The following editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition.

The new rap on Sarah Palin: Her clothes are too nice.

It turns out the Republican National Committee has been outfitting the vice presidential candidate with frocks from Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and other fancy shops. It has spent something like $150,000 on her wardrobe since the beginning of September.

There are reasons to question Palin’s candidacy. Her silk jackets and Naughty Monkey pumps aren’t among them.

What’s she supposed to wear on the campaign trail, anyway? Mukluks and moose hides?

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We're finally wrapping up our election endorsements. Believe it or not, someone called in today wanting to know what we recommended on the Pierce County charter amendment.

This editorial will appear Friday in the print edition.

Approve county charter amendment
Here’s our nomination for least sexy measure on the Nov. 4 ballot: Pierce County Charter Amendment 1.

The amendment is essentially a housekeeping measure designed to speed up how appointments are made to county boards and commissions.

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The Bush administration’s rush job on reviewing 200,000 comments submitted in response to a proposed overhaul of the Endangered Species Act is a sham.

What’s Sarah Palin supposed to wear while campaigning? Mukluks and moose hides?

The Bush administration is making a mockery of public process in its campaign to undermine the Endangered Species Act while it still can.

The Associated Press learned this week that the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service has called in reinforcements as it tries to review 200,000 comments about a proposed overhaul of the act before close of business Friday.

Each staffer will have to read and digest seven comments a minute to meet the deadline. Some of these comments are dozens of pages long. Many paper shredders don't work that fast.

This shortcircuited review period is tied to the Interior Department's stealth proposal to eliminate the scientific reviews required of federal projects. (Well, it was stealth until the media got wind of it and Dirk Kempthorne had to call a hastily scheduled press conference to defend himself)

As we said in an August editorial:

Under current law, the experts at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service determine a project’s possible harm to an endangered species.

The new rules would remove that oversight and hand authority to make the call to federal agencies that do not always employ the necessary specialists. Imagine the Army Corps of Engineers getting to decide whether a hydroelectric dam hurts fish, and you begin to get the picture.

If the Bush administration is successful at ramrodding this proposal through, it could take years for a new president to undo.

With all the talk going around of the "failure" of capitalism and free markets, here's a contrarian view.

I think it's self-evident that, as Berlinski argues, "even free markets that fail regularly create more wealth and raise general living standards vastly more effectively than do command economies."

Her discussion of the cultural and institutional conditions needed to allow markets to work applies directly to what went wrong on Wall Street.

By Claire Berlinski
Special to the Los Angeles Times

The free-market system, it is fashionable to say, is to blame for the current financial crisis.

By way of rejoinder, a growing cohort of commentators has argued that the crisis should be understood not as a failure of free-market economic theory but as its vindication. They argue that the U.S. government perverted the wisdom of the market by encouraging banks to make loans no rational actor would make — and that the players took the risks they did because they held a reasonable expectation of a government bailout should things get hairy.

The problem, in this view, is not that the markets were free but that they weren’t free enough.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — With Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien all taking the week off, the presidential campaigns are catching a break. But there were still some jokes to be found Wednesday night.

“(Barack) Obama is so far ahead now, seems the only way he can lose is if his supporters screw it up. But ah ha! Obama’s supporters have a secret weakness: They are Democrats.” — Craig Ferguson, CBS’ “Late Late Show.”

“They’re so far ahead in the polls — the Democrats — they won’t be thinking about the election. This is what we’ll happen. On Nov. 4 they’ll be too busy shopping at Whole Foods for the big Obama victory party. ’I’ve got the brie, I’ve got the free-range mushrooms, I’ve got the Tofu — I forgot to vote!”’ — Ferguson.

“How do you spend $150,000 on clothes in two months? What, do you buy the original ’Thriller’ jacket off of eBay?” — Jon Stewart, speaking about the Republican Party’s spending on Sarah Palin on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

“The only person McCain’s not talking about is George the President.” — Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.”

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A couple weeks ago I posted an item, subsequently printed on the TNT oped page, contending that the hands-off regulatory stance championed by former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan during the Clinton and Bush II administrations was a huge mistake.

Now Greenspan himself admits it. This, from his testimony today before a Congressional committee:

But in a tense exchange with Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the committee, Mr. Greenspan conceded a more serious flaw in his own philosophy that unfettered free markets sit at the root of a superior economy.

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.
“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Your obt. correspondent reports again from Ashland, Ore.:

If you're agog about -- or simply weary of -- the staggering amounts of money being spent on TV advertising in Washington's governor's race this year, it pales next to the TV ad spending in Oregon's U.S. Senate contest.

The total in the match between incumbent Republican Gordon Smith and Democratic challenger Jeff Merkeley has hit an astronomical $27 million, nearly doubling the previous record. That was the $14.7 million spent in Oregon's 2006 governor's race.

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