What do we learn from the debate?

Obama wants to run a "Clean Campaign."

Except he doesn't.  By refusing to repudiate any charges against McCain that were made by his supporters, he is implicitly approving every slanderous or libelous, baseless, ridiculous charge that the nutroot, netroots want to throw against McCain.  Obama doesn't care about "hurt feelings," so he couldn't care less.  McCain supporters should attack.  McCain supporters need to bring out the truth about the judgement of their not-so-wunderkind.  McCain is a chump if he repudiates anything from this point on.

Obama wants to spend the next three weeks talking about the "economy."

He wants to talk about how bad the economy has been over the past year, but not the years before when we had sustainable economic growth.  He wants to pretend it was Bush policies that brought us here, when it was Bush policies that brought us five or six years of "Goldilocks" growth (not too fast, not too slow--according to Larry Kudlow), and that it was demonstrably two democratic policies that got us into this fine mess: 

Their "don't drill" environmental energy policy:  Ten years ago, the Republican Congress passed a bill that would allow more drilling, but it was vetoed by President Clinton--oil, by the way, that we would have had access to already even by Democratic standards, since they say it will take ten years to see any new oil.  What does Barack say?  Oh, he wants to allow drilling now (at least while he has a Democratic congress and he never has to, you know, actually drill). but he still says  we have three percent of the worlds oil reserve but we use 25% of the world's oil . . .   I don't know if he intentionally left out the word production, or if it was just a debate mishap.  Of course it makes the statement totally meaningless.  The worlds oil reserve is huge.  We are talking about all of the oil underneath every Arab country, every western country, China, Russia,. . . . everywhere.  And 3% is under our country.  That is a lot.  Thirty years ago, they were talking about running out of oil.  Now they are not.  We simply cannot produce it fast enough.  And the statistic usually sited by the Democrats is that we use 25% of the worlds oil production.  But that 25% of the annual production (it needs to be annual, or it doesn't make sense--production doesn't lead to an amount of oil unless you put a time to it:  how much oil we produce in a month, a year, a day) which is a very small amount compared to the three percent of the actual reserves in the world. Imagine that he had said, we only have 3% of a million dollars, but we use 25% of a hundred dollars.  They make the 3% figure sound small (it is $30,000) and the 25% figure sound large ($25)  but it isn't.

The credit crisis:  This is even sadder that they are able to pin this on Bush.  Because it is due to all of those worthless loans clogging the credit markets.  These are loans made to people who could not afford them. The Democrats WANTED the banks to make those loans.  The Democrats PRESSURED the banks to make those loans on fear of losing their charters.  Then when the mortgages started to default because they turned out to be too creative and began adjusting, then the banks, which the dems had forced to make bad loans became "Predatory lender".  Oh, sure.  Everyone is standing in lines to make loans to people that can't pay them back.  At least in Obamaworld.  We're Obama warned about Freddie Mac and Fannie May.  Only we're never told what he warned about or what he wanted done.  Don't tell me he wanted the banks to stop making these loans.  His favored Acorn (whose parent company he defended--it was just those nasty people who they were paying for signatures who got fake signatures) is one of the prime movers in getting people into houses they can not afford.  He probably just wanted to have the government pump more money into the mortgage system earlier so banks could make even more bad loans.  Do not try to tell me that he wanted to warn them about making bad loans.  That is just not the Obama way.

Of course all of this would have come out if they had had many townhall meetings.  But that doesn't matter.  He wants to spend three weeks talking off a teleprompter and airing his (and his supporters') ads, so they can put anything they want on the air and he never has to repudiate anything.

Because he wants a "clean campaign"

Just the idea that the MSM is putting out that bad economic news favors Obama is incredulous.

The simple idea that to decrease price you need to increase supply is beyond the liberal democrats in general and Obama in particular.

The idea that we can't get oil from drilling until five years from now, and, therefore, it won't help today, but research into alternatives that are either 10, 20 years away or completely infeasible makes a lie any claim that Obama has to economic expertise.

Then there is health care. He seems to think that coming up with billions of dollars to pay for everyone to be insured will solve the problem.  But health care is a scarce resource.  Too much money chasing too few goods makes the price skyrocket.

The only way to increase the availability of health care is to increase the supply.  We need to increase the numbers of doctors, nurses and hospitals in this country.  What Obama wants to do will exacerbate the situation further.  If we control the price (though not the cost) of health care, somewhere along the line, doctors will be paid as salaried employees. And pretty low salaries at that.

I don't doubt there are many doctors who go into the business for altruistic reasons, just as I'm sure people go into teaching for altruistic reasons. But to ask someone to spend that much time and money getting a medical license, and then pay them very low wages, will test the altruism of even the most well meaning pre-med.

If we try to have government control healthcare, we will have mediocre care for everyone, with month-long waiting lists for medical care, and days-long care for emergency treatment.  Say good bye to innovation.

We could, like the UK, go overseas to get the doctors we would need.  But the solution for the medical personnel shortage in the UK merely exacerbated the security problem there, with some of the newly imported medical personnel being implicated in some of the terrorist attacks.

Let's make sure everyone can buy a house.  If they can't afford it later on, we'll have the government buy up all the bad mortgages and latter we can accuse the people we forced to lend money of lending money to people who can't afford houses.

We don't like companies taking jobs overseas?  Let's increase their taxes and that will make them want to bring the jobs back (sarcasm).  Obama will stop companies from taking jobs overseas.  He'll make the whole company relocate overseas.

And of course increasing the taxes on big corporations will cause them to create more jobs (more sarcasm!).  Eating into the revenues of big corporations simply means higher prices and fewer jobs.

Let's increase the capital gains tax.  Obama knows it won't result in increase revenues.  He has admitted exactly that.  He just wants to do it out of fairness.  Can anyone explain that to me?

Tax cuts for the middle class!  Who cares that many of the people that Obama wants to help with his tax cuts already pay little or no taxes.  Let's give them a refundable credit.  Never mind that this is nothing but enforced charity (the lowest kind, according to Maimonides).  But of course, we can't call it charity.  Proud American's don't take charity.  Handouts from the government are another matter.  Besides, if it really were charity (instead of a government program) we might actually have a large percentage of the money actually getting to the people that need it.  We can't have that.  Not in Obamaland.

I don't care how many Clinton aides Obama has around him.  The only thing to recommend them is that they happened to be working in the government during the tech bubble.  If anything, that disqualifies them from having any knowledge of economics since their views are skewed by having a growing (or bubbling) economy during their tenure.  Anything they did worked.  Experience is about knowing what won't work.  These people know nothing of that.

We are told that he was a great student in school.  I guess he never took Econ 101.