(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

In Kerrigan v. Commissioner of Public Health, over the protests of three members of the court (as expressed in three dissenting opinions), a four-member majority of the Connecticut Supreme Court has overturned as "unconstitutional" a statutory system whose long-standing components were passed by Connecticut's lawmakers and signed into law by its governors over many years, and has instead decreed that henceforth in Connecticut, "same sex couples cannot be denied the freedom to marry." Here's the majority's own summary of its reasoning:

Because the court relied upon its interpretation of the equal protection provision in the Connecticut state constitution rather than upon the comparable provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, there is effectively no chance that the U.S. Supreme Court will review today's decision. That decision is now the law of Connecticut, subject only to being overturned by the Connecticut Supreme Court itself or by an amendment to the state constitution.

The judges who made up the majority in this ruling are precisely the kinds of judges whom Barack Obama and Joe Biden want to appoint the the federal bench. That's why Obama and Biden voted against confirmation of both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito. Instead, they want judges who will make law from the bench — and especially laws on the most controversial subjects (like gay marriage) that couldn't possibly gather a majority vote in Congress and a presidential signature. It's worse than meaningless, but rather a complete fraud, for Obama and Biden to tell voters that they oppose gay marriage when they will appoint judges who will bring about gay marriage by judicial decree.

This decision will alarm and dismay two partially overlapping groups of people: (a) those who believe that recognition of single-sex marriage will ultimately destroy the traditional institution of marriage and foster other bad effects in society, and (b) those who decry unrestrained judicial activism as a tyrannical seizure of political power by rogue judges in a manner that undercuts the legislative and executive branches of government, thereby rendering impotent the political decisions made by democratic majorities.
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(HT: RobinsonandLong.com).

If everyone knows it is a "panic" and not a correction based upon looming recession, then the panic-driven selling must be close to an end as rational investors assess the basic facts that companies like IBM posted great numbers, companies like Apple keep unveiling amazing new products at very attractive prices and American innovation keeps throwing up new goods and services.  The Washington Post can put out nonsense stories like "The End of American Capitalism," but even an enormous loss of wealth gained over five years is only that and not a repudiation of laws of supply and demand or the marvelous effects of liberty on markets, and of course the eventual and widely expected rebound will erase some of that loss.  There's an enormous amount of cash on the sidelines waiting to enter at the perceived "bottom," and not eager to miss the expected dramatic move up, and that will be just the beginning of a recovery in share price for most of the companies that are still doing in October what they were doing in August.  As Victor Davis Hanson noted this morning: "Sometime in the next few days, wiser investors should see that trillions of global dollars are now piling up and could begin to prime the economy — and that still valuable stocks, for a brief period, are up for sale at once-in-a-lifetime bargains."

These basic truths are hard to keep at the front of mind when expectations are shattered, but this is the fourth time I have watched this in 20 years --1987, the dot.com meltdown, after 9/11 and now this.  Each time American capitalism came roaring back.  There are lots of bank failures out there, but lots of banks are very, very strong as well.  The Fed and the Treasury are flooding the zone with credit and will continue to do so.  Inflation may be a problem down the road, but deflation doesn't look like a realistic possibility.

There is also a new economy humming along powered by millions of highly connected Millennials doing business in new and very different ways.  I know a number of them, and most of you do as well.  They are outside of old structures and busy designing an economic future.  For them, the collapse of stock prices is the greatest investment opportunity of their young lives since they can buy their first shares at these ridiculously low prices.  Those of us who invest every month are in fact going to get some greatly discounted shares for a bit, and when the market recovers, please remember that.

Finally, if you haven't yet read Walter Russell Mead's "God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World," now would be a great time to do so.  If you have read it, reread it.  Here is one key paragraph from Mead's opus:

Not many Americans are thinking about "pressing on into the future" today, but they will be next week or next month.  (In fact, enough of them might so carefully consider the future to give Obama a huge shock at the polls.)  A NASCAR nation loves its fast economy, but as with fast cars, there are some spectacular wrecks along the way.  We are watching one right now.  At its conclusion --which may have already arrived, we just can't know-- a shaken crowd will exhale, fret a bit and mourn the real damage, and then look forward to the next race.  "Gentlemen, start your engines" will mark all of 2009, no matter who is president.

I wonder how many web star-ups launched this week?  LawStudentCafe.com did, and probably a few thousand others.  More will follow next week, and in ten thousand industries many hundreds of thousands of engineers will continue to innovate and design.  Yes, the Christmas sales season will be slow, and car sales awful, but one thing is certain --Americans will be buying cars for a long long time. There are lots and lots of newly unemployed investment bankers, and most of them are enormously talented folks who will now take that talent away from banking and into the American economy at some other point.  Think of the seeding that is going on in front of us.

The underlying American commitment to building and growth isn't going anywhere, and even if Obama wins and the Democratic majorities expand, the government can only hinder not ruin the deeply rooted American desire to grow and improve.  If the fanatics among our enemies think to strike at America or its allies, they will be quickly be reminded that stock prices have very little connection to the ability to project American military power.  In short, the Greatest Generation did much more than win World War II.  It rebuilt a country capable of absorbing very hard hits and recovering quickly with a dynamism that astonishes every time. 

We saw that in 2002 and 2003, and we will see it again in 2009 and 2010.

And perhaps even in the closing months of 2008.  Perhaps even in the closing weeks of this election.

Read the whole thing.  Th ecolumn hits McCain for failing to raise these issuess earlier, but then returns to the significance of these associations.

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

The national media is filled with highly confident predictions that Barack Obama is about to win the presidency in a run-away. A good example is David Paul Kuhn's article today on Politico.com, breathlessly entitled Dem strategists see landslide in the making. I'm not quibbling about the accuracy of the headline — Mr. Kuhn is indeed describing what Democratic strategists are predicting. But if you actually read his article, it's filled with more of the "Why the Dems Ought To Win This Cycle" arguments we've been hearing since at least early 2007. Even with a massive and historic addition to those arguments — an economic panic that many people blame more on Bush-43 and the GOP than on the Democrats, fairly or (as I think) not — all of those "should and oughta" reasons have not yet lead to a pro-Obama breakout in the opinion polling.

Instead, as Hugh noted earlier today, the polls remain whisker-tight, vibrating like a high note being played on a violin string. The Democratic "strategists" being interviewed for these articles are all cooperating in a very deliberate expectations game — hoping to depress their opponents psychologically to depress their voting turn-out statistically — but at some point that vibrating violin string must begin to seem like those shrieking notes from the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1960 movie, Psycho. And — to stretch the analogy one delicious bit further — 1960 was the year in which the charismatic (but inexperienced) young Democrat was supposed to swamp the sweating and stubble-faced (but more experienced, especially in foreign affairs) Republican — and that race came down to a few tens of thousands of questionable votes in Daley-dominated Chicago and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (in the latter of which, dead people who signed the election register all in the same handwriting famously voted in alphabetical order).

Writing in TIME, Joe Klein makes a very interesting observation that I think is partly true, and very revealing in ways that Klein very definitely did not intend. Klein argues (boldface mine) that

Klein is exactly right that we are witnessing something remarkable here, and that Obama's race is "receding" in importance "as he becomes more familiar." And Klein's also right — unfortunately for Obama, and perhaps fatally to his campaign — that Obama is indeed being increasingly judged on the content of his character! And that's precisely why the polls aren't showing him breaking out to a big lead, despite all those "oughta be a Dem landslide" factors.

During the Democratic primaries, before Obama had clinched the nomination and solidified what the pollsters now paint as a monolithic voting block among black Americans, there were arguments about whether Obama was "black enough." I thought those were profoundly silly and insulting arguments — insulting not just to Barack Obama personally, not just to black Americans, but to all Americans of any race or political viewpoint. Now, however — while simultaneously arguing that Obama is heading for a "landslide" — Obama's admirers are pre-testing the meme that "if he loses, it can only be because of racism." Although he certainly didn't intend it, I think Klein's observation pre-explodes that premature argument.

With each debate, and with all the gathering attention as the election nears, any lingering negative significance of Obama's race is indeed fading, and he's being judged not as a "black man" but simply as "a man." And if the kind of fear that might have come into play was mainly of the "unknown black man" — the sort of fear that Obama famously attributed to his own (white) grandmother on seeing unknown black men on the street while waiting for a bus — Obama's simply no longer unknown. He is indeed a celebrity, whether because of or despite his race. In fact, with respect specifically to his race, I would wager that Barack Obama is now up into Bill Cosby/Cliff Huxtable territory in terms of his non-threateningness to all Americans regardless of his or their respective race.

But contrary to Klein's wistful thinking that voters will see "steadiness" in Obama's phlegmatic and professorial personality, what more and more voters are actually coming to recognize is that he's a young man, an inexperienced man, an untested man, a leftist man, a pro-government man, a tax-raising man, a spending-raising man, an overconfident and smug and elitist man, a reckless man who underestimates our enemies, and — therefore, based on the combination of those qualities — a very dangerous man.

His race simply has nothing to do with the growing doubts about him in the still very large number of voters who are just now finally focusing on the details of Barack Obama. To the extent that his being black was ever supposed by anyone to be "scary" to white voters, that's now disappeared for all but the most entrenched, most irredeemable outright racists.

In short, Barack Obama is not "getting any blacker" even to the limited number of people who may still find even some blacks scary simply because they're black. But he's becoming very, very scary to a great many other people for other reasons altogether.

Here's my message, then: America, you need not feel guilty for being afraid of Barack Obama. It's not racist to doubt his character and experience and judgment. It's not racist to conclude that they're lacking. He has already proved that a black man can run an entirely viable campaign for the presidency of the United States. Every one of us who looks forward to a post-racist, post-racial society — one in which we've ended racial discrimination because we've stopped discriminating on the basis of race — can be proud. But we can also refuse to vote for Barack Obama for reasons unrelated to race, and we can do so without feeling any guilt whatsoever.

In his own mangled metaphor from the second debate, Barack Obama is still "green behind the ears." Being scared of him for that reason doesn't have anything to do with the rest of him being black.