From the Post:

Putnam Investments has closed a $12.3 billion money-market fund to limit losses to its investors, the large mutual fund company said today. The highly unusual announcement is the latest sign that tremendous financial pressures are now threatening even some of the safest kinds of investments.

The Prime Money Market Fund was open only to institutional investors. Putnam said in a statement that its board decided to close the fund last night after receiving a large number of redemption requests. The company said it could honor those requests only by selling assets at a loss, reducing the value of the remaining shares.

Putnam said it decided instead to liquidate the fund and spread any losses evenly among all the investors. “We wanted to treat all shareholders equally,” said spokeswoman Laura McNamara. She said it was “premature” to discuss how much of a loss, if any, shareholders will incur.

Sarah Palin needs to have the Bush Doctrine explained to her by Charlie Gibson:

I try to keep this blog clean, so I’m not going to type anymore right now.

You can calculate your Obama tax cut here: ObamaTaxCut.com.

The McCain campaign is getting awfully touchy since Sarah Palin came on board.  Today, at a campaign stop in Virginia, Barack Obama used a common idiom to describe the latest McCain campaign theme:

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin’s new “change” mantra.

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said as the crowd cheered. “It’s still a pig.”

“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink.”

“We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

Playing the hurt feelings card, Jane Swift, the head of the McCain campaign’s “Palin Truth Squad”, had this response:

Speaking on behalf of the McCain campaign, former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift tonight flatly stated that Obama had called Palin a pig.

“[T]he formation of the Palin Truth Squad couldn’t have happened too soon, as we saw when Sen. Obama in Lebanon, Va., this evening uttered what I can only deem to be disgraceful comments comparing our vice presidential nominee Gov. Palin to a pig,” Swift said.

“Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology,” she said.

Later she would suggest that Obama had called McCain a stinky fish.  Seriously.

It sounds to me like Swift said something really dumb, realized it, but didn’t want to reverse herself.  So she tried to rationalize it, to make it sound not-so-dumb:

When one reporter asked Swift why she assumed the remarks were directed at Palin, Swift replied: “It seemed to me a gendered comment. There’s only one woman in the race.”

“As far as I know, she’s the only one of the four — the presidential and vice presidential candidates — who wears lipstick,” Swift said.

But like I always say, you can’t polish a turd.  (No, I’m not calling Jane Swift a turd.)

Surprise.  I thought it was a great speech.  He made the decision to make a pretty big stylistic change in this one, getting much more into policy proposals.  At least, as much as you can do that in a stadium of 75,000 people.  He also rebutted all Republican attacks from this campaign as well as the last two 2004 and 2000, then prebutted attacks for the next two months.  I think he hit a home run.

That 75,000 number reminds me: why are Republicans trying to use his appeal against him?  I guess its that Rove tactic where you attack your opponent’s greatest strengths.  But really, why is it a point of pride for McCain that he can’t draw a crowd remotely that size?

And what a great call by his campaign to open up the convention and have this event in a stadium.  When the cameras panned the crowd, instead of Democratic conventioneers, you saw an incredible cross-section of Americans.  And considering some of the conventioneers I saw in the television coverage earlier this week, I think that was a wise move.

Finally, I thought the bio video that they played before his speech was nice, but it left out what had to be a hugely influential moment of his life: