Before I get into this recipe, a few notes on cooking tofu. Tofu is, I'm pretty sure, the most misused and unfairly maligned foodstuff around. And it's unfairly maligned because it's misused. Because it's badly cooked. If your only association with tofu is the quivering, cold white squares that your hippy housemate put in her bulgur wheat salad, you're not going to like the stuff.

Tofu, however, is an incredibly useful pantry staple (we're talking here about firm tofu, not silken). It's cheap. It's healthful and environmentally friendly, at least compared to livestock. It can last in the refrigerator for upwards of a month, hanging out until you need it. It can soak up the flavor of anything, and be cooked to almost any texture. It can be lightly fried to serve as a soft counterpoint to crisp vegetables like broccoli or green beans, or it can be cut into small cubes and fried to a sharp crunch. But like anything else -- ever eaten dry chicken breast? -- it must be cooked well.

Let's start here: Your tofu should almost never be white. Certainly not in a dinner context. The question with tofu, rather, is how brown. Just as you cook fish until it's no longer opaque, and you cook chicken until it's no longer a pale pink, you should cook tofu until it's no longer pale and unappetizing. You should cook it on high heat, in plenty of oil. If you have it, you should use sesame oil. You should let it fry to a golden brown.

From there, of course, things get more complicated. There are all sorts of ways to cook tofu. You can press it to extract liquid, bake it, fry it and then braise it (which is what I did in this recipe of yore), even barbecue it. But we're not going to get complicated here. If you haven't cooked tofu well before, you should just cook it. Cut it into cubes of about an inch (the bigger the cube the softer and moister the center). Again, use plenty of oil. Maybe with garlic and chiles in it. Again, use high heat. Again, until it's golden brown. Learn to use it. Not as a replacement for meat, but as an alternative. Unlike meat, it can hang in the fridge for quite awhile, so if you have a couple packages sitting around, you always have a protein for dinner. Alright, the recipe:

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Paul Krugman is closely watching the G7-save-the-global-economy talks this weekend, and what's emerged thus far has not made him happy.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, Ronald Reagan's closing statement in his debate with Walter Mondale was really an odd piece of work:

Charles Wyplosz makes a useful point:

A tax rebate is not, by any means, the most productive use of a dollar of stimulus. You may want a tax rebate because it can be done incredibly quickly, but you also want unemployment insurance and food stamps and infrastructure spending. It would be a real shame if progressives assumed control of the government and then responded to this crisis with a Reaganite package.

Tyler Cowen recommends George Halverson's book Health Care Reform Now! It's a good recommendation. Halverson is CEO of Kaiser Permanente, which is one of the higher performing, better organized, health care systems around, and so he's got a pretty good vantage point on the problem. And the thing about Kaiser is that it's almost fully integrated. It owns its facilities, salaries its doctors, builds infrastructure that connects clinics to urgent care wards to hospitals, and has constructed the largest private electronic medical records system in the world.

Awhile back, a health economist I met made the point that the very high performing systems in the US -- Mayo, Cleveland, Kaiser, the Veteran's Administration -- are all entirely integrated. Indeed, she said, the thing about them is that they actually qualify as systems. The doctors, buildings, machines, and so forth are all owned by the same institution. That, she argued, was much more important than who ran them or whether they were non-profit or socialized or academic or private. The rest of health care, she said, is a sector. When you're dealing with Kaiser or the VA, they have data from and control over every link in the chain. When it's your insurance company negotiating with an urgent care ward that sends you to a hospital who prescribes a follow-up with a private specialist who tells you to pick up a prescription at the drug store of your choice which gives you a reaction which sends you to the emergency room which then puts you in touch with yet another private specialist...well, that's rather a different story. It's just too fractured, and too few of the actors have an actual incentive to coordinate.

McCain deserves real credit for staging a public intervention against the partisanship of his own base. But it's not an easy position he's in. If his vice president is going to continue telling audiences that Obama sees "America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who would bomb their own country," and if McCain is going to continue funding ads that say "Obama worked with [a] domestic terrorist," then the occasional calming word during a townhall is a tinny counterweight. When McCain's supporters call Obama a danger, they're drawing the only logical conclusion from their candidate's rhetoric. A president who supports terrorist attacks against this country would indeed be a danger. That McCain makes that case, then tries to calm the firestorm by saying Obama is a "decent man" is unlikely to change their minds. They'll just believe him to be bowing to the pressures of the liberal media. McCain should either end the rhetoric producing these fears or accept his role as the instigator. But he cannot be both the cause of, and solution to, the problem.

Meanwhile, Brian Beutler notices something very odd in Mark Halperin's transcript of the above video. Watch the final question. The woman says to McCain, quite intelligibly, that she cannot trust Obama because he is "an Arab." And that's originally how Halperin reported the clip:

My friend Amanda (whose blog was way less lame today) interviews Greg Gillis of Girl Talk. In what must be a sign of the times, the conversation turns to internet dating and postmodernism, with surprising speed. Weird, but you should download his new album anyway.

And they both come in the same post. Good point the first:

I think this is probably the dirtiest mailer I've seen this cycle. But if anyone thinks they can top it, let's see it in comments.

In the current economic environment, this is only photo blog that matters.

You know, if we'd all just listened to Brad Plumer four years ago, none of this would be happening.

You're seeing a lot of talk lately about how closely October's polls correlate with November's results. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels e-mails:

I really can't wait for the press conference where McCain tearfully atones for this ad:

I'm sure he'll be very sorry. Meanwhile, Rick Davis is ascending ever higher up. Out-of-Touch. "I don't know if you really want to turn a campaign into a CNBC news show on the stock market," he says. At this point, his oxygen must be thinning.

Full ad here.

Some folks e-mailed asking me to comment on this Ron Brownstein health care column, but I don't have much quarrel with it. Brownstein says the Obama camp is wrong to portray McCain's policy as a massive tax increase on the middle class, and that's right, but only insofar as they're wrong to portray the effects of a health care policy as if it were a change in the tax code. It's much more complicated than that. But as a shorthand, it's not that bad. it really is the case that most workers will feel the full brunt of a $3.6 trillion tax hike on employer benefits. For a fuller statement of that view, I'll just direct folks to this post.

As an addendum, I'm a bit more puzzled by Marc Ambinder's post on the article, which calls it "a balanced column on health care that neither campaign will like (which is why it's worth pointing to)!" Even after a couple of years as a professional journalist, I still find that mindset very weird.

Last week, I was complaining about the proliferation of the terrible term "main street." Today, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg offers a look at the genealogy of the term, and we learn that it's long been a fraud: "As it happens, 'Main Street' was published in the same year when the Census showed for the first time that rural Americans had become a minority of the population."

Sebastian Mallaby has a sensible and calm column today on the various efforts being made to avert financial catastrophe and the likelihood that some of what we're seeing now is, to use FDR's term, fear itself. "We have gone from grappling with genuine financial challenges -- that mortgage loans are tumbling in value; that shrinking the excess borrowing in the financial system is bound to force asset prices down -- to grappling with the exaggerated terror that nobody is to be trusted. Banks won't lend to each other or to healthy companies even for short periods. Companies that have pre-negotiated rights to borrow are calling in the money, not because they need the cash but because everyone else is hoarding it."

But the fact remains that the market his dived in response to every effort the government has made to give it some help. In this, it's been like nothing so much as a kid who's hungry but doesn't know what he wants, and keeps crying harder every time you try and offer something. Like the kid, the market can't quite seem to speak, and so no one quite knows what to do to help it.

Which may mean that we can't keep asking it what to do, and so we do it ourselves: We nationalize the banks and just waiting for folks to settle down and decide they can trust each other again. meanwhile, Mallaby is arguing for a second stimulus package, and given his position on the center-right, that's something of a powerful indicator. This is one of those places where progressives should be working now to fire up their dream machines and figure out what they want in this package. Some of those agenda items will be good short-term policy -- getting money into people's hands quickly -- but some of them should have an eye towards the long-term. This is likely to be one of the most profound moments of public investment and regulatory change this country has seen for years, and using it to construct a real mass transit infrastructure, or a green energy sector, or a transaction tax, are things progressives should be gaming out now. They shouldn't be caught flat-footed by someone else's proposal, they way they were by the Paulson bailout plan. Crisis and opportunity and apocryphal Chinese characters and all that.

Image used under a CC license from NeilT.

When this campaign started up, the conventional wisdom was that the Hispanic vote was up for grabs. Hispanics had overwhelmingly supporter Hillary Clinton in the primary, and this was assumed to be as much the product of antipathy to African-Americans as preference for Clinton. Meanwhile, John McCain had been a leader in the fight for comprehensive immigration reform, and was expected to perform historically well among Hispanic voters. But as Ben Smith reports today, neither is happening. Instead, "polls show Obama winning the broadest support from Latino voters of any Democrat in a decade, while McCain is struggling to reach 30 percent, closer to Senator Bob Dole's dismal 1996 result than to Bush's historic 40% four years ago." Which is probably all to say that parties matter. John McCain's party is restrictionist with xenophobic tendencies. barack Obama's party is not. For all the talk of how these two candidates were to prove sui generis, the reality is they've performed, broadly speaking, as you'd expect the generic Democrat and the generic Republican to perform, and their demographic coalitions are pretty near to what you'd have assumed before you knew the identity of the candidates.

Last Tuesday's debate featured an odd moment when McCain told a young African-American questioner that before all this, he'd probably never heard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The young man was Oliver Clark. And he just posted this to his Facebook page:

I'll have more to say about undecideds in a few days, but suffice to say, on some level, we're all undecided voters, but Gallup's selection process was pretty clearly doing violence to the idea of the undecided voter, which is more akin to voters who haven't yet developed a preference.

As intellectual property legislation has become a hotter topic in recent years, you've repeatedly heard a couple numbers bandied around to explain why we need to ruthlessly stamp out innovation and give corporations unending patent monopolies: 750,000 and $250 billion. The first number is the jobs we've supposedly lost to piracy. The second number is the cost piracy supposedly imposes on our economy. You hear the figures frequently: The Department of Commerce uses them, the Chamber of Commerce uses them, the Patent Department uses them. The only problem, as Julian Sanchez explains, is that they appear to be made up.

Tyler Cowen's skeptical post on bank capitalization makes a series of fair points. Namely, Tyler asks why direct lending from the Treasury Department will fix the problem when direct lending from the Federal Reserve did little to disrupt the collapse. My understanding of the situation, though, is that it's about the nationalization, not the capitalization. Summarizing the work of Paul DeGrauwe, Yves Smith writes, "trying to recapitalize banks while the liquidity crisis is on merely throws money into a black hole. The new equity goes poof when the liquidity worries resurface (as they have, each time in more virulent form). The only way to break the cycle is for governments to take over banks, or a least most of the big ones." Or put more directly:

The birth of shark Jesus.

File away in "structural advantages that could decide the election":

It's a pretty rough morning on Wall Street, so here's some countercyclical soothsaying from Casey Mulligan:

Did you all read our cover story on Rachel Maddow this month? You certainly should have.

Image used under a CC license from DipDewDog.

How much does Michael Bloomberg wish he had pulled the trigger on a presidential run this year?

Arjun over at The State of the Union takes a look at the relationship between McCain's poll numbers and the stock market:

Tracks pretty well, right? "McCain’s floor hovers around forty percent," writes Arjun, "accounting for the divergence at the end, but regardless, the correlation between the two data sets is a robust 0.77."

It's a useful reminder that elections are heavily structural. McCain's problems are, in large part, the product of actual world events that don't favor Republicans. They're not the result of some awesome new Obama ads, or Palin, or even McCain's erratic and odd campaign style. It's a bad time to be an aging economic conservative with a long record of deregulation and close ties to the outgoing administration.

In some ways, I think David Brooks gets this right, and in some ways, I think he gets it wrong. But I sure like reading it: "Politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away."

The GOP's inadequacy on economic issues is true, but not a recent development. In the past couple of decades, when the working class has been concerned about the economy, Democrats have won elections. When they've been more worried about terrorism or communism, Republicans have won elections. When they've been worried about neither, as in 2000, it's been pretty close. But if John Kerry or Al Gore had run amidst a collapsing financial sector, their close elections would probably have been Democratic blowouts. If Barack Obama had run in 2004, he might have done considerably worse.

Meanwhile, you've had a structural change in elections, too. The GOP wasn't much trusted on the economy because they were considered too sympathetic to the interests of corporations. That poll question asking "do the Republicans care more for the problems of people like you or those of corporations?" has not been kind to the GOP. But the flip side of the bargain was a whole lot of money. The GOP wildly outraised the Democrats, and won a lot of elections that way. This was particularly true in the final weeks of the 2000 election, where Bush swamped Gore on battleground state airwaves. But the rise of online fundraising and small donor democracy have, at least to this point, largely wiped that advantage out at the presidential level, and so now the Republicans are left with the baggage of a pro-corporate philosophy without the protective effect of the fundraising advantage.

As for the educated class, that's an interesting question. Much like with the conservative wing's mistrust of Hispanics, it's a policy that might have seemed electorally wise a couple years ago but is growing more questionable with every passing election. At some point, the demographic trends predicted by The Emerging Democratic Majority's will reach sufficient maturity and the GOP's decades-long effort to drive away the educated and young and the different is going to leave them making ever more exclusionary appeals to an ever smaller slice of the electorate.

To respond to some of the comments in this thread, yes, I'm agreeing, at least in principle, with Snodgrass when she says that Obama's tax plan will not raise sufficient revenue and will end up harming the working class in the long run. Without getting too Concord Coalition on you, the government does have a variety of long-term social policy commitments that far exceed its current revenue streams. If you don't increase revenue gradually in the short-term -- and Obama's plan does not increase revenue -- then you're either looking at sharper tax hikes in the long-term, drastic reforms, or some mixture of both. Presumably, the majority of those tax hikes will fall on the wealthy. But not all of them. And a lot of those reforms will probably hit the middle class -- they'll slash subsidies, or cut benefits for future retirees, or lower the retirement age, or whatever. Most government policy is progressive, and cutbacks tend to hurt the working class and the poor. This isn't, of course, the point of Obama's tax plan, but it is the implication of continually cutting taxes while increasing spending. Maybe there'll be some deus ex machina in the form of single payer or an end to defense spending or something. But in all likelihood, Democrats are going to have to eventually figure out how to raise revenues again.

The markets are tanking. On Yom Kippur. Presumably, they're atoning for our sins.

Hopefully, you've all read George Packer's article on the concerns and struggles of Ohio's undecided voters by now. If you haven't, do that and come back. If you have, I want to highlight this piece:

The problem is, elites have an availability bias. They know a lot of folks who make over $100,000. Charlie Gibson wasn't being malign when he named $200,000 as an average income -- he was being unreflective. But because of that, the elite class reacts harshly if a presidential candidate proposes to raise taxes on folks making, say, over $100,000 a year, even though that's a tiny minority of the country. It's a tiny minority of the country that includes a whole lot of journalists, television pundits, think tank workers, political operatives, etc. These are people who influence public opinion and, incidentally, this is the knowledge worker class that donates a lot of money to progressives, and so politicians shy away from touching their taxes.

But more downscale folks have an availability bias too. Just as $100,000 is conceivably insufficient to Charlie Gibson, $250,000 is inconceivably luxurious to Barbie Snodgrass. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, where the median income is $37,897. People live near folks with similar incomes. The rich aren't randomly sprinkled across the country. Rather, a lot of them live near Charlie Gibson, and none of them live near Barbie Snodgrass. $100,000 will look common to someone living in Georgetown, but quite rare to someone living an a hollowed out community in the Rust Belt. And the difference in cost of living between the two places will further magnify the impact: $100,00 doesn't ensure a sumptuous existence in Georgetown, but it's all you'd need in Columbus.

And so when politicians dance around the stage swearing that they'll never touch a family that makes even $150,000 a year, their populism rings untrue. Because it is untrue. To most of the country, no one makes $100,000 a year. It's five percent of the nation. And not a five percent they run into very often. But it's a five percent that pundits live amongst, that reporters live amongst, and that politicians live amongst, and all of those folks agree that it's not very much money at all, and so folks in the rest of the country rightly conclude that the political class is oriented towards itself and has no real understanding of how the rest of America lives or what they need.

It's sort of funny that Hugh Hewitt was shopping a book called "How Sarah Palin Won the Election... And Saved America," but honestly, this is how books work. Publishing times are long. Publishers tend to award contracts on current issues of interest, then find that the book has no audience when it's released, or its once-revolutionary ideas have long since penetrated the national audience. If Hewitt hadn't made the gamble, someone else would have.

That's why the model Chelsea Green used for Bob Kuttner's book Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency was so extraordinary. The book went from manuscript to publication within a matter of weeks. It worked on a magazine time cycle rather than a publishing time cycle. And so it managed to hit while it was relevant. Indeed, the thesis of the book -- that Obama was going to face a time of genuine national crisis, and would have the opportunity to inhabit a transformational presidency -- came true as the book landed on shelves.

Some serious Western state populism from Barack Obama:

I've been struggling with how to write this post encouraging folks to read George Packer's deeply moving, deeply sad article on the personal struggles facing undecided Ohioan voters. The problem is that it's a bit hard to describe. Most articles about voters are actually about politics, politicians, and elections. The voters exist as a manifestation of the subject. Packer's article is rather the opposite: It's actually about the voters, and though the election is the ostensible topic, it's really a deep exploration of the struggle a certain number of people are having as they try to navigate the fear of change experienced by all folks who have already lost too much with the need for change felt by those who know the status quo isn't working for them. And Packer simply lets them talk. At length. These aren't folks who are generally heard at length. The result is very powerful -- an article that will be relevant long after the election is over.

And then there's the racial angle. I found this vignette particularly affecting:

It's gotten a bit less attention than the shifting momentum at the presidential level, but in the last few weeks, the outlook for Democrats in the Senate has brightened considerably. With Norm Coleman now a likely loser, you're looking at eight likely pick-ups for the Democrats, bringing them to 59 votes in the Senate. If they can win one of the more stubborn states on the list -- like Kentucky, Mississippi, or Georgia -- they've hit the holy grail of 60 votes in the Senate -- a filibuster proof majority. And many think it possible. A table may help clarify the situation. The following list aggregates the Pollster.com estimates of all the competitive Senate races to provide a snapshot of the contest for the Senate as it stands right now. Because the candidates are, on some level, incidental here, I didn't use their names. I also bolded the winning percentage, and ordered the races from the highest margin for the Democrat to the lowest margin:

Given the likely impact Obama is going to have on black turnout in places like Georgia and Mississippi -- turnout that, at least in the primary, wasn't caught in polls, because pollsters had never seen anything like it before -- it's easily possible that a slight tightening in Georgia or Mississippi could lead to an unexpected upset. Which would bring Democrats to the magic number in the Senate: 60 votes.

An odd sidenote of that, though, is that if Democrats hit 60 in the Senate, good relations with Joe Lieberman become arguably more important. Since 55 seats is a lot like 56 seats, a more middling win will probably see Reid kick Lieberman out of the party entirely. But if they're trying to hold together a filibuster proof majority, you'll likely see more of an effort to make common cause. Success in that venture would probably change the incentives for a lot of moderate Republicans, too. It's an odd quirk of legislative politics that, for the minority, the first best outcome is often killing the bill entirely, but the second best outcome is being a constructive player on the bill, not voting in opposition. If you can tank the legislation, you've denied your opponents an accomplishment they can use to run against you. But if you can't tank the legislation, you may as well insert your priorities into the final bill so you have an accomplishment you can use when you run against them.

It's an odd quirk of American politics that a record exhibiting an unremitting hostility to the working class and a stubborn incomprehension of foreign affairs isn't much of an electoral problem, but the revelation that some financier is buying you expensive suits can get you kicked out of the Senate. Ah well. That's politics. And after this press conference, I think it's pretty likely that Norm Coleman, Minnesota's loathsome used car salesman of Senator, is done for: