Merry New Year!

I hope 2009 does not stink as badly as I fear it is going to stink, so here's a little happy happy music!

Cool Quotes From Paul Krugman's Blog

Yesterday, on Krugman's blog:

And here’s a trip down memory lane:

“A national severe price distortion seems most unlikely in the United States” — Alan Greenspan, October 2004.

“Homebuilders led the stock parade this week with a fantastic 11 percent gain. This is a group that hedge funds and bubbleheads love to hate. All the bond bears have been dead wrong in predicting sky-high mortgage rates. So have all the bubbleheads who expect housing-price crashes in Las Vegas or Naples, Florida, to bring down the consumer, the rest of the economy, and the entire stock market.” — Larry Kudlow, June 2005.

“I suspect that we are coming to the end of this downtrend, as applications for new mortgages, the most important series, have flattened out .. I think the worst of this may well be over.” Alan Greenspan, October 2006.

“The housing market is at or near the bottom.” Henry Paulson, April 2007.

Thanks for nothin', idiots!

Awesome Headline...

Wonkette from yesterday: Bristol Palin finally crapped out her kid, Tripp Easton Von Dildo Palin Aniston Mozzarella Stick Johnston.

We Are All Roland Burris

...Even his kids. From Wonkette:

Roland Burris Has Already Constructed His Terrifying Death Chamber


Wonkette grave-robbing operative “Vasyl” sends us this hilarious bit of information about your would-be new junior Senator from Illinois, Roland “Don’t Lynch Me” Burris: “Just so you know, that nice old black man who is set to become the next US Senator from Illinois is well prepared. He has already built a tombstone — actually, more of a monument — with all his accomplishments listed on it. Planning ahead, he has left extra space for additional accomplishments. Also, Roland Burris’s children? They’re named Roland II and Rolanda. No joke.” HMM… It appears that there is much to learn about this so-called “Roland Burris.”

GIMMEE MY MILK!

The Good Ol' Texas Ratio

From the awesome website lolfed.com, which is tropes on lolcat.com, which is itself a poor version of icanhascheezburger.com, comes the following post, reprinted here in full, as I could not link to it:

There’s an antiquated notion that, perhaps, banks should have more equity and loan-loss reserves than they do nonperforming loans. It comes in handy when banks try to do things like not fail.

In the 1980s, a metric came out of RBC Capital Markets (best associated with Gerard Cassidy) called the “Texas Ratio,” so named for the performance of banks in Texas during the 1980s, and retested in New England in the early 90s. It’s not so complicated; you divide the total of the bank’s nonperforming loans by its total equity+loan loss reserves, and if the ratio is 1:1 (or, worse, 2:1, or higher) you start Photoshopping the bank’s logo onto a sinking boat and posting about it on LOLFed.

Today, LewRockwell.com took this formula - with a variation to account for gov’t-guaranteed debts - and ran the numbers for all the banks in the United States. You might as well look your bank up, though it won’t necessarily give you a warm fuzzy feeling when you do it. A “100″ in their formula is the equivalent of a 1:1 Texas ratio, that is, a bank with bad loans equal to its reserves; any number higher than 100 means they already have more bad loans than reserves. There are a lot of banks to which that applies. Back in May, Cassidy ran the Texas ratio for US banks and predicted at least 150 upcoming failures. LewRockwell’s numbers are probably even less rosy.

Looking at the banks with the better Texas ratios, you will notice many of them have hit the TARP hard. Once our TARP application is approved and we become a bank holding company, we’ll be known as the LOLFed Bank of Bartertown and Cheap Scotch, N.A. We’ll do our best to keep our Texas ratio down.

Sad But True...

True that post by John Aravosis at Americablog about how if everybody cuts spending in order to save their money in case things tank, things will tank. Reprinted here in full:

Krugman wrote a column the other day about how state governments are cutting back spending, at at a time that we need them to keep spending, and even increase spending.

It’s true that the economy is currently shrinking. But that’s the result of a slump in private spending. It makes no sense to add to the problem by cutting public spending, too.

It's the same problem we see with private spending, spending by you and me. It makes sense that you're cutting back your spending, just in case the economy REALLY goes south. But the thing that just might send the economy REALLY south is all of us collectively cutting back our spending. Thus, the precaution leads to the very problem. Ironically, Bush's then-ridiculous advice last year to "spend money" was spot on. But how can you spend when you're afraid that your employer won't spend, but will instead cut back themselves and fire you? It's all one big prisoner's dilemma (or, tragedy of the commons).

[A] dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared resource even where it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen.

In other words, it makes sense for YOU personally to stop spending and save your money, but if we all do it, we're screwed. If we all spend, perhaps we're not screwed (and that's part of the problem - there is no guarantee that spending wildly will save any of incomes).

Price Discovery? No Thanks!

Cool post by Yves over at Naked Capitalism, where he discusses how most banks are toast in spite of the huge capital infusions from the government. The salient point is this:

Repeat after me: you need recapitalization AND price discovery. The near pathological avoidance of the latter by the officialdom would seem to support widespread suspicions that marking assets to market, or even a realistic notion of longer-term value, would confirm that the industry is insolvent.

Price discovery is where you let the market (remember it?) decide, based on supply and demand (remember them?), what a commodity is worth. But what would happen if banks admit that a lot of the paper they hold is worthless and that they are basically insolvent because they are so over-leveraged? Sounds pretty scary to me, but at least we wouldn't by giving the money we're printing to the crooks who got us all in trouble in the first place.

Dude! Your Name!

Awesome article in Business Week about Anurag Dikshit, the founder of an internet gambling site who's now in trouble with the feds. It's got a lot of great lines, like:

Apparently, U.S. officials don’t believe Dikshit is a flight risk.

and:

Dikshit has already paid the first $100 million installment.

Mr. Mortgage's Recipe for Fixing the Housing Mess

Mr. Mortgage, who maintains the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter website (worth bookmarking cuz it's chock-full of good information, daily updates, and useful links about the real estate/mortgage biz), wrote an awesome article about the real roots of housing crisis. His recipe for helping homeowners out of their current troubles makes a lot of sense:

It is time for the very same financial institutions that created all of this to do what’s right and re-underwrite every loan originated between 2003 - 2007 using prudent underwriting guidelines. Then, they must reduce the principal balance to what the borrower really earns using a 28% housing and 36% total debt-to-income ratio at a market rate 30-year fixed loan. When home owners are levered to 28/36 DTI they are able to save money and live a decent lifestyle. If they go upside down in their property who cares - they are still able to save money and live the lifestyle their income level allows. At 28/36, their home once again becomes a place to live.

If reducing the principal balance to 28/36 on a market rate 30-year fixed loan winds up being $100k lower than the present value of the home, the bank should receive the differential through an equity warrant to 90% of the value of the property. This way the home owner is not upside down in the home, they can freely sell or refi, they are not getting anything more than they deserve and the bank is still protected. But the home owner gets all of the upside. Anything less and the program will fail. If the borrowers can’t prove income through bank statements at the very least, then they need to leave the house and rent. They should have been renters all along.

For the small percentage of folks who can afford the payments with DTI’s under 28/36 but are underwater solely due to house price depreciation, principal balance reductions to 90% of the present value of the property is likely in order WITH a full-recourse provision to thwart fraud.

For the minority with equity who may owe $200k on a $400k home or have no mortgage at all, you get a multi-year tax break and a lollipop. By de-leveraging and stabilizing the consumer, you will stabilize house prices much faster, which will benefit you. Left unchecked and the consumer de-leveraging and housing price depreciation will continue for years, which brings you down too. You may end up underwater in your home unless the right solution is brought forth.

These things will not prevent housing prices from coming down over the next few years to reach a level of affordability consistent with present mortgage rates and lending guidelines. But at least it would be the best way to begin to undo the irresponsibility of the past five years and get back to basics where house prices and affordability are based primarily on traditional factors such as rents, incomes, interest rates, macroeconomic conditions and sentiment.

This would of course be a tough pill for the banks and investors to swallow, but Mr. Mortgage makes a good case that it's really all their fault.

Passive Homes!

The New York times has a neat article about ultra-energy-efficient passive homes. Apparently, this type of "manufactured" home is all the rage in Germany. Touch my monkey! Here's a cool website about passive home design in the US.

On Being WaMu

Long, detailed NYT piece on Washington Mutual's crazy lending practices. Fun example:

On another occasion, Ms. Zaback (a mortgage screener for WaMu - ed.) asked a loan officer for verification of an applicant’s assets. The officer sent a letter from a bank showing a balance of about $150,000 in the borrower’s account, she recalled. But when Ms. Zaback called the bank to confirm, she was told the balance was only $5,000.

The loan officer yelled at her, Ms. Zaback recalled. “She said, ‘We don’t call the bank to verify.’ ” Ms. Zaback said she told Mr. Parsons that she no longer wanted to work with that loan officer, but he replied: “Too bad.”

SEC = Morons!

Here's the link to the letter that guy wrote to the SEC in 2005 about how the Madoff fund was a Ponzi scheme - it's a 19 page PDF. In its defense, the SEC stated that the letter was short on details, and that is why they did not act. I read the whole thing, not understanding most of it of course, and it is nothing if not detailed. Whoever read this letter and decided to ignore it should have a live python stuck up his or her a*s!

Happy Christmas Your Arse!

The best (but saddest) Christmas song ever written!

46% of Kids do not Finish College...

...But their loans live on forever! Neat piece by Zac Bissonnette, a precocious 19-year-old at Zoo Mass Amherst who can afford a lot of double consonants in his name:

But there are plenty of four-year colleges willing to take the money of anyone who can pony up -- whether that money comes from parents, the government, or that student's paychecks until he’s old enough to buy a discounted movie ticket. These colleges have seats to fill and bills to pay, and sure, they'd all love to be Harvard, but they'll take what they can get. And student lenders? They have absolutely no incentive to encourage responsible borrowing because they will get paid back -- you can file for bankruptcy 400 times, and your student loans will still be there, with interest and penalties accruing daily.

Ponzi Schemin'

Awesome post by Michael Hudson in Counterpunch about the original Ponzi scheme, the 2006 Spanish stamp fund scandal, and how the financial markets really are a Ponzi scheme after all:

We have entered an era in which financial markets resemble the stamp-buying funds. Governments have replaced industrial growth with purely financial wealth creation in the form of a real estate and stock market bubble. This has turned the economic universe upside-down relative to what the classical writers expected to result from the technological progress unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and its parallel agricultural, commercial and financial revolutions. Property and credit have become costs instead of a benefit, institutional forms of rent- and interest-extracting overhead rather than helpful inputs.

23/6 Says Be Happy You're Not Mrs. Ted Haggard

Good ol' 23/6:

Remember this lady? Her husband, former Evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, admitted to having sex and meth with a male prostitute. Ted was removed from his position at the influential New Life Church, then kicked out of a de-gaying program and is now trying to sell insurance in Arizona. The couple, who have five children, are still married.

[snip]

Imagine for a second that you take your marriage vows seriously. For Evangelicals, "in sickness and in health" is a catch-all that includes, "gay or straight." And Gayle's husband is ill. Very ill. Ted's fever for d*ck has left a cucumber-sized tumor in his mouth. If this lady were you or me, we would introduce him to our friend Bruce from college and wish them well. But this is Gayle. According to every truth she holds self-evident, she must stay and make this marriage work.

The fall from Pastor's Wife to Uncloseted Gay Insurance Salesman's Beard is a long, hard one. No matter what happens during this tough recession, let us be thankful that we are this one thing: not Gayle Haggard.

I'm Gonna Kick Some A*s With My Own Pipe Wrench!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Krugman on Madoff...

...and how Madoff was not all that different from Wall Street business as usual:

Well, Mr. Madoff allegedly skipped a few steps, simply stealing his clients’ money rather than collecting big fees while exposing investors to risks they didn’t understand. And while Mr. Madoff was apparently a self-conscious fraud, many people on Wall Street believed their own hype. Still, the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.

More Change You Can Stick in Your Crack Pipe and Smoke it!

Interesting article about Obama's pick to head the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler. The upshot:

The choice of Gensler for that mission is ironic. While in the Clinton administration, the former assistant Treasury secretary helped oppose regulation of the exotic derivatives at the center of the financial crisis.

That pretty much describes everybody on Obama's economic team.

HHHHOOOOLLLLLYYYY CCCCRRRRAAAAAPPPP!!!!

A must-read post by Rob Patterson on the key points of the Boyd 2008 Meeting, a group looking to apply the theories of John Boyd, an influential military strategist, to survive what they see as the coming economic and political unraveling. Here are Patterson's first two bullet points:

• That there is no soft landing. We are not in a recession. We are not even in a depression. We are at the end of an era. The Tipping Point is of course the financial collapse. The Vast Ponzi Scheme of our financial world - with the vast sums in the Derivative Market and the Credit Bubble all in effect lost - cannot be saved. There is not enough money in the national accounts to pull this back.

• The search for efficiency and the urge to consume has set us all up like a row of dominoes - there is no buffer, no resiliency. As one problem rises it causes another. As one solution is tried it drives another problem. We all pull back and the consumer economy stalls. The auto industry and credit firms feeds the media (40% of conventional advertising). Papers and TV and Radio networks, many subject to LBO's will have to fail as per the Tribune. Every sector will be laying people off. Sales of all things fall off a cliff - driving more business failures and layoffs. Cities and states that depend on sales tax and property tax and the credit markets can rely on none of these. So they too will have to lay off millions - thus making all the problems worse. National governments will be asked to save us all and of course cannot. As States and Cities get squeezed and cannot borrow, they will too lay off millions - teachers, firemen police. No one will be safe.

Read the whole thing!

Alexander Cockburn On Madoff

Interesting article in Counterpunch about how the Madoff fiasco is disproportionally affecting Jews:

It’s not just ruined heiresses in the Palm Beach Country Club now faced with the prospect of dividing the contents of the Whiskas can into two equal portions for mistress and cat, it’s academics on Ivy League campuses, doctors in Santa Monica, rich people from Boston to San Francisco to the West Side of Los Angeles finding their retirement nest eggs or charitable trusts wiped out overnight.

The True Story of Bush and the Shoes...

Awesome Gawker Piece About Shana Madoff!

Pretty funny. So Shana Madoff, Bernie Madoff's niece, married a lawyer at the SEC. Apparently, her job at the family firm was keeping regulators at bay. Talk about taking your job seriously!

Gloom & Doom from Mike Whitney Part 6,721,452

Mike Whitney from Counterpunch argues that the Fed's massive injection of liquidity into the financial system is having little effect. He quotes Christopher Woods from the Wall Street Journal:

"The origins of the modern conventional wisdom lies in the simplistic monetarist interpretation of the Great Depression popularized by Milton Friedman and taught to generations of economics students ever since. This argued that the Great Depression could have been avoided if the Federal Reserve had been more proactive about printing money. Yet the Japanese experience of the 1990s -- persistent deflationary malaise unresponsive to near zero-percent interest rates -- shows that it is not so easy to inflate one's way out of a debt bust."

Whitney goes on to say:

The Fed has increased the money supply at an unprecedented pace and expanded its balance sheet to $2.25 trillion, but velocity is down. [snip] According to the Wall Street Journal, " the issuance of nonagency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in America has plunged by 98 per cent year-on-year to a monthly average of $0.82 billion in the past four months, down from a peak of $136 billion in June 2006. There has been no new issuance in commercial MBS since July. This collapse in securitization is intensely deflationary."

Whitney thinks there is not going to be any real structural change out of Obama's economic team, which is the only thing that can restore confidence in the financial system. He writes:

And how can confidence be strengthened when no one pays for predatory lending, ratings manipulation, malfeasance, fraud, or any other white collar crime? So far, not one indictment has been served in the biggest financial swindle of all time. That's not how a "rules-based" system is supposed to operate.

[snip]

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and presidential adviser Lawrence Summers believe they can fire off a stimulus salvo and put the economy back on track, but it will take more than that. The financial system needs fundamental structural reform and both men rose to power because they proved themselves defenders of the status quo. Geithner and Summers may nibble at the edges and make grandiloquent proclamations about rebuilding the system, but when it’s time to pull the trigger, they will subvert every attempt to regulate or oversee the system which they feel is the sole province of the establishment elites who own the big financial institutions. There's bound to be plenty of blasting trumpets and celebratory confetti to greet Obama's economic whiz kids. Just don't expect change. Barring a complete economic meltdown, the rot at the heart of the system will continue to fester and grow under Obama just as it did under Bush and Clinton.

Since I'm an Obamacynic, I agree 100%. So what's in store? A long, deep recession. Read the whole piece!

Avian Mental Health Break

Really?

Hall & Oates Say Goodbye to Alan Colmes!

Pretty funny bit on the Daily Show.

Katha Pollitt Tears Bill Ayers a New One!

It couldn't have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama's best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday's New York Times op-ed page, he announced that "it's finally time to tell my true story." Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , "The Real Bill Ayers" is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left.

Ouch! Read the whole post here.

Colin Powell to Sarah Palin: GFY!

I think GFY should enter the texting lexicon like IMHO or LOL. It's sure succinct: Go F* Yourself! Anyway, here's what Colin Powell, speaking to Fareed Zakaria on CNN, had to say about Sarah Palin:

"Gov. Palin, to some extent, pushed the party more to the right, and I think she had something of a polarizing effect when she talked about how small town values are good. Well, most of us don’t live in small towns. And I was raised in the South Bronx, and there’s nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx.

And when they came to Virginia and said the southern part of Virginia is good and the northern part of Virginia is bad. The only problem with that is there are more votes in the northern part of Virginia than there are in the southern part of Virginia, so that doesn’t work."

The YouTube video is posted on Think Progress. The 1st comment in the comments section is pretty funny:

1. shoeless Says:

   ---

   Well, most of us don’t live in small towns.

   That’s why they are small.

   December 11th, 2008 at 5:05 pm

   ---

Friday Night Talking Cat Blogging

Donde es el Joe Stiglitz?

Interesting article by Michael Hirsh in Newsweek, wondering why NYU economist and Nobel price winner Joseph Stiglitz has not yet been offered a position on Obama's economic team. He's been a vocal critic of Rubin's and Summers' policies for years, so they don't like him much:

No surprise there. Stiglitz, more than anyone on the Washington scene, was the biggest fly in the ointment of "free-market fundamentalism" pressed on the world in the '90s by Summers, Geithner and their mentor, former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin—advice that has now contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It's not just that Stiglitz's Nobel-winning work, building on John Maynard Keynes's insights, uncovered profound fallacies in the Reagan-era idea that markets, especially in finance, can always correct themselves (good call, Nobel committee). In his writings and speeches since serving as chairman of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors and then chief economist of the World Bank, Stiglitz has been the leading voice opposed to the mindless liberalization of capital flows that brought us to where we are today.

Everyone's a Critic!

Apparently, karaoke is quite the rage in Malaysia, but bad karaoke etiquette will get you killed. From the New York Times:

A 23-year-old Malaysian man was killed on Thursday night after reportedly enraging other customers who felt that he “hogged the microphone” at what Malaysia’s Star Online described as “a coffeeshop-cum-karaoke outlet” in the town of Sandakan, on the island of Borneo.

Goth Cruise!

Prison with a chance of drowning, but with freaks!


Goth Cruise the Movie trailer - a 'Gothumentary' from jeanie finlay on Vimeo.

Guillermo Rodriguez in Twilight

And in The Bourne Supremacy

Paul Krugman's Suggestions For "Fixing" the Economy

But will the gummint do it? And will it work?

Rick Astley Rick-Rolls Some Preschoolers

First, from Wikipedia, a definition of Rick-Rolling:

Rickrolling is an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link given and is led to the web page he/she is said to have been "Rickrolled" (also spelled Rickroll'd). By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive.

Read the whole Wiki post - it's pretty funny. Here's Rick Astley doing the Rick-Rolling at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade yesterday:

When Private Ain't Really Private

Interesting post from Dan Savage on the fallout over the resignation (under pressure) of the director of the LA Film Festival, Richard Raddon, after it became public that he donated $1500 to the Yes on 8 campaign.

Thank You Sarah Palin!

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Fed Pledges up to $7.4 Trillion for Bailout!

So Bloomberg reports. And with very little transparancy. Check out Bernanke:

“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,” Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that’s counterproductive.”

Things are too crazy for words...

Sunday Night Tahitian Pearl Blogging

Tahitian pearls come in a variety of cool colors, including green, purple, blue, pistachio, white, grey, and yellow. They are grown in the warm waters of French Polynesia in the South Pacific.

NY Times on Citigroup

Excellent article about the Citigroup mess, including the role played by Robert Rubin. A sample:

The bank’s downfall was years in the making and involved many in its hierarchy, particularly [CEO] Mr. [Charles O.] Prince and Robert E. Rubin, an influential director and senior adviser.

Citigroup insiders and analysts say that Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin played pivotal roles in the bank’s current woes, by drafting and blessing a strategy that involved taking greater trading risks to expand its business and reap higher profits. Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin both declined to comment for this article.

When he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible by allowing banks to expand far beyond their traditional role as lenders and permitting them to profit from a variety of financial activities. During the same period he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent.

As y'all know, Robert Rubin is an economic adviser on the Obama transition team. More change we can believe in!

Awesome Obama Impression

Shiver Me Timbers!

From The Globe & Mail, and awesome phony Bloomberg story making the rounds on Wall Street:

Somali Pirates in Discussions to Acquire Citigroup

By Andreas Hippin
November 20 (Bloomberg) -- The Somali pirates, renegade Somalis known for hijacking ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden, are negotiating a purchase of Citigroup.

The pirates would buy Citigroup with new debt and their existing cash stockpiles, earned most recently from hijacking numerous ships, including most recently a $200 million Saudi Arabian oil tanker. The Somali pirates are offering up to $0.10 per share for Citigroup, pirate spokesman Sugule Ali said earlier today. The negotiations have entered the final stage, Ali said.

"You may not like our price, but we are not in the business of paying for things. Be happy we are in the mood to offer the shareholders anything," said Ali.

The pirates will finance part of the purchase by selling new Pirate Ransom Backed Securities. The PRBS's are backed by the cash flows from future ransom payments from hijackings in the Gulf of Aden. Moody's and S&P have already issued their top investment grade ratings for the PRBS's.

Head pirate, Ubu Kalid Shandu, said: "We need a bank so that we have a place to keep all of our ransom money. Thankfully, the dislocations in the capital markets has allowed us to purchase Citigroup at an attractive valuation and to take advantage of TARP capital to grow the business even faster."

Shandu added, "We don't call ourselves pirates. We are coastguards and this will just allow us to guard our coasts better."

*CITI IN TALKS WITH SOMALI PIRATES FOR POSSIBLE CAPITAL INFUSION

*WILL REQUIRE ALL CITI EMPLOYEES TO WEAR PATCH OVER ONE EYE

*SOMALIAN PIRATES APPLY TO BECOME BANK TO ACCESS TARP

*PAULSON: TARP PIRATE EQUITY IS AN `INVESTMENT,' WILL PAY OFF

*KASHKARI SAYS `SOMALI PIRATES ARE 'FUNDAMENTALLY SOUND' '

*Moody's upgrade Somali Pirates to AAA

*HUD SAYS SOMALI DHOW FORECLOSURE PROGRAM HAD `VERY LOW' PARTICPATION

Wednesday Night Eres Tu Blogging

Wonderfully sappy song from 1973 Spain. How could Franco let this happen?

China Rising?

Somewhat long, complicated, interesting article about the interconnectedness of the global economic system. Sample graph:

So far China has been relatively unaffected by the worst insanities of the investment markets. The Financial Times reported a story that did the rounds in Beijing: "At a secret meeting of top Communist officials at the start of this decade, Zhu Rongji, then China's premier, summoned senior academics and finance officials to teach a crash course on complex financial instruments. Financial derivatives. . . were described as like putting a mirror in front of another mirror, allowing a physical object to be reflected into infinity." This is a good description of a mechanism with a worldwide value of more than a $1,000 trillion - the equivalent of 20 years' global production - resting on sand.

Cheezeburger Funny!

Awesome, though very cheesy, website for cat- and animal-lovers!

How Prop 8 May Go Down...

Very interesting point about the courts and Prop 8 from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers, quoted in full:

The critical point that is put forward in every brief seeking Prop 8's invalidation is that Prop 8 stands for more than gay marriage: it stands for the premise that any minority group can suddenly be targeted by the majority for discrimination. It essentially eviscerates the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution. This because a) the Supreme Court has held (in Perez, some 20 years before Loving) that marriage is a fundamental right and b) in the Marriage Cases, that homosexuals are a suspect class. Unless Prop 8 somehow by implication reversed either of those, Prop 8 means that any time we wanted to be mean to some minority group, we could.

So, just to help you think about this a little more clearly: Prop 8 stands for the idea that we could put on the ballot tomorrow the question of whether Catholics could marry. We could also put on the ballot the question of whether someone with HIV could vote or own property. We could put on the ballot the question of whether mexican catholics can be discriminated against in housing or employment.

You just don't get, do you, up in your ivory tower, that the courts are the ultimate backstop for human rights. Remind me, did desegregation come because of a referendum? No, that was Brown v. Board. Oh, and wait. How about interracial marriage? Nope, that was Perez in California and Loving v. Virginia federally. And I will wager a year's salary that in both cases, had the question been put to a vote, it would have come out completely differently. And if it were put to voters today, I have no confidence that they would vote to sustain them.

That's the point of the Equal Protection Clause. (Aside--do you then also disagree with Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas?) The rights of minorities aren't subject to extinction by the majority's fiat.

Happy 100th Post!

30 Reasons why we're screwed! Read it and weep!

Paul Craig Roberts on the Detroit Bailout

Fantastic article by former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, advocating the bailout of the Big 3 automakers. Read it!

Tasty!

Awesome article about Texas BBQ by Calvin Trillin.

Dummkopfen Sunday Night Blogging

From Rasmussen:

When asked to choose among some of the GOP’s top names for their choice for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, 64% say Palin. The next closest contenders are two former governors and unsuccessful challengers for the presidential nomination this year -- Mike Huckabee of Arkansas with 12% support and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 11%.

Lieberman Should Go!

I agree with David Lindorff - the Democrats should show some backbone and kick Lieberman out of their caucus. As Lindorff writes,

The other reason to shun Lieberman, and to cast him into the legislative purgatory he so richly deserves, is that it would be an object lesson to other potential Iagos in the party’s legislative ranks that such treachery will not be tolerated. What, after all, is the point of having a party at all, if its members can be as back-stabbing as Lieberman and get away with it?

It would be a good lesson to the Democrats of the state of Connecticut, too, who voted in a Democratic primary two years ago to oust Lieberman as their candidate for re-election, but who then turned around and joined Republicans in re-electing him when he ran as an independent against a Republican challenger and against Ned Lamont, the Democrat who had bested him in the primary. This was treachery by a class of Democrats in the state of Connecticut that should also not go unpunished. Connecticut voters should no longer have the benefit of a powerful senator with seniority when that senator has so betrayed his party.

However, I will not hold my breath, as Democrats are notoriously lame.

Scary Article About the US Economy

Scary news all around! Scary graph:

The notion that consumer prices have to fall because of a recession is pure nonsense. This argument is rooted in fantasy and demonstrates a total lack of understanding of how money works. The more money that is made available, the higher nominal prices will go – regardless of economic growth. We have already gotten one stimulus so far in 2008. It is a good bet another will be in place for the critical holiday shopping season. A shopping hiatus during this holiday season will be catastrophic. If you think the number of Chapter 11 filings is high now, wait until after 1/1/2009. In a $13 Trillion economy, 70% of which is consumer spending a mere 10% cutback in consumer spending (we’re more than a quarter of the way there just in October) will amount to nearly a Trillion dollars yanked from the US economy or a 7% contraction in GDP. And that is just the result of a 10% cutback by consumers. These are the unintended consequences of building an economy on consumption. We’ve already got the recession. When the fresh fiat created to fatten bank balance sheets and lubricate credit markets works its way to Main Street, we’ll have rising consumer prices as well.

The upshot?

How does all this play into the Dollar? Quite simply, in the absence of tangible backing, a currency is backed by economic activity or perhaps implicitly by natural resources as in the case of Canada, Australia, and Russia. US economic growth is fading fast, and as for the full faith and credit of the US Government? Enough said. While there is no official measure of the full faith and credit aspect, the willingness of foreigners to buy debt is a pretty good proxy. And during the past two months, foreigners have been less than inspired to take on more US Government debt. In short, there is no fundamental reason whatsoever for the Dollar to gain value. The current situation is an opportunity to get real. Get real assets and buckle your seatbelts because the currencies of the world are about to play a good old-fashioned game of meet me at the bottom. Lucky for us Gold won’t be participating in the game.

Saturday Night Roman Moroni Blogging

Hitler Loses His McMansion

Bail Out Detroit?

Good overview of the pros and cons in The New Republic. Estimates are that 3M people would lose their jobs if the Big 3 go under, what with all of their subcontractors going under as well. The social cost of doing nothing would be much larger than the $25B the automakers are after, but would $25B really be enough?

That English Funny

Awesome website with funny English translations from all over the world, mostly from Asia! A taste:

Sheperd Smith Has Gone Rogue!

Talkin' trash on Fox News - says there's no liberal media!

Obama Will Break Your Heart

Sad but true post by Tom Engelhardt. Some interesting graphs:

Finally, President-elect Obama accepted the overall framework of a "Global War on Terror" during his presidential campaign. This "war" lies at the heart of the Bush administration's fantasy world of war that has set all-too-real expanses of the planet aflame. Its dangers were further highlighted this week by the New York Times, which revealed that secret orders in the spring of 2004 gave the U.S. military "new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States."

[snip]

...As head of the New America Foundation Steve Clemons has been writing recently, the economic team looks suspiciously as if it were preparing for a "Clinton 3.0" moment.

You could scan that gathering and not see a genuine rogue thinker in sight; no off-the-reservation figures who might represent a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking (other than, being hopeful, the president-elect himself). Clemons offers an interesting list of just some obvious names left off stage: "Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, James Galbraith, Leo Hindery, Clyde Prestowitz, Charlene Barshefsky, C. Fred Bergsten, Adam Posen, Robert Kuttner, Robert Samuelson, Alan Murray, William Bonvillian, Doug & Heidi Rediker, Bernard Schwartz, Tom Gallagher, Sheila Bair, Sherle Schwenninger, and Kevin Phillips."

Mobilizing a largely Clintonista brain trust may look reassuring to some -- an in-gathering of all the Washington wisdom available before Hurricane Bush/Cheney hit town, but unfortunately, we don't happen to be entering a Clinton 3.0 moment. What's globalizing now is American disaster, which threatens to level a vulnerable world.

Obama Won't be Able to do Much...

From a Der Spiegel interview with British Historian Niall Ferguson. Upshot:

SPIEGEL: So what can Obama do?

Ferguson: He can give a great inauguration speech.

SPIEGEL: And what else?

Ferguson: Give more great speeches.

SPIEGEL: He can't do more?

Ferguson: No, because he will have the least latitude of all presidents we can remember. Obama wants to assemble a nonpartisan government, and we will experience a more cautious first 100 days than we did under Bill Clinton. He will be cautious to the point of being boring. This will be precisely his great strength.

SPIEGEL: Where does the problem lie?

Ferguson: With Hank Paulson.

SPIEGEL: What does the current treasury secretary have to do with Obama?

Ferguson: Because of his big bailout plan, Paulson has already spent the money for Obama's healthcare reform and for his tax cuts. The money is gone.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Ferguson, we thank you for this interview.

Palin: McCain Camp Admits She's as Dumb as a Door Nail

Lovely!

5 Stupidest Things That Happened This Election

From 23/6 - super funny!

Sunday Night Psycho Train Blogging

"Psycho" by the post-grunge "Don't Ever Call us a Nirvana Cover Band" Band Puddle of Mudd, sung by a bunch of trains.

Former 49ers' Steve Young's Wife Active Against Prop 8

Interesting story here. Turns out former 49ers QB Steve Young is a Mormon, but not just any Mormon. He is the great-great-great grandson of Brigham Young. And his wife has donated $30,000 to the No on 8 campaign!

Bubbies & Schmendicks

Must-read article about Florida voting by Al Giordano from The Field.

Gotta Love This Blog!

From the blog "Margaret and Helen:"

My name is Helen Philpot. I am 82 years old. My grandson taught me how to do this so that I could “blog” with my best friend Margaret Schmechtman who I met in college almost 60 years ago. I have three children with my husband Harold. Margaret has three dogs with her husband Howard. I live in Texas and Margaret lives in Maine.

Check it out!

A Very Queer Halloween!

Plenty of awesome political gayness here.

Heartwarming Picture!

From Andrew Sullivan:

US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama supporters stand in the cold during a rally at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, October 28, 2008. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty. McCain canceled his Pennsylvania rally because of the weather.

Fox's Shepard Smith Disavows Joe the Plumber

From the Huffington Post:

So, Joe The Plumber was out on the trail with John McCain today, apparently giving the thumbs up to someone in the crowd who felt that an Obama Presidency would bring about the end of Israel. From Raw Story:

The Ohio plumber, who has no license and is actually named Samuel Wurzelbacher, spoke at a McCain campaign event in Columbus Monday. A McCain supporter asked if "a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel." JTP hardly batted an eye.

"I'll go ahead and agree with you on that," Wurzelbacher said.

Anyway, five minutes with Joe The Plumber had Shepard Smith so frustrated that the Fox anchor felt compelled to issue a disclaimer, immediately following the segment, pushing back on any notion that Obama would mean the "death of Israel," saying: "I just want to make this 100 percent perfectly clear -- Barack Obama has said repeatedly and demonstrated repeatedly that Israel will always be a friend of the United States, no matter what happens once he becomes President of the United States. His words." Smith later added, "The rest of it -- man...some things -- it just gets frightening sometimes. We'll be right back." I haven't seen Shep this broken up about the state of the world since Katrina.

More Palin Love (Not so Much!) From the McCain Campaign

From Politico's Mike Allen's Playbook Blog:

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, on a “demoralized” McCain campaign: “Palin is going to be the most vivid chapter of the McCain campaign's post-mortem. … Those loyal to McCain believe they have been unfairly blamed for over-handling Palin. They say they did the best they could with what they got.”

In convo with Playbook, a top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless “diva” description, calling her “a whack job.”

Priceless!

Wouldn't it be Swell! (HT Pam)

Dear Red States:

We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. It may even include Florida and Ohio, they are seriously considering it. We've given them until Nov. 4th to decide. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country. Since we're dropping the middle states we're calling it United America, or simply the U.A.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. You can take Ted Nugent. We're keeping Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. You get WorldCom and whatever lessons can be gathered from the crater of Enron. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get Ole' Miss. We get Harvard and 85 per cent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms, and the highest concentration of pregnant unwed teenagers. Please be aware that the U.A. will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, really we do, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

We'd rather spend it on taking care of sick people, and educating our children.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines, 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy Redies believe you are people with higher morals then we Bluies..

Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.

Peace out,
Blue States

The Tubes Are in Mourning!

Ted Stevens found guilty! Claims he's innocent! Still running for Senate!

Hagel calls a Palin a Palin

From a lengthy article about Senator Chuck Hagel:

Hagel may be the only senior Republican elected official who has publicly criticized McCain’s choice of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. “I don’t believe she’s qualified to be President of the United States,” Hagel told me. “The first judgment a potential President makes is who their running mate is—and I don’t think John made a very good selection.” He scoffed at McCain’s attempts to portray her as an experienced politician. “To try to make the excuse that she looks out her window and sees Russia—and that she’s commander of the Alaska National Guard.” He added, “There is no question that this candidate is arguably the thinnest-résumé candidate for Vice-President in the history of America.”

Ouch!

McCain and the Economy

Mark McKinnon, McCain's communications director during the primaries, wrote the following in The Daily Beast:

If not for a major economic event that interceded a few weeks ago (for which a strong majority of voters blame Republicans), this race might still be competitive. It isn’t Steve Schmidt’s fault. It’s the economy, stupid.

Josh Marshall from TPM thinks otherwise:

....I thought most observers were overstating the degree to which an economic crisis automatically advantaged the Democrat. To some degree, sure, especially in the dying days of an unpopular Republican incumbent. But remember, McCain's sell in this campaign was steadiness, experience, unflappability in a crisis. If he'd convinced voters that that was what he brought to the table, I do not believe the damage he sustained by the economic crisis would have been nearly so great. I continue to think that McCain's reaction to the economic crisis was the turning point in the election.

Alexander Cockburn On Obiden & McPalin

The whole article, found here is excellent, as usual. However, it is not safe reading for doctrinaire Democrats. Money graph:

Biden’s lucky in having an opponent for the vice presidential slot who’s now drawing about 95 per cent of the press coverage for the entire campaign. There’s no space for nasty questions about his very special relationship to MBNA, the largest independent credit card company in the world, or for the immense favors he did for the credit card industry as a whole with the bankruptcy bill that even Bill Clinton vetoed before Bush finally signed it. But did anything ever so clearly indicate the truly incredible stupidity of McCain’s team of strategists, handlers and consultants than the disaster the Palin candidacy has become?

Tom Harkin Spanks His Opponent

After a contentious Iowa debate in which Republican Senate candidate Christopher Reed called Senator Tom Harkin "Tokyo Rose" and "anti-American" and accused him of giving "aid and comfort to the enemy," Harkin did the following:

After the cameras were turned off, Harkin calmly told Reed: “You’re a nice young man and I thought you had a political future ahead of you but that just ended your political career right there” and walked away. Reed said nothing.

That's gonna leave a mark! You can read more here.

David Frum Takes McCain to the Woodshed

Read it here. For those of you unfamiliar with David Frum, he's the guy that coined the immortal words "Axis of Evil" for Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech. Of course, he's full of cr*p regarding "angry liberals" stiffling dissent (and a lot of other things), but it's interesting nevertheless. Money graph:

Sure enough, the base has responded. After months and months of wan enthusiasm among Republicans, these last weeks have at last energized the core of the party. But there's a downside: The very same campaign strategy that has belatedly mobilized the Republican core has alienated and offended the great national middle, which was the only place where the 2008 election could have been won.

Sunday Afternoon Limerick Blogging

I made this one up myself:

There once was a girl from Wasilla
At Obama she'd lob verbal missilla
McCain was too stupid to vet her
And things for Dems have never looked better
Now she's a Republican electoral prospect killa

Tina Brown on the Torrent of Republican Endorsements of Obama w/Some Thoughts About Palin Thrown In

Good stuff. 1st graph:

If one more Republican grandee or neoconservative bigwig endorses Obama, his campaign will collapse under the weight of counterintuitive adoration. It seems it’s not enough to garner the blessing of General Colin Powell; now he’s collected the imprimatur of the neocon foreign policy hawk Ken Adelman, the guy who introduced Dick Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz at a Washington brunch the day Reagan was sworn in. Adelman came out for Barry yesterday to George Packer on his New Yorker blog.

Get Thee Some Pearls Here!

How about some Saturday Night pearl blogging? We love ourselves some fancy yet well-priced Tahitian pearls. They are pretty because they come in all sorts of pretty colors, like green, aubergine, pistachio, yellow, blue, white, and yes, even gray! Sarah Palin would love herself some Tahitian pearls, but she'd never get them from our site because she likes paying retail.

Biden Laughs at Moron Interviewer's Moron Questions

Opie Cunningham!

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

8 Years Later...

Mas Rogue Por Favor!

Politico reports that Sarah Palin is beginning to disregard the advice of her handlers and is "going rogue," which is only adding to the tension in the rapidly sinking McCain campaign. Reminds me of Timothy Dalton as James Bond in Licence to Kill...

Awesome SNL Skit!

Bush, Palin, and McCain - it rules!

Financial Gloom & Doom From Mike Whitney Part 146,179

Full article here. Money graph:

The actions of the Fed, the Treasury and the FDIC are likely to cost in excess of $2 trillion. That does not include the trillions in market capitalization that are wiped out by plummeting home and stock prices. Nor does it include the incalculable suffering from rising unemployment, falling living standards, or personal hardship. Eventually, the Fed's emergency measures will result in higher taxes, soaring deficits and slower growth. As America's "consumer-based" economy flags and the recession deepens, capital will flee US Treasurys and securities and create a funding crisis. This may be hard to imagine, now that the dollar is strengthening and US Treasurys appear to be in great demand, but the handwriting is already on the wall.

As Iron Maiden said, run to the hills, runs for your lives.

Pretty is as Pretty Does!

Kathleen Parker writes a curious piece for National Review Online (NRO) that is instantly attacked by everyone else at NRO!

Expensive Lipstick on a Pig!

The New York Times reports that Sarah Palin's make-up artist was the highest-paid member of the McCain campaign staff for the 1st half of October - a whopping $11,400 a week!

Get Yer Cool Aid Here!

Excellent article about "investigative journalism" in the right-wing blogosphere.

Early Voting in Evansville, Indiana

From Ben Smith in Politico. Money graph:

For me the most moving moment came when the family in front of me, comprising probably 4 generations of voters (including an 18 year old girl voting for her first time and a 90-something hunched-over grandmother), got their turn to vote. When the old woman left the voting booth she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help we realized that she wasn't in trouble at all but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, that she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African-American for president.

Thursday Night Commie Folk Singer Blogging!

One of the best ever anti-war songs, Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy, starts at about 4:10. Pete Seeger - a real American hero!

Joe the Plumber is a Moron!

Excellent Rude Pundit post about Joe the Plumber. Here are a few PG-13-rated graphs:

...Wurzelbacher appeared on that Fox "news" model of journalistic ethics, Hannity and (to a lesser extent) Colmes. In two lines early in the interview, Wurzelbacher pretty much destroyed whatever sad little argument he might have had about why the rich shouldn't pay more taxes. Sean Hannity, who was practically humping the desk at the thought, asked Wurzelbacher of Barack Obama's tax plan, "Why do you view this as 'socialism,' because that's the word you used?"

Wurzelbacher never even realized the brutal irony and self-contradiction of his answer: "I grew up poor. You know I actually have been on welfare, you know, my parents, you know, a couple different times, and we'd, you know, worked harder and got off of it and then, you know, actually did fairly well."

A moment later, Alan Colmes, who always looks like speaking causes him endless pain, pointed out that Wurzelbacher would actually get a tax cut with Obama's plan. And then, in a line so pathetically filled with denial of who he was and where he came from, Wurzelbacher answered, "To be honest with you. You know I don't think it's right to -- you know, you know, there's principles involved. I don't want to make or have my taxes cut if it means somebody who worked hard or had a better break than I did, and take his money. I don't want his money...I don't want someone else's money who worked hard for it. No."

Did you get that? Joe the Plumber and his parents were on welfare during hard times. But he doesn't want someone else's money and doesn't think it's fair to take money from one person to give it to another person. Can you wrap your mind around that without blowing two or three gaskets?

It Must be the Uniforms!

From the London Times:

The successor of the Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider was dismissed yesterday after he revealed a “special” relationship “far beyond” friendship with his former mentor.

In emotional interviews with the national broadcaster and a tabloid newspaper Stefan Petzner spoke openly about his affair with Haider, who died at the age of 58 in a high-speed car crash after heavy drinking session at a gay club this month. Haider’s party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, captured 11 per cent of the vote in national elections last month .

“He was the man of my life. Our relationship went far beyond friendship,” Mr Petzner, 27, said after only a week in the job, adding that Haider’s wife, Claudia, 52, “did not object” to their relationship.

“I only had him. Now I am all alone. I would spend nights with him and his family and that was important for me because I often was afraid to be alone in the dark,” he added.

Solidarity! (HT Arindam)

There is less than one month until the election, an election that will decide

the next President of the United States.

The person elected will be the president of all Americans, not just the

Democrats or the Republicans.

To show our solidarity as Americans, let's all get together and show each
other our support for the candidate of our choice.

It's time that we come together, Democrats and Republicans alike.

If you support the policies and character of Obama, please drive with your

headlights on during the day.

If you support John McCain, please drive with your headlights off at night.

Thank you for your participation.

Thursday Morning Pearl Blogging

Check out TahitianPearls.Biz's awesome Tahitian pearl jewelry. TahitianPearls.Biz has great selection and excellent prices, usually 50-70% off retail!

Springsteen Class Warfare Wednesday Night Blogging

Awesome song from The Ghost of Tom Joad (1993).

Interesting Article About the McCain Campaign

Hopefully, it's a pre-post-mortem of the McCain campaign. Longish, but well worthish, it can be found here.

Palin Has Balls the Size of Churchbells!

She takes her kids everywhere on state business, even when they are not invited, and charges the state for all the travel. Read about it here.

What else do you burn apart from witches? Part 2

You can read a letter asking fundies to pray extra-hard against curses that Kenyan witches and warlocks aligned with Obama are conjuring up against McCain and Palin. I sh*t you not.

Steve Jobs Channeling George Bush on MadTV

Hedge Fund Manager Call It Quits...

...with a fun letter to his clients. You can read the letter here (PDF).

Monday Afternoon D*ck in a Box Blogging

One of the dudes is Justin Timberlake!

What the crazies are saying...

A collection of comments, collected by Wonkette, from right-wing cesspool website freerepublic.org regarding Powell's endorsement of Obama:

* I’m not surprised that Powell has endorsed a Chicago street thug over a real American hero either. “How ‘bout some ‘blow’ General? Then we’ll go help ACORN register some more ‘voters’.”
* This is why you don’t let traitors in your midst. They are capable of doing far more harm than good.
* Clown Powell showed us his true colors with his endorsement of this communist weasel. He just spit in the face of the military he supposedly cares about.
* It’s all about Powell’s racism and everyone knows it
* Well, there goes the Muslim vote!
* Possibly less about Colin’s leanings than his wife’s. He’s always struck me as someone without bearing.
* Oh please….he’s black and he is endorsing one of his brothers…just too obvious. It’s not hard for the everyday American to understand.
* Planet of the APes mentality..”Monkey supports monkey”..
* Before this election, I treated blacks as individuals. I was wrong. They are a clan.
* Is it ok still to say “white sheet?”
* The McCain campaign should take Powell’s $2,300 campaign contribution and throw it out on a busy street. Watch the hounds jump all over the bills and take that “welfare money”.
* Look, it’s Powell Diddy!
* I just saw the video. Somebody should toll Powell that yes, it IS a problem if a Moslem becomes President. The Constitution is not a suicide pact!
* “blacks are the most racist group of people in the USA.” And the most ungrateful.
* I wrote this on Malkiin’s site: The Presidential Tyranny of Obama, these coming years, will hit all hard, and tragically. None will be spared, none will thrive. But of those hurt the most, it will be urban blacks (and hispanics to an extent). Among them there is no real sense of community, they will fight each other most viciously, the murder rate — already high — will skyrocket as groups fight for dominance. That is speculation on my part — and not an outcome I wish! I pray to G-d we will elect McCain.
* As a white blues guitarist here in NY City I too have seen reversed racism.

Powell Endorses Obama

And spanks John McCain in a very polite way.



We at Fargin Bastages has never been fans of Powell. He has been a political tool since his time in Vietnam, when he was tasked with investigating a letter, written by an American GI, detailing American military abuses against Vietnamese civilians. His conclusion was, "[I]n direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." This is around the same time is My Lai. As Casper Weinberger's senior military aide, he was up to his neck in Iran Contra, and lied to Congress about what he knew. As chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, he played a leading role in derailing Clinton's effort to allow homosexuals to serve openly in US military, which resulted in the moronic Don't Ask Don't Tell policy "compromise." As Bush's Secretary of State he laid out the case for the Iraq war at the UN, using intelligence he either knew of should have known was inflated or outright lies.

That said, Powell's endorsement of Obama on Meet the Press today was fantastic. He very cogently made his case for Obama, while at the same time calling out McCain on his petty and divisive campaign.

Excellent Post on Tire Swinging

Incredibly funny and informative post at Talking Points Memo about journalists' complicated relationship with John McCain.

McCain's Fascist Mob

I am not sure that the retrograde genie that McCain and Palin have let out of the bottle can be put back in once the election is over. Watch this video of people (and I use the term loosely) lining to go into a Palin Rally in Johnstown, PA on October 11:

Saturday Afternoon Disco Blogging

Friday Night Pearl Blogging

Here's a lovely Tahitian pearl necklace, comprised of seven high-luster, round 9-10mm multicolor Tahitian pearls, separated with 14k yellow gold spacers, on a 14k white gold omega chain.

Plumber's Crack!

It turns out Joe The Plumber is not really a plumber - at least not a licensed one!

A re-emboldened, more radical right-wing in our future?

Mike Davis sure thinks so. Reprinted from tomdispatch.com:

Can Obama See the Grand Canyon?

On Presidential Blindness and Economic Catastrophe
By Mike Davis

Let me begin, very obliquely, with the Grand Canyon and the paradox of trying to see beyond cultural or historical precedent.

The first European to look into the depths of the great gorge was the conquistador Garcia Lopez de Cardenas in 1540. He was horrified by the sight and quickly retreated from the South Rim. More than three centuries passed before Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers led the second major expedition to the rim. Like Garcia Lopez, he recorded an "awe that was almost painful to behold." Ives's expedition included a well-known German artist, but his sketch of the Canyon was wildly distorted, almost hysterical.

Neither the conquistadors nor the Army engineers, in other words, could make sense of what they saw; they were simply overwhelmed by unexpected revelation. In a fundamental sense, they were blind because they lacked the concepts necessary to organize a coherent vision of an utterly new landscape.

Accurate portrayal of the Canyon only arrived a generation later when the Colorado River became the obsession of the one-armed Civil War hero John Wesley Powell and his celebrated teams of geologists and artists. They were like Victorian astronauts reconnoitering another planet. It took years of brilliant fieldwork to construct a conceptual framework for taking in the canyon. With "deep time" added as the critical dimension, it was finally possible for raw perception to be transformed into consistent vision.

The result of their work, The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, published in 1882, is illustrated by masterpieces of draftsmanship that, as Powell's biographer Wallace Stegner once pointed out, "are more accurate than any photograph." That is because they reproduce details of stratigraphy usually obscured in camera images. When we visit one of the famous viewpoints today, most of us are oblivious to how profoundly our eyes have been trained by these iconic images or how much we have been influenced by the idea, popularized by Powell, of the Canyon as a museum of geological time.

But why am I talking about geology? Because, like the Grand Canyon's first explorers, we are looking into an unprecedented abyss of economic and social turmoil that confounds our previous perceptions of historical risk. Our vertigo is intensified by our ignorance of the depth of the crisis or any sense of how far we might ultimately fall.

Weimar Returns in Limbaughland

Let me confess that, as an aging socialist, I suddenly find myself like the Jehovah's Witness who opens his window to see the stars actually falling out of the sky. Although I've been studying Marxist crisis theory for decades, I never believed I'd actually live to see financial capitalism commit suicide. Or hear the International Monetary Fund warn of imminent "systemic meltdown."

Thus, my initial reaction to Wall Street's infamous 777.7 point plunge a few weeks ago was a very sixties retro elation. "Right on, Karl!" I shouted. "Eat your derivatives and die, Wall Street swine!" Like the Grand Canyon, the fall of the banks can be a terrifying but sublime spectacle.

But the real culprits, of course, are not being trundled off to the guillotine; they're gently floating to earth in golden parachutes. The rest of us may be trapped on the burning plane without a pilot, but the despicable Richard Fuld, who used Lehman Brothers to loot pension funds and retirement accounts, merely sulks on his yacht.

Out in the stucco deserts of Limbaughland, moreover, fear is already being distilled into a good ol' boy version of the "stab in the back" myth that rallied the ruined German petite bourgeoisie to the swastika. If you listen to the rage on commute AM, you'll know that ‘socialism' has already taken a lien on America, Barack Hussein Obama is terrorism's Manchurian candidate, the collapse of Wall Street was caused by elderly black people with Fannie Mae loans, and ACORN in its voter registration drives has long been padding the voting rolls with illegal brown hordes.

In other times, Sarah Palin's imitation of Father Charles Coughlin -- the priest who preached an American Reich in the 1930s -- in drag might be hilarious camp, but with the American way of life in sudden freefall, the specter of star-spangled fascism doesn't seem quite so far-fetched. The Right may lose the election, but it already possesses a sinister, historically-proven blueprint for rapid recovery.

Progressives have no time to waste. In the face of a new depression that promises folks from Wasilla to Timbuktu an unknown world of pain, how do we reconstruct our understanding of the globalized economy? To what extent can we look to either Obama or any of the Democrats to help us analyze the crisis and then act effectively to resolve it?

Is Obama FDR?

If the Nashville "town hall" debate is any guide, we will soon have another blind president. Neither candidate had the guts or information to answer the simple questions posed by the anxious audience: What will happen to our jobs? How bad will it get? What urgent steps should be taken?

Instead, the candidates stuck like flypaper to their obsolete talking points. McCain's only surprise was yet another innovation in deceit: a mortgage relief plan that would reward banks and investors without necessarily saving homeowners.

Obama recited his four-point program, infinitely better in principle than his opponent's preferential option for the rich, but abstract and lacking in detail. It remains more a rhetorical promise than the blueprint for the actual machinery of reform. He made only passing reference to the next phase of the crisis: the slump of the real economy and likely mass unemployment on a scale not seen for 70 years.

With baffling courtesy to the Bush administration, he failed to highlight any of the other weak links in the economic system: the dangerous overhang of credit-default swap obligations left over from the fall of Lehman Brothers; the trillion-dollar black hole of consumer credit-card debt that may threaten the solvency of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America; the implacable decline of General Motors and the American auto industry; the crumbling foundations of municipal and state finance; the massacre of tech equity and venture capital in Silicon Valley; and, most unexpectedly, sudden fissures in the financial solidity of even General Electric.

In addition, both Obama and his vice presidential partner Joe Biden, in their support for Secretary of the Treasury Paulson's plan, avoid any discussion of the inevitable result of cataclysmic restructuring and government bailouts: not "socialism," but ultra-capitalism -- one that is likely to concentrate control of credit in a few leviathan banks, controlled in large part by sovereign wealth funds but subsidized by generations of public debt and domestic austerity.

Never have so many ordinary Americans been nailed to a cross of gold (or derivatives), yet Obama is the most mild-mannered William Jennings Bryan imaginable. Unlike Sarah Palin who masticates the phrase "the working class" with defiant glee, he hews to a party line that acknowledges only the needs of an amorphous "middle class" living on a largely mythical "Main Street."

If we are especially concerned about the fate of the poor or unemployed, we are left to read between the lines, with no help from his talking points that espouse clean coal technology, nuclear power, and a bigger military, but elide the urgency of a renewed war on poverty as championed by John Edwards in his tragically self-destructed primary campaign. But perhaps inside the cautious candidate is a man whose humane passions transcend his own nearsighted centrist campaign. As a close friend, exasperated by my chronic pessimism, chided me the other day, "don't be so unfair. FDR didn't have a nuts and bolts program either in 1933. Nobody did."

What Franklin D. Roosevelt did possess in that year of breadlines and bank failures, according to my friend, was enormous empathy for the common people and a willingness to experiment with government intervention, even in the face of the monolithic hostility of the wealthy classes. In this view, Obama is MoveOn.org's re-imagining of our 32nd president: calm, strong, deeply in touch with ordinary needs, and willing to accept the advice of the country's best and brightest.

The Death of Keynesianism

But even if we concede to the Illinois senator a truly Rooseveltian or, even better, Lincolnian strength of character, this hopeful analogy is flawed in at least three principal ways:

First, we can't rely on the Great Depression as analog to the current crisis, nor upon the New Deal as the template for its solution. Certainly, there is a great deal of déjà vu in the frantic attempts to quiet panic and reassure the public that the worst has passed. Many of Paulson's statements, indeed, could have been directly plagiarized from Herbert Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, and both presidential campaigns are frantically cribbing heroic rhetoric from the early New Deal. But just as the business press has been insisting for years, this is not the Old American Economy, but an entirely new-fangled contraption built from outsourced parts and supercharged by instantaneous world markets in everything from dollars and defaults to hog bellies and disaster futures.

We are seeing the consequences of a perverse restructuring that began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and which has inverted the national income shares of manufacturing (21% in 1980; 12% in 2005) and those of financial services (15% in 1980; 21% in 2005). In 1930, the factories may have been shuttered but the machinery was still intact; it hadn't been auctioned off at five cents on the dollar to China.

On the other hand, we shouldn't disparage the miracles of contemporary market technology. Casino capitalism has proven its mettle by transmitting the deadly virus of Wall Street at unprecedented velocity to every financial center on the planet. What took three years at the beginning of the 1930s -- that is, the full globalization of the crisis -- has taken only three weeks this time around. God help us, if, as seems to be happening, unemployment tops the levees at anything like the same speed.

Second, Obama won't inherit Roosevelt's ultimate situational advantage -- having emergent tools of state intervention and demand management (later to be called "Keynesianism") empowered by an epochal uprising of industrial workers in the world's most productive factories.

If you've been watching the sad parade of economic gurus on McNeil-Lehrer, you know that the intellectual shelves in Washington are now almost bare. Neither major party retains more than a few enigmatic shards of policy traditions different from the neo-liberal consensus on trade and privatization. Indeed, posturing pseudo-populists aside, it is unclear whether anyone inside the Beltway, including Obama's economic advisors, can think clearly beyond the indoctrinated mindset of Goldman Sachs, the source of the two most prominent secretaries of the treasury over the last decade.

Keynes, now suddenly mourned, is actually quite dead. More importantly, the New Deal did not arise spontaneously from the goodwill or imagination of the White House. On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual life.

Even with the greatest optimism of the will, it is difficult to imagine the American labor movement recovering from defeat as dramatically as it did in 1934-1937. The decisive difference is structural rather than ideological. (Indeed, today's union movement is much more progressive than the decrepit, nativist American Federation of Labor in 1930.) The power of labor within a Walmart-ized service economy is simply more dispersed and difficult to mobilize than in the era of giant urban-industrial concentrations and ubiquitous factory neighborhoods.

Is War the Answer?

The third problem with the New Deal analogy is perhaps the most important. Military Keynesianism is no longer an available deus ex machina. Let me explain.

In 1933, when FDR was inaugurated, the United States was in full retreat from foreign entanglements, and there was little controversy about bringing a few hundred Marines home from the occupations of Haiti and Nicaragua. It took two years of world war, the defeat of France, and the near collapse of England to finally win a majority in Congress for rearmament, but when war production finally started up in late 1940 it became a huge engine for the reemployment of the American work force, the real cure for the depressed job markets of the 1930s. Subsequently, American world power and full employment would align in a way that won the loyalty of several generations of working-class voters.

Today, of course, the situation is radically different. A bigger Pentagon budget no longer creates hundreds of thousands of stable factory jobs, since significant parts of its weapons production is now actually outsourced, and the ideological link between high-wage employment and intervention -- good jobs and Old Glory on a foreign shore -- while hardly extinct is structurally weaker than at any time since the early 1940s. Even in the new military (largely a hereditary caste of poor whites, blacks, and Latinos) demoralization is reaching the stage of active discontent and opening up new spaces for alternative ideas.

Although both candidates have endorsed programs, including expansion of Army and Marine combat strength, missile defense (aka "Star Wars"), and an intensified war in Afghanistan, that will enlarge the military-industrial complex, none of this will replenish the supply of decent jobs nor prime a broken national pump. However, in the midst of a deep slump, what a huge military budget can do is obliterate the modest but essential reforms that make up Obama's plans for healthcare, alternative energy, and education.

In other words, Rooseveltian guns and butter have become a contradiction in terms, which means that the Obama campaign is engineering a catastrophic collision between its national security priorities and its domestic policy goals.

The Fate of Obama-ism

Why don't such smart people see the Grand Canyon?

Maybe they do, in which case deception is truly the mother's milk of American politics; or perhaps Obama has become the reluctant prisoner, intellectually as well as politically, of Clintonism: that is say, of a culturally permissive neo-liberalism whose New Deal rhetoric masks the policy spirit of Richard Nixon.

It's worth asking, for instance, what in the actual substance of his foreign policy agenda differentiates the Democratic candidate from the radioactive legacy of the Bush Doctrine? Yes, he would close Guantanamo, talk to the Iranians, and thrill hearts in Europe. He also promises to renew the Global War on Terror (in much the same way that Bush senior and Clinton sustained the core policies of Reaganism, albeit with a "more human face").

In case anyone has missed the debates, let me remind you that the Democratic candidate has chained himself, come hell or high water, to a global strategy in which "victory" in the Middle East (and Central Asia) remains the chief premise of foreign policy, with the Iraqi-style nation-building hubris of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz repackaged as a "realist" faith in global "stabilization."

True, the enormity of the economic crisis may compel President Obama to renege on some of candidate Obama's ringing promises to support an idiotic missile defense system or provocative NATO memberships for Georgia and Ukraine. Nonetheless, as he emphasizes in almost every speech and in each debate, defeating the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, together with a robust defense of Israel, constitute the keystone of his national security agenda.

Under huge pressure from Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats alike to cut the budget and reduce the exponential increase in the national debt, what choices would President Obama be forced to make early in his administration? More than likely comprehensive health-care will be whittled down to a barebones plan, "alternative energy" will simply mean the fraud of "clean coal," and anything that remains in the Treasury, after Wall Street's finished its looting spree, will buy bombs to pulverize more Pashtun villages, ensuring yet more generations of embittered mujahideen and jihadis.

Am I unduly cynical? Perhaps, but I lived through the Lyndon Johnson years and watched the War on Poverty, the last true New Deal program, destroyed to pay for slaughter in Vietnam.

It is bitterly ironic, but, I suppose, historically predictable that a presidential campaign millions of voters have supported for its promise to end the war in Iraq has now mortgaged itself to a "tougher than McCain" escalation of a hopeless conflict in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal frontier. In the best of outcomes, the Democrats will merely trade one brutal, losing war for another. In the worst case, their failed policies may set the stage for the return of Cheney and Rove, or their even more sinister avatars.

Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change. You can listen to a podcast of Davis discussing why the New Deal isn't relevant as a solution today by clicking here.

Copyright 2008 Mike Davis