Like Atrios, I haven’t really paid any attention to the North Carolina Senate race and thus don’t know anything about it beyond the fact that Democratic challenger Kay Hagan seems to have an improbably good chance of winning. So I thought I might poke around at her website, and she turns out to be . . . a mass transit advocate just like me like and Atrios. Her energy plan devotes substantial space to the idea that increased investments in mass transit infrastructure will boost economic growth while also helping to clean up the environment.

An economic downturn is the best time to start working on the big new infrastructure projects that, among other things, will partially determine the contours of future growth when the next upswing begins. It’d be really nice for the country to be smart about this stuff if, as seems likely to me, we have a renewed push for economic stimulus early next year.

When I heard Sarah Palin say at the VP debate that she’d had the Alaska Permanent Fund divest from Sudan to protest the Sudanese government’s actions in Darfur, I assumed that she had, in fact, had the Alaska Permanent Fund divest from Sudan. On the one hand, it was a totally plausible story — a lot of publicly controlled funds have divested. And on the other hand, it would be bizarre to tell such a straightforward lie. And yet lie she did:

“The [Palin] administration killed our bill,” said Alaska state representative Les Gara, D-Anchorage. Gara and state Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage, co-sponsored a resolution early this year to force the Alaska Permanent Fund – a $40 billion investment fund, a portion of whose dividends are distributed annually to state residents – to divest millions of dollars in holdings tied to the Sudanese government.

In an e-mail later, Gara clarified that he believed opposition from the Palin administration helped kill his bill, but was not solely responsible for its death.

Bizarre.

Brad DeLong calls our attention to the fact that Bobby May is part of the McCain-Palin Virginia Leadership Team, and Treasurer of the Buchanan County (VA) Republican Party. And also author of a pamphlet claiming that Barack Obama favors “Mandatory Black Liberation Theology classes,” would make Al Sharpton Secretary of State, would “hire rapper Ludacris” to paint the White House black,” wants to increase US development assistance so that unnamed African relatives of Obama’s can “skim off enough to allow them to free their goats,” would make Palestine an American state, and change the national anthem to “‘The Black National Anthem’ by James Weldon Johnson.”

As I said yesterday I think we should expect to see a lot more of this kind of this kind of thing if Obama wins the election.

The McCain plan:

Mr. McCain’s advisers said their hope was that the issue of the economy would recede somewhat from the public consciousness, now that Congress has passed a bailout plan, and open the way to try to turn the contest back into a referendum on Mr. Obama’s credentials. They argued that given everything that had happened, Mr. McCain remained in easy distance of Mr. Obama, evidence of what they said were underlying problems with his appeal.

That seems unlikely to me. The nature of the financial crisis certain did provoke a white knuckle tone to press coverage of the economy that’s unusual. But dramatic financial crisis or no dramatic financial crisis, the combination of job losses and near-universal agreement that we’re in for a recession would seem to guarantee a hefty focus on the economy. You could imagine something changing that — a terrorist attack or some kind of foreign crisis could easily push the economy off the front pages temporarily — but it’s hard to imagine it happening just as a process of fading.

Iceland, like various other countries, has recently had to bail out a major bank. And like other countries, it looks like there may be more bank failures on the horizon. But where Iceland differs from other countries is that it’s tiny — fewer than 300,000 people live there — so that even though it’s a prosperous country, it simply doesn’t have very much money in the aggregate. And while its banks aren’t huge, they are quite large relative to the overall size of the Icelandic economy. Consequently, Iceland’s bank nationalization is leaving the country as a whole in need of a bailout.

Financial problems aside, Iceland’s one heck of a nice country. Absolutely beautiful and blessed with abundant reserves of puffins, hydropower, fish, and Bjork. Ultimately, taking over Iceland could be an excellent long-term move for a great power on the rise. Maybe China wants a new colony? After all, the US shut down the Keflavik Naval Air Station last year so it’s a wide open field.

UPDATE: More here from the Observer. Joking aside, the situation is quite serious: “Yesterday people were buying up supplies of olive oil and pasta after a supermarket spokesman announced on Friday night that they had no means of paying the foreign currency advances needed to import more foodstuffs.”