Meme Tag!

TRANSLATION: "This blog invests and believes, the proximity"

[meaning, that blogging makes us 'close' -being close through proximity]

Well, I've been tagged. I suppose the point is to mention blogs that you feel close to, all warm and fuzzy about, without duplicating the person who linked to you...thanks, MissC!...

The tradition of this particular meme is to pass this off to eight other bloggers who are supposed to acknowledge it by copying the above graphic and text in a post of their own.

So who hasn't pissed me off lately...;-). Seriously, these will be links to blogs who's blog owners I genuinely like and welcome their comments here, as irregularly as they post:

BadTux, The Snarky Penguin. He may not always be right agree with me, but he usually makes me think.

Adgita Diaries. MandT always have cogent observations and pithy comments to make.

I was going to include Agitprop and my good buddy, Blogenfreude, but then Colonel Agi, Frederick, Culture Ghost and El Serracho would get pissed at me and I'm still working my good graces on them, so I'll tap the Guys From Area 51, their group effort. Some of the best Photoshopping on the Nets is done here.

Instaputz. Seriously.

Targa at Targa's Tirade. It's my fault he blogs. I guess I owe him a show of love.

Churl at Mad In The Middle, who's always good enough to link to me, and always checks out my posts. Thanks, guy!

Noni at I Dreamed I Saw Grace P. Last Night. We met over at Jesus' General blog, and have had a fair amount of crosscommenting ever since.

And finally, Skippy at Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo, also known as Jon Stewart's favorite blog, also known as the inventor of the term "Blogtopia", who somehow puts up with my inane comments without batting an eyelash. He must be part iguana.

Risky Business

George Will, not a man I either admire or whose bromides and harangues I pretend to really even listen to, once said one of the smartest points about American government policy.

Unintentionally, of course. He's not that bright. He originally had been speaking of the tax code when he said that businesses tend to privatize profits but socialize losses.

In other words, a business can deduct its losses from the IRS (and by extension, the government) but will work like the dickens to retain as many earnings as possible and avoid as much tax as possible, even to the point of tax evasion.

Unfortunately, as Paul Krugman points out today, this policy is not limited to the tax code:

The logic of the crisis seems to call for an intervention, not at step 4, but at step 2: the financial system needs more capital. And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.

That’s what happened in the savings and loan crisis: the feds took over ownership of the bad banks, not just their bad assets. It’s also what happened with Fannie and Freddie. (And by the way, that rescue has done what it was supposed to. Mortgage interest rates have come down sharply since the federal takeover.)

But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

In other words, ladies and gentlemen, we've co-signed a home loan for a friend, without any access to his income, and now the bill is due, he can't afford to sell enough of his crap on eBay and the mortgage is due.

If this was the first or only bailout we had endured, that might be OK. After all, it would be an experiment, and experiments are allowed to go bad.

But this is neither the first time we've had to bailout out bad loans (Krugman correctly refers to the S&L crisis of the 80s), or even companies in deep fiscal trouble.

We've been down this road before, and will sadly travel it many times into the future unless we change the paradigm. More on that later, perhaps next week.

We are in essence buying $700 billion dollars of near-worthless paper...after all, if it had value, the banks could package and sell it...in the hopes that some miracle, mirabile dictu!, and they gain value again.

Some will, many will not. While I find it hard to believe that these so-called "adults" of the Bush administration haven't calculated a generous breakeven point for the bailout where we stand to make back our $700 billion, I can pretty much guaran-damn-tee you that point is highly, perhaps even exuberantly, overoptimistic.

I haven't run the numbers, but I'd be willing to bet Paulson's gamble will show us losing a few hudnred million, maybe we recapture $400 billion. Maybe. Not likely.

Meanwhile, these banks, the WaMus and Wachovias and Wells Fargoes, all get to line up at this big pig trough for their slop of Fed money, in the hopes that somehow, banks that managed to keep their books in order privately, like Citibank, who ended up with a saudi bailout will begin lending them good money after bad.

With no penalty to the banks who got Federal money. No management changes. No seizure of assets to offset even a small portion of the bailout. No censure of the board of directors for failing their fiduciary oversight, and all golden parachutes intact.

Meanwhile, if you owe a mortgage and you have trouble paying it off, you lose your house, even if the Fed somehow steps in and finds you a shelter, but then again, the Republicans have cut those unnecessary social services because, you know, it inflates the deficit...

George Will is correct: Our priorities are all screwed up.

Stupidest. Column. Yet.

Charles Krauthammer-

WASHINGTON -- For the last 150 years, most American war presidents -- most notably Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt -- have entered (or re-entered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George Bush. Not so the war on terror. The 9/11 attacks literally came out of the blue.

HULLO???? PEARL HARBOR??????

Friday Music Blogging

Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb

Godspeed, Richard.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) It's been a long time coming, but the Bush SEC finally did something that makes sense.

2) Here's an investment tip, gratis: All bull markets in recent memory, since we came off the gold standard, have ended after a bout of what Alan Greenspan understated as "irrational exuberance." All bear markets end with a significant redistribution of wealth to the poor and middle classes, usually in the form of government grants and unemployment and welfare checks. So the advice is really simple: when you're making a lot of money in the market, and you can't understand precisely why, it's a good time to think about getting out. You have about one to two years, unless you've realized this at the back end of the trend, in which case you ought to freeze your money immediately.

And when people are hurting badly, and the government is forced to intervene directly, that means the markets will shortly show a turnaround. Shortly, again, being up to one year.

4) One more thing. In order to effectively utilize this advice, you have to do one more thing: pay attention. For the bull market advice, that usually means when the mainstream, not business, media pick up on a trend that directly affects the financial markets, like the dotcom bubble or the easy mortgage money, you start edging towards the exit. When the news reports that Congress is extending unemployment benefits, for example, you start pooling money together.

5) One codicil: not all bull markets and bear markets are bull or bear. Sometimes, they are merely violent corrections, like the crash of 1987 (two days later, stocks posted their single best day ever and recaptured many of the losses). When you're surprised by a market move, if you've been paying attention, that's likely a market correction. It happens. This is why you always try to play with house money, or at the very least disposable income.

6) Sorry for spending so much time this week on this, but I suspect we're heading into the teeth of a storm. It's important.

7) Joe Biden, populist? I happen to agree with him: if you've made a bundle off the bounty this nation has given you the opportunity to make, you owe it to the nation to pay it forward.

8) Thank GOD we won't have Gates-Seinfeld to kick around anymore!

9) Hm. It turns out I was right all along: conservatives are more scared than liberals!

10) This is your VP Candidate:

11) This is your VP Candidate reading hate mongering material:

12) This is the hate mongering she supports: American Opinion Magazine, published by the John Birch Society. Any questions?

13) They should have built this school. They could have cut the sex education budget down to a dollar a student and sent them next door!

14) The last baseball game ever at Yankee Stadium will be played this Sunday. You can watch it on ESPN. As a Mets fan, part of me is thinking good riddance to bad rubbish, but as a baseball fan, one has to tip one's hat to a stadium with the history that Yankee Stadium has. I've been to a couple of games (and required hospital stays twice to recover from the shame!) and while it's not unique in any way in and of itself, you can't help but feel the history flow through you.

15) Which reminds me: Shea Stadium closes next weekend, and I will attend. I'll post my thoughts about this rattletrap in the next couple of days.

We Don't Need Another Hero

"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you"- Paul Simon

I read a fascinating essay this morning written by Paul Simon . It had originally been published upon the death of Joe Dimaggio:

A few years after "Mrs. Robinson" rose to No. 1 on the pop charts, I found myself dining at an Italian restaurant where DiMaggio was seated with a party of friends. I'd heard a rumor that he was upset with the song and had considered a lawsuit, so it was with some trepidation that I walked over and introduced myself as its composer. I needn't have worried: he was perfectly cordial and invited me to sit down, whereupon we immediately fell into conversation about the only subject we had in common.

"What I don't understand," he said, "is why you ask where I've gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I'm a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven't gone anywhere."

I said that I didn't mean the lines literally, that I thought of him as an American hero and that genuine heroes were in short supply. He accepted the explanation and thanked me. We shook hands and said good night.

Heroes are myths.

I don't mean that if heroes didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. No, I mean that we've invented them, and in so doing, have mythologized them as human beings. We've created larger than life, fictional characters out of flesh and blood people, people with foibles and flaws just like you and me.

In Dimaggio's day, it didn't matter that he was a focus-driven, cantakerous old coot who disliked most people and tried to live a solitary life in his silence. Indeed, part of his mythos is that he avoided the spotlight, this paragon of ability and dedication. His 56 game hitting streak is likely the purest of records in sport, falling so far outside the statistical norm for the sport, as Stephen Jay Gould observed.

In Dimaggio's day, all that mattered was the public image he had, his accomplishments on the field, and what few public appearances he made, carefully controlled by his handlers. In co-operation with the sporting press, of course. They understood that America needed heroes, that heroes sold papers back then.

We were a younger country back then. We're much older now. We don't need heroes.

Or so you would think. Part of what I believe the divide is between red staters and blue staters (meaning conservatives and Democrats) centers on heroes. Red staters are determined to have heroes, no matter how flawed they may be. The trouble is, they don't seek out their own heroes. Their heroes are manufactured for them.

A hero is someone you seek out, not for their sake, but for the sake of what they've accomplished. My heroes growing up, and please forgive the heavy sports theme of this post, were Joe Namath, Tom Seaver, Muhammad Ali. They were JFK and RFK and MLK, Jr.

And yes, there was Jesus and Moses and Ghandhi, too.

Could the American hockey gold medal have meant half as much if we had won in 1976 at Innsbruck or 1984 at Sarajevo? We needed the mythology, the false construct of defeating our sworn enemy on our own soil. People conveniently forget that victory took place under the Carter administration, so mythified that victory has become. People believe Reagan was already in office!

Somewhere along the way, we lost the thread of heroes. Look around you now, all you see are sympathetic eyes, searching for someone, ANYONE, to point the way ahead, to lead by example.

It is not any wonder, in my view, that our heroes today are fictional characters. Having stripped away the veneer of polite society from our news coverage, allowing our politicians and public figures to become not just clay-footed but clay-legged, -armed, and -chested, we have a need to search out those who we can look to in admiration, without reservation.

Silly Americans.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the release of movies like Star Wars, or the Indiana Jones films, or Rocky or Rambo or The Terminator, or any countless action/adventure movies came at a time when the scales of our eyes were being stripped away by partisan politics determined not to speak for the good of the nation, but for the bad of the politician it faced.

We look for purity, and find it wanting. Even now, the right looks to Sarah Palin as a beacon of "old fashioned values," conveniently forgetting that old fashioned values would have had her sitting in her kitchen preparing dinner instead of running a city into a massive debt and a state for less than two years, or would have her daughter exiled from her home town while she dropped a litter.
And conveniently ignoring that she's about as corrupt a politician as they come.

Similarly, the Democrats looked to Barack Obama for the same reasons: fresh-faced, principled stands, filled with ideas and vinegar.

Conveniently ignoring the fact that his hometown of Chicago is responsible for an awful lot of the corrupt ways that have infested our polity, and that it's impossible for a politician to come out of that untainted.

Harry Truman might have pulled it off, coming out of Kansas City Pendergast machine, but I doubt it. I seriously doubt that this unassuming man, with little personal charisma and charm and certainly nowhere near either of those qualities as Barack Obama has, was suddenly knighted as untouchably pure.

It appears that Americans are so in need of heroes, real-life heroes, that we'll create them for ourselves.

John McCain? Hero. John Kerry? Hero, but later villified for his heroism.

Sarah Palin? Hero. Hillary Clinton? Hero, but later villified for her heroism.

We just haven't gotten around to villifying McCain/Palin, but we're working on it!

And as I posted below, Barack Obama, a man who genuinely worked his way up the ladder on his own merits, hero, but villified for his heroism. But McCain/Palin? Hero.

We just haven't gotten around to villifying McCain/Palin, but we're working on it!

And we will. Win, lose or draw, McCain's accomplishments will be viewed thru the eyes now of the people who hate him the most, as will Palin's, as will Obama's, as will, eventually, Biden, altho I don't hear many people championing Biden as a hero.

Despite the fact that, indeed, he's picked himself up from tragedy and accomplished much in his life. He might actually BE a hero.

ACTUAL Straight Talk

Amy Goodman discusses the Fed's (our) bailout deal with investment banker turned journalist, Nomi Prins and Michael Hudson, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends here.

It ain't pretty.

For anyone who is interested in the Bear Agenda, as I am, see this interview with an Alaska University professor and marine conservation specialist who requested the assessment of state scientists who had examined the impact of global climate change on polar bears. He was told he might have to pay close to half-a-million dollars for the request to be processed. Rick Steiner finally obtained the documents through a federal records request and found that the state’s marine mammal scientists were actually at odds with Governor Sarah Palin’s position.
Grrrrr.
I have been saying the Imprecatory Prayer of the Northern Wolves daily as tonic.

Greed Is God

Much of this week, hell, much of this year, has been about the coming economic disaster, which appears is now arriving on Track 13.

It got me to thinking a little about the capitalist system and its built-in, inherent flaw. Hell, it's such an obvious flaw that it boggles the mind that a rational people would choose it for their economy. Even Adam Smith saw it coming and warned against it.

Laissez-faire capitalism can loosely be defined as each person acting in his own interest contributes to the benefit of society at large.

For the large part, this system works pretty well: it's simple, easy to implement, and eventually, all people can benefit from truly free markets.

The one flaw in the ointment, the thing that ultimately Smith warned us on, is, well, greed. I mean, it's right there in the first part of that equation: A person's self-interest.

Implicit in that statement, of course, is the question "Which self-interest?" After all, one can be greedy to the point that it no longer is in one's self-interest. Think about Ebenezer Scrooge.

The assumption Smith made in his time was that man would remain ultimately a polite creature, fair and impartial, and more to the point, powerless over his fellow man (except for nobility, royalty and slavers).

In other words, business would remain small and personal. Indeed, his specific warning was against business combinations that would tend to unduly influence a market.

In fact, despite Republican tendencies to the otherwise, he insisted on government regulation in markets to assure that companies would remain beholden to the market, to the customer, and to society.

What we have witnessed over the past eight years is one of the least regulated markets in world history. Even the Romans, no socialist society, had the decent sense to keep the overseers at least nominally independent of the overseen!

The systematic deregulation, either de jure or de facto by ignoring regulatory oversight or simply paying lip service to it (SEC chairman: "Say, you boys over there at Bear Stearns aren't doing anything I should know about, are you?" *winkwink*), of the Bush administration was teasing the tiger with a thick steak on the wrong side of a short fence. It was asking for trouble. It was practically BEGGING for it.

Combined with the recent hard-line business attitude that economic royalists have taken since at least the Reagan administration (another Republican), which has seen huge companies overthrown because any shlub with a sufficient credit line thought he could squeeze more shareholder value out of the company than current ownership, and you have a deadly combination.

Management at corporations have had to genuflect to the shareholders, but those shareholders have tended more and more to focus on the short-term quarterly profit than the more nebulous, less objective, "value of the company".

The "self-interest", if you will. As companies have gotten bigger and bigger and more out of touch with their customers and the community, we've seen less and less accountability, less and less care, on the part of the corporation.

Which I think may have been Adams' point: business combinations, whether in the form of conglomerates, mergers, or even simply a gathering of minds at the watering hole on a Friday night to split up a market, mean less attention is paid to the business at hand: providing society with the benefits it deserves from putting up with the plunder of capitalists.

Smith, in other words, believed that so long as people could remain human, capitalism would always be in balance with the rest of society.

And yet, we've all seen that this was not the case, and in my estimation, could never have been the case: Greed is a powerful intoxicant.

That may be why it is one of the seven deadly sins. Which now brings us to the message at hand for today.

I've often wondered how capitalism can exist in a society that considers itself Christian.

Indeed, for the first two thousand years, give or take a couple of centuries, Christianity banned capitalism, on the grounds that earning money on money or charging more for a good than what it cost, was a form of usury, which is barred in the Old Testament.

In 1635, a Massachussetts man was convicted of "greed"...yes, it was a crime!...because he earned 6% on his sales, which was 2% more than the law allowed.

A law! About greed! Unthinkable today!

Christ himself warned against the accumulation of wealth. You might recall the "camel thru the eye of the needle" parable.

We see that Christianity is antithetical, even hostile, towards capitalism and vice versa. Why?

Because Christianity is about your fellow man, and capitalism is about, well, taking that fellow to the cleaners. Capitalism is soulless, godless and worships nothing so much as efficiency, the more ruthless, the better.

That's not me saying that. That's the damn system, which rewards short term efficiencies, even if it means breaking the law or the covenants of society, in order to squeeze one more dollar out of a transaction.

Greed pervades the system. Greed is inherent in the homeowner who borrows more money that he can realistically afford to pay back, because he's certain the value of his home will increase exponentially, and that value is his nest egg for retirement.

Greed is inherent in the banker who finances that mortgage, who knows that when the house of cards falls down people are going to get hurt, but he can justify the month's loan activity to his regional office with increases, not decreases, only.

Greed is inherent in the broker who bundles that mortgage along with countless others in a resaleable bite-size package to a series of investors looking to make money off other people's pains. The idea was to diversify the risk, to take the mortgages off the banks' books and to hand the risk over to other people who needed to balance their portfolios, but you know what happened: everyone jumped into the game and soon not enough good mortgages were floating around, so people just effectively packaged "junk mortgage bonds" and passed them off as AAA credits.

Greed, in other words: squeeze them for every buck you can get.

Greed is inherent in the municipalities, states and even the Federal Government, who all benefit from higher home values and balance their budgets on the backs of the greedy in the form of property taxes and the income taxes upon sale or disposal of the property, as the greedy homeowner climbs the social ladder to his McMansion built on his veery own McCloud in the McSky.

Do none of these people, for there must be a whole lot of crossover here, listen in church when the minister or priest talks about the evils of greed?

I've always believed that America, being somewhat psychotic in this regard, should make a choice: God or mammon.

If you're going to choose God, then turn communist. Communism and Christianity are perfectly suited to each other: to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability dovetails nicely with love thy neighbor and turn the other cheek.

If you're going to choose mammon, money, then drop the fucking pretense of being godly. It insults my God and it's silly on its face. I mean, seriously, is there a stupider sight than to see John McCain shocked, SHOCKED, to find there's no one minding the store?

(Showing Memeorandum da love)

Hump Day Comedy Blogging

Sarah Palin responds to her critics

Polar Bears For The Truth

You get the feeling polar bears don't really like Sarah Palin's position on ANWR

I Got An Uncle Lives In Taxes

It's not often that a 'fact check" gets it wrong, but here's an example of a partisan fact check:

McCain has proposed to end one of the largest tax breaks in the entire economy. Some 60 million Americans buy health insurance thru employers tax-free, and McCain would indeed begin to tax the value of the benefit.

However McCain also proposes to give the money back as a tax credit, $2,500 for individuals, $5,000 for families.

"Let's give them a $5,000 refundable tax credit to go out and get the health insurance of their choice," McCain said.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

Because a tax credit is money in your pocket?

Is it?

What is a tax refund? A tax refund is what's left over after your tax liability has been figured out. It is, in essence, an interest free loan to Uncle Sam.

(Side note: In an Actor212 NotPresidency, I would insist the rules be changed that you receive interest at the Applicable Federal Rate on any refund you obtain. But I digress...)

A tax credit merely lowers that tax liability: in effect, it is a dollar for dollar reduction in your taxes, which you've already paid into the pot.

Now, would your taxes go down? Yes, that's a given, particularly since the tax on the health insurance premium plus the insurance premium itself would be less than the $14,000 maximum premium you'd be credited for.

But...you're still paying for the premium, and you're still paying for the tax.

After all, the average annual premium for an individual in the US is about $4,500. But, the average annual premium for a family of four is, ready for this? $12,500 give or take!

So the benefit to a family of four of a tax credit of $5,000, assuming they pay the top tax rate of 35% ($5,000/0.35) would cover a $14,000 premium.

In other words, you're saving maybe $1500 a year or $525 in taxes!

And look what would happen once this new tax was insituted: insurance companies would now be forced to report to the government the premiums paid by employee (as a check to the payroll reports individual employers now provide to the IRS, such as your W2 form).

Who pays for that administrative cost? You do.

This is another example of the mindless, piecemeal, irrational economic approach of what was supposedly the more financially savvy of the two major parties: you know, they made the money to BE Republicans, so they must know how to pass that knowledge on to us, right?

Eight years of a Bush Presidency, which included six years of a Republican Congress, has proved the fallacy of that notion. Next to no job creation (as opposed to Clinton, who created more jobs than anyone else in history, unless you count the global war machine galvanized against Adolph Hitler), an S&P 500 & Dow Jones 35 that has actually lost ground, mortgage foreclosures at all-time record levels, an unemployment rate higher than any seen in a Democratic administration since the 1940s (save for Clinton's first year in office), personal income declines, and now the tanking of the banking and insurance sectors.

Is this any way to run the greatest nation ever to appear on the face of the planet?????

Idiocies Of The Right

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control and how to avoid sexual predators, you are eroding the fiber of society.
* If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant , you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
* If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

* If you eat arugula, the single most consumed leafy vegetable in the nation, you're elitist.
* If you own your own tanning bed in your mansion, you're an average American.

How The Mighty Fall

Well, you've heard this story today, but careful readers of this blog have known this was coming for a very long time:

It's the end of an era for Merrill Lynch, the brokerage firm that brought Wall Street to Main Street.

Merrill, which has lost more than $45 billion on its mortgage investments, agreed to sell itself to Bank of America for $50.3 billion in stock, according to people briefed on the negotiations.

It is a remarkable fall from grace for the 94-year-old Merrill, whose corporate logo — a bull — has long symbolized the fundamental optimism of Wall Street. After a frantic weekend of talks between Wall Street executives and federal officials over the fate of the teetering Lehman Brothers, fear spread on Sunday that Merrill, staggered by losses, might also falter. The merger would combine Bank of America's banking and lending strength with Merrill Lynch's wealth management expertise.

Lehman, it should be noted, has since announced its intentions to file bankruptcy as early as today and has let 25,000 employees go.

 

How the mighty have fallen. From the heyday of the 80s and 90s, when brokerages and investment banks could do no wrong, and Americans across the nation profited from the opening of the capital markets to the small sucker, I mean, investor, to this recent chapter (apparently, number eleven) which has seen three huge names in the brokerage field-- Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch-- tumble into oblivion.

 

Who's left? Prudential Bache? Salamon Smith Barney?

 

Well, SSB is owned by Citigroup, which in turn owns Citibank. We can likely say buh-bye to Salomon in the near future, as Citibank's losses mount in the mortgage and credit markets.

 

Prudential Bache has managed to stay out of trouble, but more because the parent company, Prudential Insurance, has managed to squeeze clients for 12% more in commissions, and 6% more in fees, through the first half of 2008 than in 2007. Operations have shown a 17% reduction in revenues.

 

So they've made money the old fashioned way: gouging their customers!

 

Already, indications are for a market collapse unlike any other we have seen in our history, and there's not a lot of "there" there to begin to prop things up. Remember, it was the Treasury Department that negotiated the Bear Stearns sale to JP Morgan Chase Bank earlier this year, and no doubt helped sweeten Bank of America's deal with Merrill, as well as last week's almost-mandated bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

 

But you get the sense that Lehman was left twisting in the wind because the cubbard's gone bare (if there was ever a time for tortured metaphors, this is it!). Institutional investors, the guys who really play the market, have already gotten out, quietly. Futures for the NYSE were down a whopping 260 points (meaning that the second the market opens, it would drop by that much), and that was hours before Bank Of America, who had been rumoured in talks with Lehman, bailed out and bought Merrill instead, hours before the 25,000 layoffs at Lehman were announced, hours before the public declaration of bankruptcy.

 

This bodes ill for insurance giant AIG, who apparently could not gouge their clients. AIG has asked the Fed for a $40 billion bailout.

 

There's a book to be written about last night, to be sure.

 

I should of course point out that if the government had been as generous with the mortgagors and debtors who are in perilous financial straits due to no fault of their own-- medical bills, divorce, job loss-- likely this current consumer debt crisis would not be half as bad as it has been, or will get, for that matter. I don't think we've seen the worst, but the worst is nearly upon us. After all, $75 billion dollars, roughly the Fed kick in on the Bear, Merrill and Fannie/Freddie deals, would go a long way, and would be spread out across many troubled markets and into paying down debt at many troubled banks and financial institutions.

 

But I digress...

 

We are no longer looking at ripples from a few stones sliding down the riverbank and into the creek, we're looking at a flash flood of raging torrents wiping clean the banks of the river.

I'm With the Polar Bears

Some evidence of the Reality Based Community.
Big Rally in the Upper One for some of us in the Lower 48 to take heart.
The Mudflats blog is some good home cookin', and took alot of pics at this rally, complete with a couple of local (drug-addled-gasbag-wannabe?) moran of Rube Community (pics 63 and 64). Good times!

Nobody Asked Me, But...

Special Lipstick Edition

1) As JoeBuddha points out in comments, the Republicans finally found someone dumber than Bush!

2) I mean, you have to dig deep to find someone you can call "Bush Lite"...less filling AND tastes worse!

3) American geisha? Yes, apparently!

4) Hm. Perhaps this is how Sarah Palin proposes to get us to vote for McCain...hadn't pondered that. It's like the old joke about "my sister, she's been a virgin twelve times".

5) We can only pray that Hurricane Ike isn't as vicious as another Ike.

6) By the way, give Gibson credit for not buying into the charm machine. It's sad to think that in this day and age, we have to acknowledge that ofg a newscaster, but after all, this is only the second woman to run for VP.

7) Bet you hadn't heard this one about Hugo Chavez. I wonder what this means?

8) What is that growing on the Mars lander? "Hey, sailor, come here often?"

9) Perhaps John McCain is right, that the "middle class" is anyone earning under $5 million a year, but if you make $100,000 or more and live paycheck to paycheck, you need a check up from the neckup.

10) The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, Rudy. Nice family values, 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!

Nuttin' but love for The Memeorandum!

Putting Lipstick On A Pig

It's September 11 once again, now seven years out from the attacks that paralyzed my city and horrified the nation and the world.

 

As John Lennon once sang, "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Another year over, a new one just begun."

 

It has gotten so far from the hopes and dreams of a nation of September 12, 2001 that we have dumbed down the attacks. Unable to capture and bring to justice the real criminal behind the tragedy, despite an admitted new effort to land him in the desperate eleventh hour hopes of salvaging a legacy, we've decided to try and change the story: Osama bin Laden was never the man behind the attacks, Khalid Sheik Muhammed was!

 

And we have always been at war with Eastasia.

 

Under Bill Clinton, while internally we were divided thanks to a small handful of uberpartisan numbnuts who believed in party ahead of God and country, we presented to the world a beacon of hope, of good will, of what was right with this nation and could be right for the world. On September 11, indeed, the world stood side by side with us and declared "we are all Americans" from France to Palestine and beyond.

 

That's all gone now, along with our "inheritance" of freedom, democracy, and abundance. We slide slowly into the abyss of has-been, clinging to whatever outcropping of rock extends pitifully past the margins, but inexorably, we lose our grip little by little, and slip to the next handhold: we elected a man who pushed us over the precipice by lying us into an invasion we had no business attending to, watching him fumble even that distraction as the world looked on in horror (except Russia, who licked her lips and pounced on her satellite states), and then not having recognized our mistake in electing George Bush in 2000, a man who was clearly unfit for the job, then slapping the world in the face with a cold towel by RE-electing this moron.

 

Our freedoms slipped off our backs, and now we walk the streets in terror, not of some hooded bearded man with a bomb strapped to his chest, but of the cop with the M-16 searching our backpacks and briefcases, of the long line waiting to board a plane barefoot, of applying for a bank account.

 

We sat and watched our livelihoods ported to Mumbai or Djarkarta, and as our houses lost value so extensively that many of us could not even recoup and repay our mortgages if we somehow managed to find some moron dumb enough to buy our house at the going rate.

 

Teen suicides have been up each year since 2005 in this country, at an alarming rate caused in large part by suicides among those occupying Iraq. Meanwhile, teen pregnancy rates have reversed field, after declining in the decades since Roe v. Wade, meaning we are creating a permanent underclass of single moms-- the shotgun at Levi Johnston's back notwithstanding. Meanwhile, life expectancy has begun to drift downward.

 

Five million more people do not have health care since 2000. Millions more are underinsured, preferring the extra few bucks to pay the rent,  gambling with their lives. Ten million more struggle today in the depths of poverty without even the safety net of a welfare check to protect them from catastrophe.

 

All this, but today, on this sacred day, at this sacred moment, you only read about "lipstick on a pig" jokes.

 

We went from "morning in America" to "morons in America", in less than four years, now eight. On a day, at a time, that we should be re-dedicating ourselves to our American brothers and sisters, re-consecrating the memory of those we've lost, we're distracted by the clown in glasses and high heels and her sidekick, Rusty the Wonder P.O.W.

 

I can't imagine why. But it has to stop. We're being attacked, this time by an enemy we actually can see, and fight.

 

Ourselves.

All hail Memeorandum!

When Worlds Collide

The attempt to either unravel the mystery of life, the universe and everything, or the final nail in humanity's coffin, is underway in Switzerland:

September 9, 2008 (Computerworld) With the world's biggest physics experiment ready to fire up tomorrow, scientists from around the world are hoping to find answers to a question that has haunted mankind for centuries: How was the universe created?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has been under construction for 20 years, will shoot its first beam of protons around a 17-mile, vacuum-sealed loop at a facility that sits astride the Franco-Swiss border. The test run of what is the largest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is a forebear to the coming time when scientists will accelerate two particle beams toward each other at 99.9% of the speed of light.

Smashing the beams together will create showers of new particles that should re-create conditions in the universe just moments after its conception.

First off, just let that soak in for a moment: attaining speeds of 99.9% of the speed of light. That's a pretty astounding achievement, considering the relativistic properties of high speeds: mass increases in direct proportion to the percentage of light speed an object attains. Theoretically, a particle should become infinitely massive at the speed of light. That means, based on simple physics, it needs an irresistible force to move it.

Just imagine, then, when the particles collide, the amount of energy they will shed. What scientists are hoping will happen is the release of what is commonly referred to as dark matter and dark energy, which we have not been able to observe as yet, but which fill in some serious holes (no pun intended) in our theoretical constructs of the universe.

Dark matter and dark energy would be enough to offset the continued expansion of the universe until distances become so great that, in effect, the universe dies of extreme cold. With dark matter and energy factored in, the universe's expansion reverses gravitationally and collapses back into a new singul-- OK, this is getting too technical even for me.

Suffice it to say that it would be possible for a new universe to rise out of the ashes of this one if it collapses, and it might be possible to send information to the new universe that would allow us to pick up where we left off, so to speak. With a inifinitely expanding universe, there would likely not be continuing life after a time.

Too, the experiment hopes to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, the so-called God Particle, which is an elementary particle predicted by...well, let's just say that it disappeared just after the Big Bang, and may be responsible for things like gravity and electromagnetism, to keep it simple.

Naturally, an experiment of this scale does not come without criticism and guess what? Some of it is insane!

As the time for tomorrow's experiment has neared, rumors have increasingly circulated around the Internet that the experiments might destroy the universe by accidentally creating a black hole that would suck everything and everyone into it.

CERN released a report late last week saying that safety fears about the LHC are "unfounded." CERN Director General Robert Aymar was quoted as saying that any suggestion that there's a risk is "pure fiction."

I asked Professor Lawrence Lerner of UC-Long Beach about what the size of a hypothetical black hole created in a hadron collider might be and how long it would take to eat the Earth.

Dr. Lerner ran some quick calculations and assumed a black hole equal to the mass of the colliding beams of protons, and deduced that it would take upwards of a billion years for a black hole of that mass to eat enough of the planet to have a noticeable effect.

A billion years.

Surprisingly, the people who are most vested in this experiment, apart from physicists, have been strangely silent: evangelicals and other religious types.

As a Christian and a fan of science, I am all for expanding our knowledge of science, and solving the mysteries before us. I believe that God charged us with this when he said to take dominion over the land and seas and animals around us, not to conquer and subdue (altho Genesis uses terms similar) but to understand them, to appreciate them and to find His hand in them.

Ultimately, I believe that science and religion can reconcile themselves. Ultimately, there will come a point when the fundamental laws that govern the universe break down and the resulting chaos is indistinguishable from random chance, except it becomes clear that there is indeed no random chance involved, but some form of structure and organization.

It is there we will find God, finally. I think he'll be quite happy to see us!

Is This Sarah Palin?

Sources whom I rely on assure me this is.

Fear Not, For I Bring You Tidings Of Great Joy

OK, it's time to cowboy up for the Obama campaign. Fortunately, I think they can do this fairly easily:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain has gained huge support and now leads Democrat Barack Obama among white women voters since naming Sarah Palin as his running mate, according to a survey published on Tuesday.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll found that much of McCain's surge in the polls since the Republican National Convention is attributable to the shift in support among white women.

First, we have to take into consideration that Sarah Palin, the supposed factor here, is a blank slate. She makes Barack Obama look like a seasoned, vetted professional politician.

Once women peer a little more closely into her positions, and especially, hear her speak about issues like abortion, like health care, like raising kids, this number will whittle down quickly.

Right now, she's a woman and that's got women all across the nation paying attention. It's also partly why Palin has been secluded and incommunicado.

Palin will likely keep a percentage of women voters, to be sure. She's not the soccer mom McCain was hoping for, but there's an element of citizenry that thinks she'd make a good vice president because of her stance on the issues, who had never heard of her. They will stick.

And of course, there's no accounting for the lunatic fringe of PUMAs who will support anybody but Barack.

Too, Palin hasn't helped McCain where it counts: electoral votes. She may even have hampered him.

The Palin bounce (or as Skippy likes to call it, the Dead Caribou Bounce), as I indicated yesterday, was less than stellar and actually falls well within the average bounce a candidate can expect to receive after a convention, McCain receiving an 8 point boost. Even Fox had to be depressed!

I anticipate that, once September 11 is past and electioneering begins in earnest, Obama will slowly begin to build momentum, and pick back up some of these women. For now, he's kept Hillary Clinton on the sidelines, again, I suspect because of the 9/11 commemoration. He's giving a "window of purity" as Don Imus used to call the minutes leading up to having a religious leader appear on his program.

And then watch her preach!

(Mo' Memeo!)

The MacGuffin

In order to flesh out a thriller he was making, Alfred Hitchcock employed what he called a "macguffin". A pointless, useless piece that advanced the narrative but in the end had little to nothing to do with the actual movie.

The classic example? The maltese falcon from the eponymous movie, where the real mystery is a) who killed Sam Spade's partner and b) will Spade and Brigid fall in love and what will Spade do to keep her out of jail? The bird is a distraction.

Come the MacGuffin for the 2008 election: Sarah Palin.

Undoubtedly, it was Palin's selection, along with her speech at the RNC, that catapulted McCain from also-ran into a temporary front runner status.

Said status will likely be crowed about by right wingers until, well, McCain crashed back to earth, which will likely happen a bit after this week's commemoration of Bush's greatest failure.

It will be interesting to see how Barack Obama ties Bush into 9/11. Clearly, he can't do it ON 9/11, but he can remind people about the August 6th PDB and the failure of "imagination" taht Condi Rice spoke of.

Now, back to the MacGuffin: Palin's boomlet is nothing more than that. A skyrocket that has burst and dazzled, but ultimately will fizzle out into burnt embers and the stale smell of gunpowder. Like Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, California, there is no "there" there.

The pitfalls of trotting out your one trick pony is, indeed, the one trick becomes wearing and fast. You can't accuse Palin of fresh ideas, since she trots out the same tired bromides that Republicans have foisted for thirty years and failed with for the past eight.

So if it seems that it's no longer "McCain/Palin '08," it's because the Republicans are in a position where they have to milk her for all she's worth right now, in the hopes they can extend a lead going into October, when the surprises start to come down. After all, she's wholly responsible for this bounce, particularly amongst men.

It won't work. Palin doesn't have the gravitas to carry the election on her own, she can't bear her boobs on TV, and McCain's own appeal has drawn a blank among the electorate. All it will truly take to bury Palin in this election cycle is the revelation that she is nothing but "politics as usual" despite her reformer act.

Obama needs to focus on Bush, to draw the extension that McCain will just be a third term, and hammer away at that theme. This same poll indicated that fully 66% of voters are concerned that the Republican ticket will merely extend the Bush agenda another four years. That's an easy swing of 10% back to Obama as the fall unfolds, as we can assume that all 46% of his support in the polls feel this way.

Yea, he's four points behind, but that was to be expected after the RNC and in fact, I'm surprised the bounce was not higher.

In 2000, for example, heading into the DNC, Bush held an overwhelming 55-39 lead over Gore. After the DNC, Gore pulled even, 47-47. McCain swapped just five and a half points.

So while it's not great news for Obama at this early stage, it's not bad news. Fret not, liberals. We will win this thing yet.

UPDATE: The stoopid! It burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrns!

(I'm feeling the love from Memeorandum. Go show them some more.)

To Fight Fire With Water

From the October, 2008 issue of Psychology Today, p. 22

Click to Enlarge. Feel Free To Download And Pass On.

I urge you to read this. Understand the enemy and he is yours.

Nobody Asked Me, But....

1) John McCain gave a speech last night: "HEY! YOU KIDS! GET OFF MY LAWN!"

2) Prediction: The Republican Party is so bereft of ideas and policies, and more important, fresh blood, that they've trotted out Sarah Palin for a cup of coffee on the national political scene in the hopes she can run against Obama in 2012.

3) John McCain just flat out looked old last night. Ronald Reagan, no matter how much we made fun of his age, never acted this lethargic when he took center stage. Game over.

4) I've been accused at various blogs I visit of politicizing Palin's kids. I'm not. As I've posted here already, I am examining the claims of a self-professed "hockey mom" to be fit to lead a nation in a time of crisis, because indeed, what would make her take over the Presidency BUT a crisis? If you're going to trot out your disabled child as a symbol of your compassion, that compassion is fair game. If you're going to trot out your daughter's decision (your own words) to signal your commitment to principle, then the principles that child was taught are fair game. Again, a pitbull would have chaperoned her daughter if she felt this strongly about family morals and values. My dad did it with my sister, and with me on my first few dates.

5) You know who was a "community organizer"? Jesus. The appropriate response of Obama should be this:

Community organizers step in when there's a problem and government turns its back on the people. I thought that's what America was all about: roll up your sleeves and fix the problem yourself?

Epic fail, GOP!

6) Suddenly, Hillary extending the primary season seems like a GOOD idea!

7) Arguably the dumbest commercial I have ever seen.

8) Jack Abra-who, now? Four years, huh? I'm guessing Patrick Fitzgerald couldn't break him. I'm sure he has a cushy job waiting for him in 2013.

9) I'm not sure this is the answer to Obama's troubles...he really owes states like Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio a personal apology for his abhorrent behavior...but it's a start.

10) If you picked 6% or higher, you WIN! And lose.

11) They'll be able to use a similar headline on November 5.

12) I know how they felt.

13) Remember the old days, when a bachelor party meant hookers and beer?

Don't tase me, bro! This is Carl signing out.

Peace!

(h/t to Memeorandum for showing the love to this post)

George Lakoff on Symbolism v. Facts

The Palin Choice (and the political brain):
"The Democratic responses so far reflect external realities: she is inexperienced, knowing little or nothing about foreign policy or national issues; she is really an anti-feminist, wanting the government to enter women's lives to block abortion, but not wanting the government to guarantee equal pay for equal work, or provide adequate child health coverage, or child care, or early childhood education; she shills for the oil and gas industry on drilling; she denies the scientific truths of global warming and evolution; she misuses her political authority; she opposes sex education and her daughter is pregnant; and, rather than being a maverick, she is on the whole a radical right-wing ideologue.

All true, so far as we can tell.

But such truths may nonetheless be largely irrelevant to this campaign. That is the lesson Democrats must learn. They must learn the reality of the political mind."

A very succinct read in Tikkun.
If you want to see his appearance on CSpan's BookTV recently, go here.

WWJD-Be a Community Organizer

From Responsibilites of a Community Organizer
by Elana Wolowitz of Wellstone Action!

"Last week in Denver, Democrats highlighted the biography of their party's presidential nominee, Barack Obama, and the fact that he got his start as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago.

One interesting twist this election year has been the nation's exposure to community organizing as a job, and as something that might help prepare an individual to lead. It's not surprising that much of the country hadn't heard of community organizing before now. A good organizer is always in the back of the room, or better yet, outside collecting sign-in sheets.

However, last night here in our great hometown of St. Paul, Republicans gathered for their turn to make their case to voters. And Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, along with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, openly mocked and derided the job of community organizing."

She goes on to defend the professional field to which Wellstone Action trains people to devote their lives.

Further:

"Being an organizer means putting the needs of the community above yourself and your ego. Your task is to influence the powerful with little more than the common will, and do so while developing the leadership of those around you. A good organizer is always working to put themselves out of a job, because many others should be prepared to step up and take their place. You listen and learn, coordinate and plan, arrive early and stay late, and do the real work that improves people's lives.

It's easy to laugh at something unfamiliar, or mock something you don't understand. But community organizers have been the ones that moved our country forward during times of crisis and great change. They are ordinary people working to improve their communities - that doesn't sound very elitist, does it?"

From Levi Johnston's MySpace Page

This was just discovered this morning:

September 3, 2008

Levi Johnston's Convention Diary

Exclusive Blog from the Presumptive Vice Son-in-Law

Dear Dude,

There is some seriously WEIRD FUCKIN SHIT goin on up in here!!!

So I get off the plane in Minnesota and the first thing I know some creepy old dude who smells like my grandma is gettin up in my grille. I am totally goin to give him a righteous beat-down and then I see it's that John McCain dude from TV who's always approvin his fuckin message.

So I give him this look like, "Don't get in my face or I will SERIOUSLY fuck you up," and dude looks back at me like, "I've ate Viet Cong bigger than you for breakfast." So I like totally back off. Dude, if I'm gonna get fucked up no way am I gonna get fucked up by someone older than Larry King.

Things go from weird to fuckin WEIRD AS ALL SHIT as I get like the totally evil eye from Bristol's old man Todd who looks like he wants to shove an oil pipeline up my fuckin ass. Shit, I said I'd marry her, what the fuck is wrong with you, dude??? Back off or I'll fuck you up.

So I TOTALLY try to stay out of the way of Bristol's mom, who looks like she's gonna go medieval on my ass, like do me way worse than that trooper she got canned. For a minute I feel like I am TOTALLY GOING TO SHIT MYSELF, but than I think of thoughts to calm me down, like that time in middle school when I fucked that guy up who tried to fuck with me.

Dude, the one thing I don't like understand at all is why Bristol's mom even WANTS to be fuckin vice-president and all. Right now, being Governor of Alaska and shit, she could totally invade Russia if she wanted to. It's that fuckin close.

With all this crazy shit going on I didn't even like get a chance to talk to Bristol. I wanted to ask her how her summer was, shit like that, but every time I opened my mouth that McCain dude gave me another look like, "You say word one and I will rearrange your fuckin face you fuckin piece of hockey shit." So I don't say a fuckin thing.

Gotta go now. One thing's for sure, dude - when this week is over I am totally getting wasted!!!!!

Peace out,

L to the J

What A Friend We Have In Jesus!

I was just your average hockey mom and signed up for the PTA.

I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.

 

- Sarah Palin

 

With that, the GOP strategy has been revealed. My friends, we moderates and liberals have been given a gift! Praise Jesus!

 

Believe it or not, they have chosen to re-run the 1988 election all over again, with John McCain serving as Bush the Elder, and Sarah Palin as the attack-dog Veep candidate, Dan Quayle.

 

Comparing herself to Harry Truman, Sarah Palin launched a mean spirited, red meat attack on Barack Obama.

 

Quayle compared himself regularly to JFK, thus setting the stage for one of the most memorable lines in American political history, delivered by Lloyd Bentsen.

 

Palin last night: "But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate."

 

Quayle in 1988: "Want to hear a sad story about the Dukakis campaign? The governor of Massachusetts, he lost his top naval advisor last week. His rubber ducky drowned in the bathtub."

 

Palin was chosen in large part because she's young and attractive and John McCain's "soulmate" (his words).

 

Dan Quayle was chosen in large part because he was young and attractive and "Bush, it seemed, had looked in the mirror and found what was most needed in the second-banana role that he had played for eight years: a younger version of himself."

 

Now, in the past I have made comparisons between Barack Obama and Michael Dukakis. Both are competent legislators/administrators. oth come off as emotionless, bloodless drones.

 

It is, however, a mistake to re-run the campaign that Lee Atwater ran in 1988. For one thing, the economy in 1988, while souring, was not in the tanks the way the economy is today. We did not suffer from a major overseas threat, the Soviet Union having dissolved. Indeed, we were wondering how to spend our "peace dividend".

 

And Barack Obama, while sharing some characteristics with Dukakis, is not Mike Dukakis, anymore than Dan Quayle was John Kennedy or Sarah Palin is Harry Truman.

 

Some have called the treatment of Sarah Palin sexist. But it's not any more sexist to ridicule the ridiculous in a dress than it was to ridicule the ridiculous in a suit. The Palin/Quayle parallels are eerie.

 

For one thing, you might recall the name Paula Parkinson. It was alleged that she and Dan Quayle bumped uglies on a golf outing to Florida, where she admitted that she had, um, unduly influenced the social intercourse of the Congressmen on that trip.

 

Apparently, Mrs. Palin too has her indiscretions, according the National Enquirer, the go-to source for the GOP smear machine.  

 

The clear strategy for Obama is simply not to run the same race as Mike Dukakis, something I think he can clearly accomplish. He has far more charisma than Dukakis and a better sense of humour, for two things. More important, he's clearly a smart enough politician to learn from the past.

 

Something Karl Rove and his minions are not.

 

So this will play out in the following manner:

Sarah Palin will energize the base of the Republican party, this is true and this is her ONLY reason for being on the ticket. Expect many many more attacks from her, ranging from the obvious (Rezko) to the idiotic (a governor of Alaska teasing the Democratic candidate about visiting his grandmother in the "exotic" state of Hawaii). She will feed them red meat, and assholes like Michelle Malkin and her orc minion ilk will eat it up.

 

She will also, however, end up energizing the Democratic base as well. She will anger women, but also anger men as well. She will be perceived as a lightweight airhead who once she is taken off-script can't talk her way out of a paper bag with a knife in her hand.

 

Obama, on the other hand, will continue utilizing the gifts he has been given-- eight years of Bush and a smart political team behind him-- and dismantle McCain/Palin on the issues. A bonus at Obama's level is McCain's irascible temper. Combine Palin's aggressiveness and McCain's defensiveness, and you have inarguably the worst ticket ever to run for office, and I include the irritable Bob Dole and the sarcastic Jack Kemp! 

 

Biden will, however, emulate Lloyd Bentsen and remain statesman-like (remember, he was picked to offset some of the inexperience of Obama, which means he will have to keep whatever prickliness he may be tempted to let loose with in check), and occasionally, he will have to pat Palin on the head and say "there, there, dear, you are no Harry Truman".

Now, let's get to work on taking Congress back completely!

 

By the way, if Sarah Palin is as aggressive and protective as a pitbull, how come her daughter's pregnant?

How McCain Could Win

The news of Sarah Palin's, um, colorful family life has certainly made liberals scratch their heads, wondering how John McCain could possibly hope to win the election in November.

Granted, it seems like, one right after the other, story upon story is released that puts a major damper on the enthusiasm you might expect the Republicans to have regarding a breakthrough nominee.

While this is like a candy store full of goodies for Democrats, The Republicans do not appear to be too nonplussed by it all. Brave front? Perhaps.

I thought I'd sit down and do some political calculations in my head and see if, indeed, John McCain could still win the election. Now, I make no allowance here for extraordinary events, like an October surprise in either the Rezko trial or in the Alaskan investigation regarding whether Palin was illegally overzealous in pursuing the firing of her former brother-in-law, State Trooper Michael Wooten. This analysis is based on the status quo and is strictly an exercise in numbers, not strategy.

The electorate can be divided pretty neatly into three groups: 40% Republicans and conservatives, 40% liberals and Democrats, and 20% unsure/undecided/truly independent.

The middle sixty percent is where elections are battled, with each side almost conceding at least a third to the other (i.e. each side can count on 40% of the vote, plus).

Even in the worst defeat in electoral history, 1984's re-election of Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale pulled in the bare minimum 40% of the popular vote. I don't think McCain is in any danger of underwhelming that many people.

So they each start with at least 40% in the bank, meaning the middle twenty is the battleground. Indeed, Obama actually started a bit behind after the primary season, given the split in the party, since healed, between Clinton voters and Obombers.

Current polling suggests that Barack Obama should end the week somewhere north of 50% of likely voters. He did get a bit of a bounce coming out of Denver, but the real bounce occured shortly after Palin's revelations (pun intended) became news.

It is not often that a candidate gets a bounce during the other guy's convention! This despite the fact that Obama has stayed rather conspicuously in the background, as candidates traditionally do, coming forward only to deny that his campaign was behind the leak of the Palin unauthorized biographical information and to urge supporters to stay out of the Palins' private lives.

Unlike McCain, who tried hard to make the news daily during the Denver convention. But I digress.

It seems unlikely that McCain can win the election, to be sure, but here's how it could break for him.

All he really needs to do is keep it close until October, I think. He'll get a bounce (I'm guessing about three points) by Friday, much of which is coming from the seven or eight percent still undecided, and a few people shifting from Obama.

Scaring people, which is tonight's theme, can create irrational decision making.

So let's say Obama leads on Friday, 49-46. McCain cannot afford to lose much more ground. Period.

In addition to this, he will have to consider the electoral vote calculation. Pennsylvania is in play, thanks to Obama's hurtful comments regarding guns and religion. Biden helps him a little there, but possibly not enough. Ohio, too, is in play but that was a given anyway.

Rasmussen Reports, hardly an unbiased source, although they at least make a stab at reality, indicates that the electoral college tally right now stands at McCain 183, Obama 193, with 162 up for grabs or at least leaning.

These further break down this way:

Safe Republican 62

Likely Republican 121

Leans Republican 64

Toss-Up 27

Leans Democrat 71

Likely Democrat 50

Safe Democrat 143

Or 264 Obama, 247 McCain, with Obama needing just 5 more votes.

The states considered toss ups are Virginia (13 votes), Colorado (9), and Nevada (5), all carried by Bush in 2004. Hillary Clinton took Nevada surprisingly easily. Obama did extremely well against Clinton in Colorado and Virginia, both of which have skewed more Democratic over the past two election cycles.

That bodes well for Obama, but here's the mix: in the "Leans Democrat" are the following states: Iowa (7), Michigan (17), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (21), Wisconsin (10).

Of those seven states in 2004, Bush carried in Iowa (surprisingly, given that this state put Obama on the map) and New Mexico. Of the states that currently lean Republican-- Florida, Ohio, Missouri, Montana, Maryland Montana, and North Dakota-- Kerry carried none.

In other words, allowing for Iowa and New Mexico, the current calculus is more like Obama 252, McCain 259. This is, um, not good news. McCain has gained on Obama since the Democratic convention in Iowa, although the New Mexico lead for Obama remains solid. So let's back out New Mexico's five votes. Obama 257, McCain 254.

That's just too damned close to call this for Obama!

If McCain can hold onto the states currently at least leaning his way, and recapture Iowa, then the election will basically come down to Virginia. I suspect Nevada is less in play than pollsters think (again, that "guns" thing comes into play). Obama does well in the urban and college towns, but if you look at the primary map, the counties that Clinton took west of the Shenandoah are largely Republican.

This is not good news for Obama. Again, guns and religion. Working class folks. Obama will have to make the case over the next months that he's not the scary liberal black man that the Republicans will paint him as, that he's an average American, at least as average as Sarah Palin, with an interesting life story and a rugged upbringing. He has to show he learned something, some common sense.

If he can do that, he will win the election, but it will not be the landslide many are predicting.

UPDATE: I feel icky, violated: Hugh Hugetits linked to this post.

Uh Oh, McCain Palin In Comparison!

Obama cracks 50% for the first time

So I'm guessing people were a bit turned off by the whore-raising, gun-toting, aborting-by-plane mother of five that McCain chose to run with?

GOP Im-Palin Itself

Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas, as they say:

A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain's choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

On Monday morning, Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd, issued a statement saying that their 17-year-old unmarried daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant and that she intended to marry the father.

Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state's public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

Some family values, eh? But this is the culmination of the paternalistic politics of the Republican party, the denouement of the Daddy State. Lecture, harangue, harass, moralize, genderfy about values, and ultimately, even the top of your ticket is going to be smeared by the same human behaviors you've accused the rest of the country...you know, them?...of self-indulging in.

I'm not here to judge Bristol Palin. I feel nothing but sadness for her, as I would for any single woman at the beginning of her life faced with this choice, particularly one for whom abortion could never be an option. Bristol will never be able to follow in her mother's footsteps. She will never be a contender for Miss Alaska. She will marry a man-- who also earns my pity, since his life and his future is now over so long as his mother-in-law is a political presence-- who is barely old enough to fight in Iraq (makes you wonder, in fact, why he's not there already. At eighteen, why is he still in high school?). Yes, they will both be taken care of. Mommy's on the big stage now, and the limelight splatters onto the rest of her tribe.

None of them will ever go hungry again, so long as the lecture circuit and book deals from Regnery Press abound.

But the chance that Bristol might extend an already impressive family name are zilch now. We make choices, and in making choices, we make mistakes. I grieve her mistakes with her. I'm pretty sure she's not happy about what has happened.

I am, however, free to judge Sarah Palin. On these two scores alone, her daughter's promiscuity as well as the attempt to fire a public servant out of a spiteful vendetta from a family matter, she falls far short of the Republican ideal of morality and humility.

Well, actually, on that last point, she's probably in lockstep, but I digress.

It is ironic that the public outcry from the right wing, particularly from the McCain camp itself, has been one of tolerance, praising the decision to keep the baby, of letting a politician's private life be her private life, of keeping the children out of this. On that last point, I concur, but...

The internal inconsistency of that statement-- a public official hiding behind the privacy shield, while a) denying it to women who might choose abortion and b) utilizing her very public resources to hound a man who is in a private dispute with a member of her family-- is astoundingly cynical, to say the least.

And yet, the word will go forth about the party of values, the party that just a year ago excoriated Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney's younger sister, for getting pregnant at sixteen. Somehow, they manage to twist their heads 360 degrees on this story about Bristol Palin.

I think this sums up Mickey Malkin's post:

Working

Take a look around you, no matter where you are. What do you see?

Pick up your keyboard and look at it. Take a sip from your cup. Retie your shoelaces (or if you're a conservative troll reading this, adjust the velcro).

Someone made those.

Today is Labor Day. Today we were supposed to be celebrating the men and women who riveted and bolted and inserted tab A into slot B, who built this country. Instead, we drive over to a friend's house to eat some barbecue, drink some beer and maybe watch a ballgame.

The United States of America grew on the backs of these people: the plumbers, the carpenters, the road pavers, the steelworkers, and yes, the slaves. We owe them all a debt of gratitude that is immeasurable. Too often, we forget this. We pay lip service to the working classes, but we don't really understand what is involved in doing their jobs. We only know that, when the furnace breaks, some guy in dirty overalls shows up and tracks soot through our basement to turn our hot water back on.

We forget that we have "advanced" to such a degree that we couldn't even begin to do what takes them twenty minutes, billable hours. We simply dial a telephone, they show up, and things are right again after a couple of hundred dollars. We make no investment in the actual work. Hell, most of don't even bother to watch to see how its done.

We spend the rest of the year insulting them, making jokes about plumbers' butt cracks. We deny them their true voice in society because many of them are too tired to sit down at a computer, if they own one, and express their opinions. We'll complain about how much they charge for fixing our car, but then drive to the stadium to watch guys who make in an hour what a bricklayer makes in a year play a game.

Every four years or so, we trot out at least one candidate who tries to speak for "them", the faceless nameless mass of "the working class". This year it was John Edwards and then Hillary Clinton. Why? Because these people consider it a duty to vote, despite their exhaustion, despite the lung diseases they've contracted mining our coal, despite the crippling arthritis of working too many hours bent over a sewing machine, stitching our shirts.

Republicans speak to the working class about things they understand: God & guns. Liberals and Democrats speak of things in the abstract: programs & plans. Is it any wonder why they usually vote Republican?

Since 1960, only four Democrats have won the Presidency: JFK, LBJ, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. One of them, LBJ, won in a "gimme" the year after Kennedy was assassinated. The other three all won because they convinced voters that they were men of God. They spoke the lingo, at length, of religion, the type of religion that fills the Baptist or Methodist church in that small town you zip by on the freeway.

The guys who milk cows? They understood these men. All of them had "the common touch," a left-handed compliment if I've ever heard one, as if it's beneath most politicians.

Maybe it is. Maybe it's beneath the rest of us, as well, as we sit in our living rooms, dorms, and dens, sipping lattes and reading this pathetic little slice of the Internets.

But it's not beneath the sewer workers or the fire fighters or the cops! And they count, dammit!

My dad was a carpenter. He was union, and I benefitted from the only affirmative action that should matter: the affirmative action of a group of workers banding together to get their fair share from an employer. And what was the first thing the conservatives attacked once they wrested power in the 1980s?

Unions.

My dad built schools in the city. He was often lead foreman on one project, and then sub-foreman on the next, but that was after twenty years sweating and bloodying himself laboring on projects where his name might appear in small type on a plaque in the lobby, and that would be the only acknowledgment he would get.

When I went to a new school, I made sure to check the plaque. Sometimes my dad's name would be on it, and I'd point it out to my teacher or the principal. Sometimes, it would be some other man's name (yes, sadly, a man's name only), that I'd recognize. I'd tell my dad when I got home. Sometimes he would tell me stories about the man or the job site if it was his.

I remember one summer going to one of my dad's sites as a Cub Scout, and standing on the steel structure, looking at the magnificent view from three stories up in Queens. Fast forward thirty years, and taking my daughter for her first day of school at this same building.

And smiling.

That house you live in? Somebody built it. The car you drive? Someone built that, too. The clothes you wear, the food you eat, the TV you watch, the toys your kids play with, someone worked too many hours way too hard under the supervision of a company that was only interested in the bottom line, who insisted "more".

And in your wildest dreams, in your most egomaniacal fantasy of power, you could not begin to duplicate what you now possess, using your own two hands.

John Edwards was right. There are "Two Americas". There's our America, and there's the workers' America.

Hillary Clinton was right. We owe these people more than lip service every four years and then a fumbling review afterwards as to why they voted "against their pocketbooks."

We owe them our lives. It's about time we started paying them back.