I´m late to this party. I´m travelling.

But I did a search for the above word on this page and nobody mentioned it. So for the record, my thoughts in a nutshell:

1. This is ratfucking, updated (google it).
2. It´s the republicans, make no mistake.
3. Making it look like a Kerry operation is part of the MO. When they ratfucked Muskie, they made it look like a McGovern operation.
4. No polling required, just a spy or two, or intercepts. Given how quickly Dean´s computer staff grew with people coming out of nowhere, the probability that there are no spies in the Dean operation is zero.
5. The republicans are scared of Dean and nobody else. They can get the others with strictly conventional means. Dean is a wildcard, they can´t use standard methods, so ratfucking.
6. They ratfcuked McCain. Same pattern. McCain was also a wildcard candidate.
7. Ratfucking requires extreme loyalty and significant intelligence know-how. It´s a republican deal, through and through.
8. Even Clark is a mildly better suspect than Kerry. The military call ratfucking "psyops".

So, it appears the Dollar's recovery last week has ended. The question now is if the fall has restarted, or if things will be stable just below 0.80 €.

My bet is that things will remain stable at least till a big news item gives it a kick one way or the other.

"We have eight days," Dr. Dean said in his brief speech. "You have proven that we're the folks that can beat George Bush because you're all here at 3:30 in the morning.

Dean needs to slow down. Quit the 3:30 AM sleepless mentality. It's showing. It certainly showed in the disastrous Iowa "victory" speech.

My advice to the Doc: Take today off. Get a solid 8 hours a night the whole week. Eat three squares. Stop the rock-star act. Do small groups, talk to them. Listen. Just you, no endorsers. Get Judy close (but not at events). Relax. Think. Regroup. Pull the ads. Let NH happen as it will. Predict nothing. Work on the following batch of primaries with the money you have, and a renewed message.

Get your staff to get some sleep also. Discipline rather than exuberance. Humility over hubris. Energy management rather than crash and burn.

My two cents.

In the short-run at least, this stabilizes the currency situation, and hence the ability of the US to sell debt at low interest rates.

The market is obviously showing volatility, so I'll be following this closely.

They are blaming the weird (read: poor) unemployment figures, but that is just an excuse to a clear trend. After $1.25 / 0.80, the markets are clearly moving to test the "pain limit" of US$1.30 / 0.77 &e; &eu; &eur;