Bright House cable customers won’t be able to watch the Colts game because it’s squabbling with WISH-TV (channel 8). But, hey, they’ll be able to listen to the radio broadcast over their television.

The CBS affiliate’s blackout on Bright House occurred early Friday and affects about 125,000 Hoosier households, including parts of Indianapolis and nearby communities.

Probably the last reminder I’ll post here, but if you want to vote in the November election — and if you don’t have something to vote for (or against) in this one, I’m not sure you ever will, and you might just want to give your citizenship to someone who gives a damn — then the deadline to register is Monday, October 6.

Verify your existing voter registration here. More information here.

Or, don’t vote:

A word coined by Milton Smith in the 50s.

Multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.

Some mornings, I’ve got nothing. This is one of them. It’s cold and dark this morning, so just pretend I wrote an inspired rant about how inappropriate Eastern Daylight Time is for our part of the country during this part of the year.

Also, folks don’t trust the government to tell us the truth or to act ably on our behalf; which is a huge reason this whole bailout business is so difficult. Making the rounds is what purports to be an analysis of a closed-door conference call with Treasury suggesting that the bailout will tend to fleece the taxpayers for the benefit of the big investors.

The Vice-Presidential debate is tonight. Whatever happens, I don’t expect it will amount to much in the big scheme of things. The ones I can remember have all been side shows:
1988 – Dan Quayle is no Jack Kennedy.
1992 – Adm. Stockdale “PING PONG MATCH”
1996 – No idea
2000 – Lieberman lets Cheney lie about not profiting from government jobs.
2004 – Edwards notes Cheney’s daughter is gay.
2008 – ???

Governor polls are all over the map. Daniels is up by 15. No, he’s only up by 1! On cold, dark mornings like this one, I want DST-Daniels to lose, but it’s hard to put a lot of faith in those polls. But, who knows. Daniels has done some unpopular stuff and has generally behaved in a Napoleonic fashion when advancing his agenda. Maybe folks have memories that stretch back more than a year. I’m not going to count on it, but it’s possible.

O.k., so I had more to say this morning than I though. But, by all means, please consider this an open thread.

There is a lot of talk among the political horse race types about “managing expectations.” For example, in the primaries, it wasn’t about picking up enough delegates to win, so much; rather, it was about beating “expectations” and, therefore, building “momentum.” There is a similar narrative that usually goes along with discussions about “winning” and “losing” debates.

Expectations are at rock bottom for Sarah Palin. The right wing is now trying to work the ref by complaining about moderator Gwen Ifil’s upcoming book, citing it as “evidence” that she’s in the tank for Obama. With these metrics, you could probably plug in that tape of Terri Schiavo that Republican Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist used to “diagnose” brain activity and still win the debate.

But, maybe, just maybe, if folks are sensitized to Palin’s tendency to use “word salad;” she might have to actually demonstrate a command of the issues and sensible policy positions on them. Kagro X describes the debate technique common to Gingrich disciples like Palin as follows:

[W]hen stuck, they’ll often: 1) repeat back some of the words in the question to establish that they’re “answering” it; 2) parry by steering the frame of their answers toward a talking point that bears some relation to the subect of the question; 3) spray some transitional buzzwords that help them segue from what they were asked to what they have prepared to say, and; 4) deliver the focus group-tested answer they originally planned, even if it’s kind of a non-sequitur.

Not sure how you turn that into a drinking game, but it’s something to watch for. (And, yes, I did use an abnormally large number of scare quotes in this post.)

Hunter comments on some new ideas for the bailout. What sounds like a worse idea than a cripplingly expensive bailout? How about a cripplingly expensive bailout with tax cuts? Or, here’s an idea! A cripplingly expensive bailout with tax cuts and looser accounting rules. No, seriously, these things are being considered.

So fine, my position has changed. I was previously “skeptical” of the Paulson plan. Now I want it to die a hot, flaming death. I want its ashes to be fed to goats, and the goats fed to sharks, and the sharks put on a rocket and fired into the sun. I want the whole premise to be made Unspeakable, so that future generations shun anyone who even threatens to mention it.

The Politico has a quote from Indiana Republican Party chairman Murray Clark in an article about the increasingly jittery McCain campaign. As the economy is getting turbulent and people are coming to regard Obama as better able to grapple with the complexities, Murray Clark suggests not trying to convince folks that McCain is the better leader on issues pertaining to the economy — admittedly a tough sell — but rather to start playing Six Degrees of Barack Obama, a game we saw in the waning days of the Clinton primary campaign against Obama.

Murray Clark, the chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, said he is eager for Obama’s “troubling relationships” to be aired in his state. “I think those things will come up in Indiana again and they do have an impact on mainstream voters in Indiana. You call it going negative, [but] whoever … is in a position to point out these relationships, I think it’s helpful.”

Presumably, like Clinton, the Republican Party is eyeballing the kitchen sink and wondering if it might be necessary to throw the thing in an effort to get the guy on their team elected. Trouble is, a) people are worried and seem to be taking this campaign more seriously and might not be easily distracted by sideshows; and b) McCain/Palin have close associations with troubling characters of their own. I’ll see your loose association with Rezko and raise you a closer association with Charles Keating, Jr. in a savings and loan scandal that looks disturbingly similar to the current economic turmoil. Jeremiah Wright? Again, I’ll see that and raise you Palin’s witch hunter pastor.

So, let’s just not go there. If McCain has better plans to get folks back to work at jobs with good wages and decent security; help them deal with increasingly out of reach health care costs; and otherwise set a playing field where those who work hard and play by the rules prosper in proportion to their skill and diligence; then lets hear them.

Senator Marvin Riegsecker of Goshen, Indiana died today after a battle with cancer. I didn’t have much interaction with him personally, but by all accounts, he was a good guy. I have a lot of family from Goshen. And they kept re-electing him, so he must have been doing something right.

Riegsecker was diagnosed this year with lymphoma and decided not to seek re-election, wanting instead to focus on his health and spend more time with his family.

Riegsecker was first elected to the Senate in 1988 and represented Senate District 12, which covers most of Elkhart County in northern Indiana. He authored Indiana’s no-call list law against unwanted telemarketing and championed causes such as providing services to those with developmental disabilities.

Like so many others, I am groping in the dark to some degree on the financial mess and the proposed bailout. The unknown variable, really, is how much letting those who acted wrongly suffer the consequences of their actions will affect those who did not act wrongly. In other words, if we let the banks crash because they chose poorly, how badly will it hurt those who did not make poor decisions? Because seeing the wicked punished is emotionally satisfying and it might deter such foolishness in the future. But, if that means that the non-wicked end up losing jobs, houses, the ability to feed their children, etc., it simply isn’t worth the cost.

I don’t think I agree with the editorial in the Evansville Courier Press which seems to base its objection to the recent bailout proposal on an almost dogmatic faith in the “free market.” I put “free market” in scare quotes, because, though it’s a term I and others use quite a bit, I’m not sure of its precise definition. Is government intervention permissible in a “free market” in the form of courts and police being used to enforce contracts? If so, what other forms of government intervention are permissible in the market such that it still remains “free?” Regulation of currency? Laws permitting individuals to escape liability through use of the corporate form? Laws permitting individuals and corporations to escape liability through bankruptcy?

Whatever the precise parameters of the free market, I am of the opinion that it is a tool for us to use, not a God to be worshiped. As folks often say of our Constitution: It’s not a suicide pact. Our Founders designed the Constitution with a system of checks and balances that have done a remarkable job of keeping the system confined within certain parameters, preventing the energy of the system from moving to one extreme or another. Similarly, I think we benefit when the energies of the market are prevented from moving to one extreme or another. Allowing the market to put us through a series of booms and crashes doesn’t strike me as making the best use out of this great engine.

The market is a good tool for allocating resources of goods, services, and labor to those areas where they are most useful. I think that harnessing the energies of this tool requires some constraints — engines need to be constrained to generate and regulate the pressure necessary to move the pistons most efficiently.

At this point, I’m simply putting forth some general principles. But, I think those principles are sound enough to at least make us skeptical when our representatives or opinion makers start edging toward slavish devotion to the market and “free market principles” rather than recognizing that the market is for our benefit, not vice versa. There are many potential entirely pragmatic reasons to oppose the bailout: it may do more harm than good; it cost’s more than it’s worth; etc. But let’s not regard the market as somehow sacrosanct.