The Cubs lost to Milwaukee today, giving Milwaukee the wild-card and the Cubs home-field advantage on Wednesday against the Dodgers. I'll miss a good hunk of the second game, as it's against the Vice-Presidential debate Thursday (unless they schedule a day game). I sincerely hope that the Dodgers play no better than they did all season (4 games above .500 at this writing; their final game is in progress), but of course the Cubs winning the division series at home on Tuesday wouldn't be too awful.

I won't be live-blogging the debate; but Josh Marshall is.

Economist Paul Krugman today chastises just about everyone involved in the bailout meltdown this week:

[T]he grown-up thing is to do something to rescue the financial system. The big question is, are there any grown-ups around — and will they be able to take charge?

...

[T]here do seem to be some adults in Congress, ready to do something to help us get through this crisis. But the adults are not yet in charge.

On a related note, I commend to everyone Frederick Allen's Only Yesterday, published in 1932. It's a quick read, and if you lived through the last 10 years, it will seem eerily familiar. (Someone at UVA has put the entire book online, as it may now be in the public domain.)

If John McCain doesn't have the courage to debate Barack Obama, how's he going to stand up to Putin? Or José Zapatero, for that matter?

I don't read Maureen Dowd much any more, but yesterday she gave her column to Aaron Sorkin. Not bad:

BARTLET: Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.

OBAMA: What would you do?

BARTLET: GET ANGRIER!

Good advice, too.

Happy autumn, y'all.

That is all.

At the first Cubs game I went to the season, the very first pitch wound up on Waveland Avenue. The Brewers won that game 8-2, and we Cubs fans figured that would set the stage for the entire season.

Well, the Brewers lost last night, and the Cubs' magic number fell to 1 (against the Brewers). Except that yesterday, the Cubs played St. Louis, who got a grand slam in the 1st which pretty much set the stage for the game. Final scoreboard:

Let's look at that close-up...

Mark Morford thinks she-who-will-no-longer-be-named-on-this-blog-because-she's-not-running-for-President is per se an insult to women's rights, and I have to agree:

[Thinking women] say: You've got to be kidding me. They say: This is what we get? This could be our historic role model? Two hundred years (OK, more like 2000) of struggle, only to have this nasty caricature of femininity try to hijack and mock and undermine it all?

...

WTF? Could it be true? Are cadres of formerly Obama-leaning white women really so enchanted by [her] gender and motherhood status that they openly ignore the fact that she basically wants to shove women's rights back about five decades? Can it be so simple, crude, sad?

But again, let us all remember, her purpose is to distract voters from the inconvenient fact that McCain is long past his "sell-by" date, and should under no circumstances be allowed anywhere near the nuclear launch codes, just in case he mistakes another NATO leader for Che Guevara.