I know I'm supposed to be commenting on the details of the new economic bailout/recovery plan here, but in fact, I know my own limitations. And one of those limitations is admitting that economics on a national or international scale is beyond me. My actual belief is that it's beyond anybody -- that the "science" of economics is nothing short of voodoo.

Consider: on any given day, you can find an economist who will tell you the future looks great, and another one who is predicting doom and gloom. Looking back later, you can find economists who accurately predicted what was going to happen, and other economists who were wildly wrong. The problem is they're not consistent. One economist who gets things right in one crisis will likely be wrong in the next one.

That's not science, that's throwing a dart at a wall. If it truly were "scientific" then you would expect to see some sort of verifiable results, but time and again the markets surprise the professionals who are supposed to be watching them.

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Back in Volume 36 of this Friday Talking Points column, I pointed out what seemed to me to be an obvious observation -- that the media was going a lot lighter on John McCain than they were on Barack Obama. This earned me a fair amount of ridicule at the time (and also some support, I should say). Now, however, I can definitively say that this situation has been rectified. Whether it was McCain's campaign cutting off virtually all access to McCain (and literally any access to Palin), whether it was McCain's mudslinging and lies in his ads, or perhaps whether it was McCain manipulating the media after his running mate choice, and then savagely attacking them -- for whatever reason, the mainstream media are now closely examining everything McCain says.

This is quite a change from letting him slide on gaffe after gaffe after gaffe. I wrote on this subject earlier this week in more detail, but since the subject arose here in FTP first, I thought I'd mention it.

But we've got to move along, as there are many things to cover this week. Maybe, since we're in the second year of this column, we should create a motto... something like "longest blog post ever!" or maybe "our readers aren't afraid to read more than three paragraphs!"

Ahem.

No, no, we've got to move along, as I said. No time for such frivolity.

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[This is really an addendum to yesterday's article on state polls, but it's just going to be a quick update.]

Yesterday, I did a roundup of the state polls and the electoral math outlook for the presidential race. Today, I checked the numbers as I do every morning, and over thirty states had new poll numbers -- an astonishing amount of data for one day. Even Washington, D.C. got polled, for the first time ever in this election cycle. It's easy to see why D.C. doesn't get polled much, since the outcome isn't exactly in doubt -- the spread in this poll is greater than any other state at 82% for Barack Obama and a paltry 13% for John McCain.

But with this flood of data coming in, I thought it'd be worth a quick note today on the movement these new polls show. At first glance, it looks like more bad news for Obama, since McCain is back over the magic number with 274 electoral votes, while Obama only has 243. But when you look closer, you can see what could be the beginning of a very good trend for Obama. Perhaps. As always, nothing's written in stone.

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Barack Obama has had a hard few weeks in the polls. In fact, this week's check of how the electoral math plays out may (hopefully) be his lowest point during the campaign.

I say this not out of unbridled optimism, but because of a basic fact -- what we examine here are state polls, not national polls; and the state polls always trail the national trends by a few days to a week. And the national trend for Obama may have turned around in his favor in just the last couple of days. So even though things look grim here, Obama is already starting to bounce back.

The last time we looked at these graphs was just before the convention. Since that point, Obama got a bounce from the Democrats' convention, and McCain got an even bigger bounce from the Republican convention (and from naming Sarah Palin as his running mate). But, as with all convention bounces, what goes up usually comes right back down. Leaving us (on the national level) pretty close to where we were before we started. But on the state level, the McCain/Palin bounce still shows up very strongly. But it may have peaked.

Examining state polls is always tough, because until every state is polled every day there just isn't enough up-to-the-minute information to accurately portray where all the states are at. Ten states haven't been polled in a month, for instance (listed at the very end of this article, in the "data" section). But overall, state polling has gotten more intense, with more polls out there and with polls in battleground states coming every few days. So the information flow has improved a bit over the numbers we were seeing this summer. No poll is perfect, but more information coming in is always better.

We start, as always, with the overall picture of the electoral vote, if it were held today and if every state voted the way the polls show (for all of these images, click on them to see a larger version):

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The past week may have been a crucial turning point for the presidential hopes of John McCain. Because finally -- finally! -- the mainstream media (including some very right-wing sources) have realized that it is not "McCain 2000" who is running this year, but "McCain 2008" -- a whole different breed of cat. This may have been McCain's biggest hidden asset, but ever since he hired the Karl Rove-trained campaign staff he's got now, he has carelessly tossed this potent secret weapon aside.

Now, I will fully admit up front that the jury is still out on all of this. McCain may win. His tactics may be politically brilliant. But somehow, I don't think this is going to be the case.

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What a difference a weekend can make! Barack Obama's campaign is strongly defending themselves in the air wars, and taking the fight to John McCain. Joe Biden has found his voice on the campaign trail, giving some rousing stump speeches. And Obama himself seems to be learning the "bumpersticker" rule of political slogans; keep it short and simple! But the real highlight of the weekend had to be CBS' Face The Nation, where Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- a former Hillary Clinton supporter, it should be noted -- showed everyone else what a surrogate is supposed to do. She had her facts ready, she knew her issues, and she was absolutely relentless in making her points. Her performance was so strong and so well focused that it would be foolish not to immediately send her out on the campaign trail and/or to as many television interviews as she can squeeze into her schedule.

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Surprise! It's our first anniversary column!

But before we get to that, I have to pass on this information, in the hopes nobody will get stung by a virus making the rounds which uses Obama's name. So we pause for the following public service announcement:

[VIRUS ALERT: Before we get to the column today, I have to post a virus alert (full details at VirtualBlight). If you get an email titled "Barack Obama sex story with a girl" from the sender "obamasex@obama.com" -- don't click on any links in it, delete it immediately! Clicking on links in this spam email causes a virus to be loaded on your computer which will try to get your bank information. You have been warned!]

OK, on to the celebrating!

Yes, Volume 47 of the Friday Talking Points column is actually our one-year anniversary. The very first installment of this indomitable column aired on September 14, 2007.

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As a public service, today I am running a full transcript of Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show on CBS, from last night, 9/10/08.

I tuned in to David Letterman last night to see Barack Obama's interview, and happened to catch Ferguson as he went on an absolute rant worthy of the name. I was pretty happy watching the Obama interview, but this just stunned me. Craig Ferguson is a comedian who usually plays a cheerful idiot on his show, and this isn't the usual fare for him. But he nailed it.

I looked for a full transcription of his remarks but could not find them anywhere online today, so I decided to post my own. You can watch both these segments from Aaron Barnhart's blog, as he's got the YouTube segments posted together (he also has an edited transcript, but it cuts a lot out).

So without further ado, here is Craig Ferguson (a recently naturalized American citizen), from last night's show:

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Barack Obama has been getting lots of advice recently about what to do out on the campaign trail. Since it seems to be "Give Obama Advice Week," I'd like to offer up a campaign ad script.

Part of the problem Obama's been having since Sarah Palin appeared is that he's been playing defense ever since. He needs to go back on the offense on McCain, and drive the news cycle instead of just reacting to it.

There's a simple way to do this. It's actually Politics 101. Since John McCain has been in Congress for decades, he has a voting record just chock full of issues that can be easily made into campaign ads. McCain's record is a goldmine of political stances that average American voters would not agree with.

There are dozens of opportunities to do this, and all it would take would be a few hours of fact-checking to come up with some hard-hitting ads. How about "John McCain voted for earmarks 50 times while in the Senate." Or "John McCain voted against a minimum wage increase 19 times in Congress." Or how about "John McCain says he's for alternative energy now. Why should we believe him? He has voted against alternative energy 99% of the time in the Senate." Or: "John McCain was against honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. with a federal holiday."

Now, I fully admit that I made up those numbers, since I didn't have time to research them all. But there are all kinds of ways to attack John McCain's voting record, and so far I haven't heard Barack Obama even mention it. It's time to fight fire with fire -- point out McCain's most embarassing votes, and paint him as an extremist or a party hack while doing so. Also paint him as anti-middle-class.

This stuff really isn't rocket science, folks.

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America handed over control of the Iraqi province of Al-Anbar to the Iraqi military yesterday. Although they had to postpone this handover for two months due to (depending on who you believe) concerns about a dust storm, or an uptick in suicide bombings, the handover is now complete. But while President Bush hailed this as a success story in his usual blustery language ("Today, Anbar is no longer lost to al-Qaeda -- it is al-Qaeda that lost Anbar"), the outcome is far from being so clear. And there are disturbing signs that point to this "success story" being undermined by the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki.

Anbar is the province that gave birth to what have been variously described as the "Anbar Awakening," the "Sunni Awakening," the "Sons of Iraq," or the "Awakening Councils." These were Sunni groups who were tired of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (also called AQI, for "Al-Qaeda in Iraq") sowing so much destruction. The foot soldiers of the insurgency basically switched sides, and threw in their lot with the United States. America, in a spirit of forgiveness, started paying these soldiers $300 a month to stop attacking Iraqi and American forces, and instead hunt down AQI and drive it from the province. They succeeded in doing so, and so America kept paying them for providing security for the region.

But all that is about to end. Come October 1, the Maliki government in Iraq is supposed to take over paying these 100,000 Awakening troops. And then he's supposed to absorb around 20 percent of them into the Iraqi security forces, and give the remainder other civil service jobs.

This where the doubt begins.

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