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And they both come in the same post. Good point the first:
Obviously my effort to get the daily market reports pushed to the inside pages is a doomed crusade. But in the short run, I wish that, instead of the DJIA / S&P 500 / NASDAQ etc, we had some comparably precise seeming, attention-getting, publicized* measure of credit availability. From all evidence, that is the real emergency driving real destruction of real companies creating real products and about to eliminate real jobs.Good point the second:
the United States is near a moment of fundamental political choice. To have the discussion distracted by -- well, it would be nice to be even-handed about this, but the truth is that the distraction has been 99% from the McCain side, with the ongoing crap about the Weathermen in the 1960s -- is suicidal. A few weeks ago Senator McCain "suspended" his campaign because of what now seems a mild early phase of the financial crisis. Maybe he and Barack Obama could agree over the weekend to suspend discussion of any topic other than avoiding real economic devastation for the time being, at a minimum until their debate next week on economics.Right. A few weeks ago, McCain said the economic situation was so dire that the campaign must cease. Today, amidst a much worse economic situation, his campaign manager said "I don't know if you really want to turn a campaign into a CNBC news show on the stock market." The common thread here is not, as you might notice, a concern for the economy. Rather, it's an aversion to talking about the economy. McCain first tried to dodge the topic by shuttering his campaign (though not really) and canceling the debate. When that didn't work, he decided to dodge it by using his campaign infrastructure to change the subject.
