1. Spank me! Spank me!

2. Obama Pumps Up the Volume

3. Paul Krugman: Financial Crisis Endgame

4. Wall Street Mourns: The Death of a Culture

5. McCain: The Raging Populist? The Incredible Hulk?

6. Sarah Palin & The Socialist Republic of Alaska

Uncle Max's Agony Column

Dear Max: I'm a female college student and a feminist. I expect equal pay, equal treatment, and fairness when it comes to chores at home. But I have fantasies of domestic discipline.

Some days, I'd like to rush home and clean the apartment and make dinner for my boyfriend wearing only an apron.

Then I'd appreciate it if he'd find some excuse—something I did wrong—to spank me until I cry before having wild sex with me.

My guy, being open-minded, would be up for this. But how on earth do I set effective boundaries?

How can you be taken seriously as an equal when you tell your boyfriend that you'd like him to dominate you outside the bedroom (the cooking and cleaning aspect) on occasion?

I want this to be a periodic, not a consistent, dynamic. It's totally unrealistic to pretend to be Betty Crocker all the time. - Clara

Get a necklace or a bracelet, sweetie. One you wear only when you want the boyfriend to take charge. You decide when that bracelet or necklace goes on, and you decide when it comes off—which puts you in control, paradoxically, of your own submission.

When you're wearing it, of course, you're Betty Crocker (whoever she is), and the boyfriend has your consent to order you about, spank your ass, and fuck you senseless.

When it's off, you're equals. Easy!

Obama Pumps Up the Volume

It’s almost as if the ghost of John Kerry’s 2004 campaign is scaring Barack Obama into action.

After watching a lead erode following weeks of the same withering, often-as-not-untrue assaults that Republicans used to sink Mr. Kerry in 2004, the Obama campaign is dialing up the candidate’s level of aggression, particularly in regard to John McCain’s reaction to the financial crisis quaking under Wall Street.

In the minutes before the campaign plane took off this week from Chicago for a swing through Colorado, Linda Douglass, an Obama spokeswoman, came to the back of the plane and, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, advised reporters to keep their ears open for some especially “spirited” things the candidate had to say about Mr. McCain and the economy.

Mr. Obama duly obliged, spending his sweep through Colorado taking Mr. McCain by the throat for being “out of touch” with American workers—and doing so in uncharacteristically simple terms.

“If you want to understand the difference between how Senator McCain and I would govern as president, you can start by taking a look at how we’ve responded to this crisis,” Mr. Obama said, deliberately, at an event on Sept. 16 before a crowd in a college gym in Golden.

“Because Senator McCain’s approach was the same as the Bush administration’s: support ideological policies that made the crisis more likely; do nothing as the crisis hits; and then scramble as the whole thing unravels. Now, my approach has been to try to prevent this turmoil from occurring in the first place.”

Typically for the tightly disciplined, robotically on-message Obama campaign, the change of course was meticulously programmed, a component of a coordinated sharpening of message on the airwaves and by Obama surrogates around the country.

(The campaign went so far as to announce beforehand, in a press-released strategy memo, its intention to run more aggressively.)

Perhaps predictably, Mr. Obama still doesn’t appear entirely comfortable in the role of chicken-in-every-pot Clintonian populist.

Paul Krugman: Financial Crisis Endgame

On Sunday, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, tried to draw a line in the sand against further bailouts of failing financial institutions.

Four days later, faced with a crisis spinning out of control, much of Washington appears to have decided that government isn’t the problem, it’s the solution.

The unthinkable — a government buyout of much of the private sector’s bad debt — has become the inevitable.

Government takeovers may be the only way to get the financial system working again.

Some people have been making that argument for some time. Most recently, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and two other veterans of past financial crises published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal declaring that the only way to avoid “the mother of all credit contractions” is to create a new government agency to “buy up the troubled paper.”

That is, to have taxpayers take over the bad assets created by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. Coming from Mr. Volcker, that proposal has serious credibility.

Influential members of Congress, including Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, have been making similar arguments.

And on Thursday, Charles Schumer, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee (and an advocate of creating a new agency to resolve the financial crisis) told reporters that “the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are realizing that we need a more comprehensive solution.”

Sure enough, Thursday night Ben Bernanke and Mr. Paulson met with Congressional leaders to discuss a “comprehensive approach” to the problem.

We don’t know yet what that “comprehensive approach” will look like. There have been hopeful comparisons to the financial rescue the Swedish government carried out in the early 1990s, a rescue that involved a temporary public takeover of a large part of the country’s financial system.

It’s not clear, however, whether policy makers in Washington are prepared to exert a comparable degree of control.

And if they aren’t, this could turn into the wrong kind of rescue — a bailout of stockholders as well as the market, in effect rescuing the financial industry from the consequences of its own greed.

Wall Street Mourns: The Death of a Culture

They’re listening to Coldplay down on Wall Street:

I used to rule the world

Seas would rise when I gave the word

Now in the morning I sleep alone

Sweep the streets I used to own

The leverage party’s over for the masters of the universe. Shed a tear. When you trade pieces of paper for other pieces of paper instead of trading them for real things, one day someone wakes up and realizes the paper’s worth nothing. And Lehman Brothers, after 158 years, has gone poof in the night.

We’re witnessing the passing of more than a venerable firm. We’re seeing the death of a culture.

For years, accountants, rating agencies and Wall Street executives decided to shoot craps and collect fees. Regulators, taking their cue from a distracted President Bush, took a nap. The two M’s — Money and Me — became the lodestones of the zeitgeist, and damn those distant wars.

The biggest single-day market drop since 9/11 reminded me that when trading reopened on Sept. 17, 2001, and the Dow plunged 684.81 points, some executives backdated their options to reprice them at this postattack low to increase their potential gains.

So that’s what “financial killing” really means. No better illustration exists of a culture where private gain has eclipsed the public good, public service, even public decency, and where the cult of the individual has caused the commonwealth to wither.

That’s the culture we’ve lived with. It’s over now. Some new American beginning is needed.

McCain: The Raging Populist? The Incredible Hulk?

“The people of Ohio are the most productive in the world!” yelled John McCain at a rally outside of Youngstown on Tuesday. Present company perhaps excluded, since the crowd was made up entirely of people who were at liberty in the middle of a workday.

Folks were wildly enthusiastic as the event began. That was partly because Sarah Palin was also on the bill. (With Todd!) And when McCain took the center stage, they were itching to cheer the war hero and boo all references to pork-barrel spenders.

Nobody had warned them that he had just morphed into a new persona — a raging populist demanding more regulation of the nation’s financial system.

And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.

Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)

“We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street — enough is enough!” this new incarnation yelled, complaining angrily about greed and overpaid C.E.O.’s. Slowly, people begin to peel out of the crowd and drift away.

Even in these troubled times, there are apparently a number of Republicans who think highly of corporate executives and captains of high finance.

The whole transformation was fascinating in a cheap-thrills kind of way. It’s not every day, outside of “Incredible Hulk” movies, that you see somebody make this kind of turnaround in the scope of a few hours.

Sarah Palin: Governor of he Socialist Republic of Alaska

People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid.

And they should lay off the governor for choosing another childhood friend to oversee a failing state-run dairy, allowing the Soviet-style business to ding taxpayers for $800,000 in additional losses.

What these critics don’t understand is that crony capitalism is how things are done in Alaska. They reward failure in the Last Frontier state. In that sense, it’s not unlike like Wall Street’s treatment of C.E.O.’s who run companies into the ground.

Look at Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s top economic surrogate — if you can find her this week, after the news and her narrative fused in a negative way. Dismissed as head of Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock plunged and nearly 20,000 workers were let go, she was rewarded with $44 million in compensation. Sweet!

Thank God McCain wants to appoint a commission to study the practice that enriched his chief economic adviser. On the campaign trail this week, McCain and Palin pledged to “stop multimillion dollar payouts to C.E.O.’s” of failed companies. Good. Go talk to Fiorina at your next strategy session.

Palin’s Alaska is a cultural cousin to this kind of capitalism. The state may seem like a rugged arena for risky free-marketers. In truth, it’s a strange mix of socialized projects and who-you-know hiring practices.