You can’t make this up.  The 700 Club reports:

In early August in her prayer time Cindy [Jacobs] heard the Lord say, “There will be no more business as usual.”

Little did she know the scope of what this meant on a worldwide scale. God is on the move. She and many others have taken this as a major point of intercession. She believes that just as there came a time when God judged the gods of Egypt, He is now judging the god of mammon. Nations are standing on the cusp of history that will determine their course for generations to come. God is judging the ideologies of nations. He is moving to put the fear of the Lord not only on His church; but upon the nations of the world.

For these and other reasons Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial institutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.

“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

Now, granted, they’re not actually praying to the golden calf.  They’re just praying around it, laying hands on it, and providing mankind a visual of such staggering irony that I suspect even Jesus would get a kick out of it.  As for the “intercession” they’re praying for, it’s called market regulation.  Which is something I’m guessing they’ve been voting and probably praying against for the last eight years.

My point here is not to mock other people’s faith.  I’m a Christian myself.  My point is to say “faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”  Don’t pray for peace and then walk down the street punching people in the face.  Don’t pray for economic prosperity and then vote to give all our money to the wealthy and strip the poor of all financial safeguards.  When you do that, you end up appearing in pictures like the one above with no idea how you got there.

On that Acorn call, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis also credited McCain with “blowing … up” the first bailout package when he suspended his campaign to come to Washington, something McCain’s campaign had heatedly denied at the time.

Davis expressed outrage that, “in the middle of the greatest disaster in our financial system that we’d had in our lifetime, that the Democrats in the United States Senate would actually link payments to ACORN in the bailout package that they promoted — prior to Sen. McCain coming to town and actually blowing that package up. So we can actually say that in addition to saving taxpayers millions of dollars, and we’re very happy that no more taxpayer dollars were added to the pile of money going to ACORN.”

After the initial bailout package failed, McCain’s aides blamed Obama:

“This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country,” adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said.

Just because John McCain can’t remember what happened three weeks ago doesn’t mean the rest of the world can’t.  McCain didn’t go to Washington to blow up the bailout package.  He went there after it looked like the deal was all but done, so he could ride in on a white horse and claim credit for it.

In fact, here’s video of McCain on Fox News talking about why he suspended his campaign:

I’ll do whatever I can do to make this thing work.  As I said, I’ve had discussions already with the president, I’ve had discussions with my colleagues.  I’ll continue to do whatever’s necessary.  And I will put my presidential campaign on the backburner if necessary and do anything.  It’s far more important to help the economy of this country recover from one of the deepest fiscal crisises in history.  But I’ll do whatever’s necessary that I think can be effective.  And if we failed the first time, it won’t be the first time.  But we will go back and we will fix this problem, because the effect it has on working families in America which is devastating.

Why would McCain say the first bill “failed” if he specifically went to Washington with the intent of “blowing that package up”?

The “Really?!/Oh, my God, are you serious?!” bit at the 2:12 mark is pretty funny, too. Speaking of which, it can’t be overstated how much NBC sucks for not letting people chop up their clips and post them on YouTube. Nobody wants to skip through these ten minute videos to get to the good stuff. Except the readers of TWP, of course, which is why I posted this ten minute clip for you to skip through.

The debate skit was good, too, but it ran long. Fred Armisen’s Obama struck the first funny note ever for me when he confessed to being best friends with Bill Ayers, then said, “Now, I’m telling you this because I’m so far ahead in the polls right now, it’s not gonna matter.” Though this is getting dangerously close to my Scary Obama idea. Any more of this, and I’ll need to see my name in the credits.

The Obama campaign is clearly not content to sit back and play defense while John McCain rehashes questions about Barack Obama’s past associations and Sarah Palin throws spitballs from the back of the class.  According to two exclusives this weekend by Politico’s Mike Allen, not only will Obama preemptively characterize all attacks against him as desperate attempts by McCain to change the subject away from the failing Republican-led economy, but the campaign will also launch a full-scale offensive on McCain’s past involvement in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal:

Retaliating for what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.

The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”

Once again, that’s KeatingEconomics.com.  Here’s the documentary trailer:

There are definitely risks to the Obama campaign with this strategy. For one, up until now the message against John McCain has amounted to: “John McCain is a good guy, an honorable guy, but his lack of judgment on the economy, Iraq, and other issues makes him unfit to lead America into the future.” By raising the Keating Five scandal, the Obama camp is basically throwing out the whole “good, honorable guy” part of that message. If the narrative turns into the young upstart politician daring to question the war hero’s honor– a narrative Obama has been careful to avoid thus far– there could be some blowback. It might have been wiser to pursue this line of attack through independent groups, though of course the story wouldn’t have nearly the impact that way.

Another risk is that the last 30 days of the campaign could end up being focused on things that happened 20 years ago instead of what’s going on right now. Whenever voters are concentrating on the here and now– the Dow Jones, gas prices, unemployment figures, housing foreclosures– Obama is far and away the biggest beneficiary. If the campaign turns into Keating Five versus Reverend Wright, the dynamic is much less certain. The Obama camp will have to be extremely disciplined in making sure that this Keating Five attack remains tied to the current state of the economy and the question of whether McCain is really the man America wants fixing it. The attack has to be seen as a relevant part of the ongoing economic conversation. Again, if the story turns into Obama attacking McCain just for the typical, political sake of attacking, there could be blowback.

The plus side of this new line of attack is that John McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal is in fact eerily relevant to the current financial crisis. In both cases, we have a Wall Street crisis caused by lack of regulation and oversight that required massive government intervention to fix. The difference is that the Keating Five scandal involved not just greedy hedge fund managers, CEOs, and sub-prime lenders, but five U.S. senators who were directly implicated in the Wall Street corruption– one of them being John McCain. If voters begin associating McCain not just with the Republican party but also with broken, and perhaps corrupt, government in general, 30 days won’t be enough time to rescue his image.

The other plus is that McCain is running out of time to turn the race around in his favor. If one week out of the next four is spent discussing the Keating Five, that’s one week spent not discussing Obama’s potential negatives or McCain’s potential positives. It puts a McCain campaign that has already pulled out of Michigan and been forced to channel limited resources into holding Indiana(!) and North Carolina, a McCain campaign that is desperate to distance themselves from George Bush on everything, even further on the defensive. If you’re playing defense, you’re not scoring, and if you’re behind in the game and not scoring, you lose.

Last month, I wrote the following about Obama’s typically passive response to being attacked:

Stop responding to John McCain’s attacks with analysis of how and why it is misleading, as well as commentary on the current state of our politics and media, and what it all says about our culture within the historical context of mid-18th century England. Hit back!

Now that Obama is taking my advice (but still not returning my phone calls), I can hardly fault this new, more aggressive strategy. But one thing is clear. By the end of this week, if the discussion is still on the Keating Five scandal, we’ll either be talking about John McCain’s rapidly rising negatives or Barack Obama’s.

The body = U.S. economy
Arms and legs = different non-essential sectors (i.e. IT, energy, etc.)
The heart = financial services
Blood = money/credit

Basically, the body will die without the heart pumping blood through it.  Similarly, the economy will collapse without the financial sector pumping money– usually in the form of credit– to businesses and individuals.  Got it?  If not, click the link and start reading.  You’ll have it down in five minutes.

As for how this affects individuals in practical terms, the post also contains a few good examples.  Here’s one:

Your car blows up.  You don’t live in an area where public transportation is readily available.  You have a good job and a good credit history.  You need a loan to get a new car so you can keep going t work and keep working.  Only you can’t get that loan.  It has nothing to do with your personal credit-worthiness – it has to do with the fact that money simply isn’t available to lend to you for buying a car.

No credit means no cars, no houses, no college educations.  Government intervention in this crisis is not optional, whether it comes in one $700 billion chunk or failed business by failed business.

Turning back to politics, I think it would have benefitted either John McCain or Barack Obama tremendously if one of them would have spent 60 seconds explaining the financial crisis in layman’s terms like the above post.  For every ten lightbulbs that clicked on at home (“Oh, yeah, I get it now!”), you probably turn seven or eight of those people into votes.

That actually might be a good opportunity for Sarah Palin to turn her fortunes around a bit.  If she could present herself in Thursday night’s debate as “the person who helped Joe and Jane Sixpack understand the complex financial crisis,” perhaps she could start building a reputation as someone who really does understand what’s going on and could explain it to you at your kitchen table, but has trouble forming an answer that passes the snobby standards of the media elite.  Then again, if she were to mangle the human body analogy the way she’s mangled most of her other answers, she could instantly greenlight a Tina Fey made-for-TV movie.

Some kind of bailout bill will get passed– must get passed– sometime in the next few weeks, and maybe it’ll be worth the delay if the bill that passes is significantly better than the one offered today.  My question is, how many Republicans voted against the bill based on negotiable specifics, and how many voted nay based on ideological posturing– not wanting to interfere in the free markets now or ever?  For the latter group, those worried about reelection and preserving their records as fiscal conservatives, those who fear that support of what is and will be characterized by future opponents as the biggest government handout in American history will damage their career, that group is in for a rude awakening.

The American public may currently be split on the $700 billion bailout in principle, but all academic discussion by mostly non-expert observers (which probably describes 90% of the public, myself included) is about to give way to very practical concerns.  What today’s stock market– is it too soon to use the term?– crash means is in practical terms is that any American who is in retirement or anywhere near it just got their plans changed in a very big, very tangible way.  As the U.S. stock market continues to slide this week, and the world markets respond in kind, support for government intervention will grow rapidly.

At some point soon, the ideological conservatives who are blocking this bill– and it’s still unclear how many of the 60% of Republicans who voted against did so on principle– will be seen for what they are: zealots.  People who are willing to put their Hallmark card mantras (Less government!) and political futures ahead of the practical wishes of their own party’s leadership and the economic survival of the people they were elected to represent.

POST SCRIPT: Andrew Sullivan asks a great question.  Now that the economic crisis is considerably worse this week than it was last, now that strong congressional leadership is more necessary now than ever, will John McCain suspend his campaign again to deal with it?

The obvious answer is no, because the suspension of McCain’s campaign had in reality nothing to do with the economic crisis, it had to do with his own political crisis.  Since the stunt didn’t work the first time, and arguably made things worse, it’s unlikely to be repeated.

Asked how long the election should be delayed, McCain vowed to put partisan politics aside “for as long as it takes me to catch up in the polls.”

ABC NEWS/WASH PO
National: Obama 52, McCain 43

FOX NEWS
National: Obama 45, McCain 39

MARIST
Iowa: Obama 51, McCain 41
New Hampshire: Obama 51, McCain 45
Michigan: Obama 52, McCain 43
Ohio: Obama 47, McCain 45
Pennsylvania: Obama 49, McCain 44

FIVE THIRTY EIGHT

McCain’s campaign is sliding off the rails right now, with the economy completely dominating every news cycle in the past 10 days, the media revolting against the (sexist!) Sarah Palin media bubble, and the New York Times dropping a bunker buster yesterday on the McCain campaign’s ties to Freddie Mac.  Today, John McCain– realizing that the best thing that could happen to him right now is for the entire planet to somehow come to a screeching halt– asked Barack Obama to stop the race; he wants to get off.  More specifically, McCain has suspended his campaign, he’s headed to Washington D.C. to slow down and further politicize attend the bailout hearings, he’s asked Obama to join him, and he’s calling for Friday night’s foreign policy debate to be postponed.

It’s not hard to see McCain’s logic in all this.  The move to suspend his campaign will look like “country first” to the casual observer, and it pressures Obama to suspend a campaign that is by all accounts picking up incredible and perhaps unstoppable steam right now.  It’s the equivalent of calling a timeout– common in sports, but to my knowledge unprecedented in presidential politics– to stop your opponent’s momentum.

The choice for Obama isn’t easy, as Ben Smith lays out:

This isn’t an obvious one. Does he go along with McCain, for fear of being trapped inside McCain’s argument that the Republican puts country first while the Democrat puts himself first?

Or does he denounce this as a political stunt, and ignore it?

Either way, the ball’s in his court, and it’s a not an easy or obvious choice.

There is clear political risk for Obama in denying McCain’s request and staying on the trail.  It would allow McCain to paint Obama as a politician, who is more concerned with his campaign than with the economic crisis.  If a deal is reached and the markets are stabilized with McCain in Washington to take the credit, it would potentially close the gap in people’s minds on the issue of which candidate would best handle the economy.

But there is also some political risk for Obama in granting McCain’s request and returning to Washington.  It would temporarily stop the momentum of Obama’s campaign, including a number of attacks on McCain’s complicity in the crisis and long history of supporting deregulation that were beginning to make a dent, and it would do this a mere five weeks away from the election.  The two presidential candidates in Washington would also politicize the bailout hearings and perhaps kill whatever progress that’s been made this week (I’m watching the hearings on CSPAN right now and all the Senate has talked about for the last hour is whether it’s a good idea for McCain to be there).

The question of whether Obama should join McCain in D.C. is tricky, the question of whether he should agree to postpone the debate is not.  The answer is– barring a market crash or a terrorist attack– absolutely not. And the reason is simply because there’s no reason to; the 90 minutes McCain and Obama will spend debating foreign policy on Friday night won’t slow Congress in any way.  And for Obama, the structural advantages of the debate’s timing cannot be overstated.  The fact that the debate is occuring on a Friday night, typically the lowest night of the week for TV viewership, and the fact that whatever happens will likely be lost in whatever solution Congress does or does not reach by the weekend, means that what will likely be John McCain’s strongest debate of the three will probably get the least audience and coverage.  There’s no reason to let McCain off this hook.

As for the question of whether Obama should join McCain in D.C., I believe he should.  The only real way for John McCain to win this election is for some huge, gamechanging maneuver to pay off big, and McCain knows this.  It’s why he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate with little to no research beforehand, and it’s why he suspended his campaign today.  He’s swinging for the fences.

By joining McCain in D.C., Obama takes away the chance– however small it is– that this economic crisis could somehow work out politically in McCain’s favor.  He takes away the possibility of newspapers across the country running an image Monday morning of John McCain standing next to the President, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and leaders of Congress, as popular bipartisan legislation is passed that rescues the economy.  He takes away the possibility of McCain spending the next five weeks saying, “I put my country first.  I suspended my campaign to go to Washington and reach across the aisle to save our economy.  And while I was in Washington solving problems, Barack Obama stayed on the campaign trail attacking me and raising money, but doing nothing for the American people.”

The economy is the one major policy advantage Barack Obama has over John McCain in the polls.  It’s an advantage that will likely carry Obama to the White House, and it’s an advantage that must be protected at all costs.  If Obama allows McCain to pull even on the issue of the economy– or even within single digits– he’ll lose the election.  Now is the time for Obama to play defense, hold the ball, protect the lead.  Now is the time for Obama to head to D.C., stand next to McCain, and make sure his face is on the front page Monday morning.

UPDATE:
McCain is also calling for Obama to join him in suspending all campaign advertising!  So not only does McCain want to call a timeout, he wants all the players off the field and the fans to go home.  Obviously, that’ll be a no from the Obama camp.

And it looks like Obama is saying no to postponing the debate and no to going to Washington.  It’s gutsy, but Obama is clearly going to run the campaign he wants to run.  He has a plan and it looks like no amount of pressure from McCain is going to knock him off course.  The upside of a Democratic Congress means that they’ll do whatever necessary to limit McCain’s political gains out of this.  Harry Reid is already pushing back.

I still think Obama needs to take some political steps to look like he’s rolling up his sleeves along with McCain, no matter how useless (or counterproductive) the steps are in reality.  It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

This is where we’re at after eight years of Bushonomics.  This is what happens when you deregulate every industry and put your faith in the free markets to magically solve all our problems.  This is what happens when you cut rich people’s taxes while fighting two wars overseas.  And John “fundamentals of our economy are strong” McCain’s stubborn denial about the seriousness of our economic situation is clearly every bit as complete as Bush’s, if not worse.

What’s maybe more disturbing than all of it is the fact that half the American people are currently bending over as if to say, “Thank you, sir, may I have another four years?”  And no doubt, John McCain will spend the next two months trying to convince voters that the problem with our economy is– try not to laugh– earmarks and wasteful spending, and the answer is– wait for it– more tax cuts, deregulation, and war.  So basically we’re driving the bus towards a cliff, and Republicans want us to believe that the problem is we’re not getting good gas mileage and the answer is to drive faster.  But the fundamentals of the direction we’re steering in are strong.

Democracy is supposed to be self-corrective.  Go too far in one direction– the wrong direction– and the American electorate is supposed to react and change course, thus saving ourselves from ourselves.  This may still happen in November, but right now it’s not, which means something basic is not working here.  It’s as though we’ve lost our reflex action.  I don’t know what it means when the doctor hits your knee with that little hammer and it doesn’t move, but I assume it means you have mere minutes to live.  Or something bad like that. 

Among the 15 percent of voters who had been affected by [Hurricane Katrina] and said they had yet to recover, Obama had a 58 to 39 percent edge over Clinton. The 28 percent of voters who had been affected, but had since recovered, supported Obama by a slightly smaller margin, 54 to 43 percent. And the 55 percent who had not been affected at all by Hurricane Katrina supported Obama by the narrowest margin, 51 to 48 percent.

But if it’s true in other parts of the country– say Ohio and Texas– that a bad economy favors Clinton, there’s a fairly elementary link for Obama to draw that will cut into that advantage significantly.  As a part-time political consultant, I’ve created this PowerPoint presentation to help explain:

As you can see, Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War.  That vote led us to the Iraq War.  And the Iraq War is responsible in large part for our bad economy.  In conclusion: Hillary’s vote —-> Iraq War —-> Bad economy.  If anyone from the Obama campaign would like to contact me for further explanation, I’ll be happy to provide my services.  I charge by the hour.