Nick Beaudrot at Cogitamus has an eliminationism reality check: as bad as McCain/Palin have been the last few days, they haven't quite reached the fever-swamp heights of the Republican Party of the 1990s. That's...comforting. I guess.

The good news is the McCain camp really does seem to be pulling back from the brink on this, with news today that Sarah Palin's stump speech is now Ayers-less. Perhaps this is partly a result of heightened media attention on their rallies; Biden and Obama spokesman Bill Burton were both asked about the rabid crowds on TV today.

In other Sarah Palin news, via Washington Monthly, David Brooks has called the vice-presidential candidate "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," echoing my statement earlier today that if Republicans have any sense they'll put Palin permanently out to pasture on November 5:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Unexpectedly busy day today, but I do have a few links.

* Anti-Obama racism comes to Roxbury, just one town over from my beloved Randolph.

* The Paulon bailout continues to take pretty heavy fire; you can find details and good analysis at Krugman's blog, where he is taking a pretty hard line on the demand for a taxpayer equity stake in the companies we'll be bailing out.

* And Glenn Greenwald takes the Brooksian dream of the Wise Old Men of Washington back out to the woodshed.

* Given that he is the Scourge of Lobbyists, it's ironic that the person tapped to run McCain's transition team lobbied for Freddie Mac just a few months ago.

* And given his well-known penchant for Straight Talk it's odd that McCain hasn't given a press conference in 40 days.

* FiveThirtyEight has polling data showing that the debates may not move the polls very much after all. There's also a new poll out showing Obama with a two-point lead in Florida, which has got to be an outlier.

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

I don't usually agree with David Brooks, and like Kevin Drum I think it's pretty likely that he and I wouldn't agree at all on the solutions—but I have to say I think he's mostly right about identifying a huge problem in the culture of debt in post-Fordist America. Still more, and charts!, from Ezra Klein.