Saw Hu Jintao from window today (and got picture) — he jumped out of limo, shook the hands of a carefully-assembled group of chinese people, then bounded across park avenue to do some more. Bush, on the other hand, hid in his limo.

If it seems like the world is vanishing from your grasp piece by piece, well, it is. One day your comments are taken away from you, the next week the whole posting engine goes south.

And while we would gladly accept $700 billion to fix it, fact is your money’s no good here, just like the rest of the world. Either the Evil Hamsters deign to fix the database, or they don’t. At least, being hamsters, it won’t take much gold to sew their parachutes.

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Here’s one for the annals of epistemology:

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

Oh Ben Smith, you’re so adorable. “Little regard”?

McCain camp criticism rife with errors [Politico]

“This is a desperate attempt to gain political advantage using scare tactics and deceit,” said Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman.

How does he do that? How does Tucker Carlson’s bastard child say that in the face of eight years of Rovian politics? Who taught him how to lie like that? What pampered Eastern elite college did he attend on Daddy’s money?

Turns out he didn’t. He went to a Western state university. A very Western state university. A state university so Western, you can hop in your Pinto and be walking the Florence beach within an hour.

Tucker Bounds, Boy Liar, Campbell Brown’s Punching Bag, went to the University of Oregon.

My university. My home town. My fucking turf.

It’s not like there aren’t assholes among the Duck Diaspora. One of them owns a sneaker company, although we treat him nice because the money he saves from Asian sweatshops buys some nice buildings on campus. And the dead half of Simpson-Bruckheimer was responsible for putting Tom Cruise in a fighter jet. And we were really proud of Yosuke Matsuoka until he, um, signed up Japan with Germany and Italy a few generations back.

But we prefer to talk about Prefontaine. And James Ivory. And Randy Shilts. And Wayne Morse, one of the two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. (The other? Ernest Gruening of Alaska. Small world!)

It’s okay, we’ll be fine. At least it rains a lot in Eugene — the stench has probably long since washed away into the Willamette.

Crisis Draws Attention to McCain Social Security Plan [WSJ]

‘Dynamic Duck duo’ help propel McCain’s campaign [Oregonian]

“This is a hole in the dike and it threatens to injure the safety and soundness of our banking system. It’s alarming to believe that the Fed, usually the great defender of the banking system, is now leading the deregulatory charge.”

And so, like Babe Ruth pointing the bat towards right field, Chuck Schumer — then a Brooklyn congressman — called the catastrophe that would unfold twenty years later.

The year was 1987, and the occasion was a major Federal Reserve vote that loosened Depression-era restrictions on banks — notably, allowing them to begin underwriting those mortgage-backed securities we’ve heard so much about lately. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act wouldn’t fall for another dozen years, but this was the beginning of the end.

The Reaganomic argument of the day was that while FDR may have saved capitalism from itself, 1930s protections had been rendered quaint by 1980s conditions, that we needed to take off the leash so American financial oligopolies could compete with oligopolies overseas.

And besides, the Cassandras fearing unimaginable calamities like trillion-dollar bailouts had failed to recognize that the financial system was all grown up now. Thomas Theobald, vice chairman of Citicorp, offered three “outside checks” on market misbehavior:

• “a very effective” SEC
• knowledgeable investors
• “very sophisticated” rating agencies

Give him credit — that’s three for three in naming the most cited failures underlying the current meltdown.

Missing from the conversation that long ago spring was any reference to Gordon Gekko or “Greed is Good,” but that’s only because of a technicality — Wall Street didn’t premiere until December. The movie’s tagline: “Every dream has a price.”

Bank Curb Eased in Volcker Defeat [NYT, May 1, 1987]

The Long Demise of Glass-Steagall [Frontline, 2003]

[Bush] added, “People are beginning to doubt our system, people were losing confidence and I understand it’s important to have confidence in our financial system.”

And speaking of con jobs, here’s today’s winning Lotto number: $700 billion.

Bush team, Congress negotiate $700B bailout [AP]

Didn’t Sarah Palin used to be somebody? We vaguely remember her from a few weeks back — maybe it was a crotch shot in a limo. Or that “Leave Sarah Alone” video. Or the other one. Or the one that’s not the first two.

Maybe this will help:

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.'”

Ah, now we remember: She’s Chuck Heath’s daughter. You know Chuck — he’s retired now, likes to hunt moose and caribou. Used to teach science. And apparently, near as we can tell, didn’t care much for creationism, at least not in the classroom. Good for him.

The pastor who clashed with Palin [Salon]

Is ‘Palin Effect’ already wearing thin? [SFGate]