Vivos Voco

BCS ain't all that

2009-02-01T12:39:00.001-05:00

Harvey Araton has an editorial in today's NYT SundaySports arguing that the Cardinals prove the BCS bowl system is better than a playoffs system. "The exalted playoff has produced the possibility of a 9-7 team...calling itself the best team in the NFL," a team whose performance was so terrible that "it would have probably removed the Cardinals from consideration for the Motor City Bowl." Hah!

A big deal is made about how every game counts in the BCS, but that's not true, or at least they don't all count the same. For Penn State ultimately only two games counted, the loss to Iowa and to USC. For USC the most important game turned out to be the loss to whatever garden state college they lost to last year. Which begs the question, how can every game count when so many games each season are against lower ranked teams? Those only count when they are an upset.

The Cardinals won the games that counted, and they put up a beautiful performance during the playoffs. Luckily there's no risk of the NFL adopting a bowl system because if players played each game as if it "counted", you'd see a lot more dramatic injuries. The Patriots played that way last season, and they're still one of the lamest teams (as in injured) in the NFL. In contrast, the Cowboys shined in all their early games, and stunk up all the games that "counted". The Cardinals deserve to be where they are at; they beat all the best teams when they had to.

The bowl system has a lot of sentimental allure, so it probably shouldn't be abandoned. But this idea that every game somehow proves a team's standing is silly. It's bad for the players and it doesn't lead to better football.

Full disclosure: my only beef with the bowl system is that as a BigTen fan it has led to this mythology of SouthEastern football supremacy. Please.

Eel test

2009-01-29T13:27:00.001-05:00

Testing a mobile blogger in a desparate attempt to avoid brushing up on the centrally mediated autonomic and somatic effects of cardiovascular regulation of OT and AVP for a couple of major presentations next week. Today's a good day for eel. I'm in a sushi mood, but too cold for raw fish. Incidentally, outside of mammals oxytocin has only been found in the ratfish. Eels and most other osteichthyes produce isotocin.

When Cultures Collide

2009-01-18T04:08:00.003-05:00

I've been getting real sick of that last post date on this blog. Each day of silence adding to the dread of not having anything to say. I still don't, but consider this therapy to avoid the blanket coverage of the looming Inauguration and the hordes of people who are now really, really, really proud of their country. All that pride makes me really nervous.

Anyways, I've seen three articles recently on cultures colliding here in the US -- what will probably be a new theme for the year here at VivosVoco -- and thought I'd share them with you.

The first: The Phillipine News reports on some peeved nuns in Manhattan (any particular ethnicity?) that are suing a Filipino couple for their culinary practices.

The Missionary Sisters of Sacred Heart in Manhattan has filed a complaint against Filipino American couple, Michael and Gloria Lim, over a Filipino delicacy called ‘tuyo’ (dried fish), and its funky cousin, the ‘tinapa’ (smoked fish). The case is now with the Manhattan Supreme Court.

Reports say Gloria was smoking fish outside her apartment window when the smell – noxious stench to the nuns, divine aroma to the Lims – of the salted fish wafted throughout the Gramercy apartment building. The “foul smell” was too strong the nuns suspected it was coming from a decomposing body and called in the Fire Department.

According to reports, the firemen searched every unit of the building and were able to trace the source of the smell to the Lims’ unit. They knocked, and when no one came to the door, the NYFD came barreling in. Gloria, a nurse, found her door knocked down and was obviously peeved. It appears the MSSH leases the unit to the Lims and may have authorized the assault.

“I cook dried fish,” Gloria defiantly declared to the NY Post.

The average American may find it puzzling how one can derive pleasure of the palate from dried fish. Foodie Andrew Zimmern, who has been to the Philippines and braved the ‘balut’ (fertilized duck egg in an embryo) and Soup No. 5 (bull’s rectum and testicles soup, believed to be a powerful aphrodisiac) might be able to share the gustatory experience.

Gloria was referring to the ‘tuyo,’ a Philippine staple usually eaten with steaming hot rice and fresh tomatoes. Some eat theirs dipped in vinegar and crushed garlic paired with fried rice and sunny side up egg.

Dried fish is not a Philippine exclusive. It is an essential in the traditional Chinese and Malaysian fried rice along with chopped spring onions, garlic and chili. Sometimes, it is pulled and sprinkled on chocolate porridge or ‘champorado.’

Food with a strong salty taste like ‘tuyo’ or ‘tinapa’ might be too intense for the morning stomach, but many Filipinos would never leave for work in the morning without having it for breakfast.

Maybe someone can explain the legal nuances, but can ethnic bias towards food odors really qualify as cause for legal action? I assume the nuns are too old to learn to like tuyo, although that bull rectum has got my tummy growling (pretty much anything with offal does the trick), but can't they install some form of ventilation system and never again rent to Filipinos? I rule against the nuns on this one. Unless it was clearly mentioned in the lease, the nuns are going to have to learn to live with it. h/t to L.S.Mogado.

The second: The BBC has an article under the awesome title, US father sells daughter for beer. The father in question is a Trique immigrant from Mexico who was giving his daughter's hand in marriage in exchange for a dowry that included beer. Are dowries illegal? In any event, the problem appears to be not the dowry, but that the daughter is fourteen years old.

A man has been arrested in California after allegedly arranging for his 14-year-old daughter to marry a neighbour in exchange for beer, meat and $16,000.

Police said they learnt of the deal when Marcelino de Jesus Martinez came to them asking for help after his neighbour failed to pay up.

He faces charges of human trafficking, statutory rape and child cruelty.

Police also arrested the intended groom, 18-year-old Margarito de Jesus Galindo, for alleged statutory rape.

Police believe the girl went willingly with Mr Galindo, but under California law she is under the legal age of consent and cannot marry. . .

Greenfield police chief Joe Grebmeier said the case highlighted an issue the region, which has a high number of migrant workers, had been struggling with.

"This is not a traditional trafficking case because there is no force or coercion in this," Mr Grebmeier said.

"We're aware of the cultural issues here, but state law trumps cultural sensitivity."

My only question is, if he gives the beer back, can they drop the charges? Seems a little harsh, under the circumstances. I don't have the energy to mount a spirited defense of the Trique at the moment, but maybe if one of you goads me into it.

Finally, there is this criticism from AlterNet of a recent NYT article on the use of misoprostol to induce abortion in Latino immigrant communities.

Several prominent women's health advocates are dismayed by a recent New York Times article about do-it-yourself abortions using the drug misoprostol. The Times piece, published January 4, mischaracterized a study about the drug, and researchers say the piece is sensationalist, implying that lots of New York City Latinas are seriously endangering their health and breaking the law. Some activists now worry that the Times article could muffle a more nuanced discussion about access to reproductive health care for immigrant women that transcends the phenomenon of DIY misprostol abortions.

In the US, misoprostol -- also known by its brand name Cytotec -- is a prescription drug approved by the FDA as one of two medications employed in tandem to induce non-surgical, "RU-486"-style abortions. The FDA has never approved misoprostol for solo use for abortions. But in many countries where abortion is banned, the drug is sold without prescription, and millions of women have taken it to end their pregnancies. Simultaneously, many women from these countries have immigrated to the US. During the past decade, speculation has spread about whether they are commonly using misoprostol here to self-induce abortions. Anecdotes abound, including many in New York City, but public health data has been non-existent.

Putting aside the (in)accuracies of the article, what interests me is this, did the NYT focus on the practice due to ethnic bias, and will it lead to legal efforts to curtail the health practices of Latina immigrants:

The Times article also states -- wrongly -- that self-induced abortions in New York are "illicit," and women do them "illegally." In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 38 states outlaw self-abortion, in laws which often track repressive statutes left over from pre-Roe v. Wade days. But New York isn't one of them -- women there can legally self abort early pregnancies if they want to.

Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas, director of policy and advocacy at New York-based National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, also was interviewed for the Times story, and she is disturbed by the resulting article. "We dispute the Times' implication that accessing clinics is very easy," she said. "There's the idea among undocumented women that they'll be deported if they go to a clinic, and the Times is wrong about the price of an abortion being cheap for many women."

After the Times piece came out, the national media followed with articles saying that misoprostol use among US Latinas is common, increasing, risky and illegal. As a result, Gonzalez-Rojas said, "there could be legislative action" to further outlaw or crack down on self-induced abortions, "including to criminalize women's use of misoprostol" in the name of protecting them. "We do have concerns."

Dr. Anne Davis, an OBGYN and medical director of New York City-based Physicians for Reproductive Health and Choice, has more fundamental objections. An OBGYN with a practice in Upper Manhattan that includes many low-income, Latina patients, Davis said she felt the Times article "was trying to do a bit of an ‘us versus them' thing," implying that poor, immigrant women have completely different attitudes than Times readers do. "There are plenty of people in Upper Manhattan who are having abortions by accessing the system; they are the overwhelming majority of the community," she said. "Misoprostol is a complex subject. I have seen many women who've used it. And I have seen serious complications. But misoprostol is absolutely appropriate for abortion if there's no other option. The problem is, there is a medical discussion and a sociological discussion about what's right for women." When either conversation intrudes on the other without careful research, thought, and language, David says, needless controversy results. The message from any discussion of misoprostol, she says, is that "We need to do better for women and make sure all of them get good reproductive medical care as soon as they need it. That's the most important thing."

Anyone who brings up FGM in the discussion gets extra credit.

Amazing show of solidarity

2008-12-12T09:42:00.004-05:00

So it looks like Republicans in the Senate just pulled the plug on the American auto industry. Unless Bush steps in and uses TARP funds to keep GM afloat the left owns the country for the next eight years, but at a terrible price. Billions in payments to suppliers are coming due in next few weeks, so not only will GM have to file for bankruptcy, so will many of their suppliers. Chrysler will go next. And, as soon as suppliers start going under, Ford will go down amplifying the effect. The transplants will have to layoff thousands as well, since they depend on the same suppliers. The domino effect begins now, and it's going to go fast. As I've mentioned before, just in time production where suppliers deliver precise amounts of product directly to assembly workers on the line (in place at all auto manufacturers) means there is no wiggle room for error. Just in time is a high risk, high reward strategy. One key supplier goes under and everything shuts down.

I am, however, extremely glad that the UAW didn't cave to Republican demands that they sell out the million+ retirees, which would have been the only way to bring wages in line at transplant and Big Three plants. It would have set precedent for all future concession discussions, selling out all manufacturing workers. So, two amazing shows of solidarity this week: UAW shows solidarity with all manufacturing workers by refusing to accept Republican demands for immediate concessions, and Republic Windows and Doors workers win their sit-down strike/plant occupation as Bank of America and JPMorgan agree to ensure they get their due severance. Together with this delicious morsel: anger at banks increasing, and Obama's vocal support for Republic workers, means a long eight years for the right.

Blago goes down - sniff.

2008-12-09T14:02:00.004-05:00

Big news today that Blago was arrested for trying to sell his "golden" authority to appoint Obama's replacement in the Senate. He also allegedly refused a lifeline to the Tribune Co. unless they fired critical editorial staff. At least the first allegation is caught on tape. None of the allegations are surprising--haven't heard a kind word said about him since he was first elected. But, is he really that stupid? And is he to blame for the Tribune Co. bankruptcy?

The earliest comments on Chi Trib today were of the vein: If he were a Republican, everyone would be up in arms about his arrest. Since he's a Democrat, no one says anything. Whatever. But one of the response comments claimed the arrest was payback for ordering the state not to do business with Bank of America for their role in the sudden closure of Republic Windows and Doors. The Republic Windows and Doors workers are staging a sit-in/plant occupation since the plant did not give fair notice and is not compensating workers as required by law. Details can be found at pilsenprole. I certainly hope the state of IL continues to refuse to do business with Bank of America, but this video from yesterday shows a pretty cynical ploy on the governor's behalf to tie his fortune to that of workers battered by Wall Street. Would he have been there if it didn't provide the perfect photo op for his "fight the power" attempt to influence public opinion? Was it at all successful? Just a thought.

The myth of the $70/hour auto worker

2008-11-27T01:09:00.002-05:00

Keith Olbermann, at 1:42, names Andrew Ross Sorkin of NYT Worst Person in the World for inventing the myth of the $70/hour auto-worker. Short version: add all Big Three liabilities, including retiree pensions and benefits, current benefits including health care, and actual wages, then divide by current worker/hours. Ta Da!

Eric Boehlert at MediaMatters also deconstructs the myth, excerpted here, at length:

It's been one week since New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote that at General Motors, "the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs."

The nugget was part of a column in which Sorkin argued that the government should not bail out the ailing Big Three automakers and that they instead should embrace bankruptcy.

Sorkin's point was that labor costs were out of control -- workers enjoyed "gold-plated benefits" -- and that during bankruptcy, the auto companies could address those runaway wages.

As I mentioned, it's been one week since the column appeared, which seems like plenty of time for Sorkin and the Times to correct the misleading $70-an-hour claim. But to date, there's been no clarification from the newspaper of record or from Sorkin himself.

And he isn't alone. Appearing on NPR last week, Times senior business correspondent Micheline Maynard told listeners that the "hourly wage" of Detroit's union autoworkers had been driven up "towards $80 an hour."

Somebody at the Times needs to clarify the record, because the average United Auto Workers member is not paid $80 an hour. Or even $70. Not even close. Yet (thanks to the Times?) the issue has become a central talking point in the unfolding national debate about the future of America's automotive industry.

Indeed, that $70-an-hour meme, actively promoted by the anti-union conservative media, has ricocheted around the traditional press as well as the political landscape, where it was picked up by congressional critics last week during hearings and used to argue against aiding GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
. . .
Question: Is the press just being sloppy on this issue of supposedly pampered autoworkers, or are there other elements in play? Because honestly, I've had trouble escaping the not-very-subtle elitist, get-a-load-of-this tone that has run through the media's misinformation on the topic; i.e., "These autoworkers get paid that?!"

Answer: No, they don't, so please stop reporting it. (And why has the press been so reticent to note that Big Three autoworkers recently made significant concessions to management?)

And it's funny, because I don't remember hearing much coverage in the press about AIG workers' six- and seven-figure salaries when the U.S. government announced it was bailing out the insurance giant. And I haven't seen or heard a single press reference to the annual salaries pocketed by Citigroup employees, even though the government has moved in quickly to bail the banking giant out of a hole its executives dug.

As Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) pointed out during congressional hearings last week, "There is apparently a cultural condition that's more ready to accept aid to a white-collar industry than the blue-collar industry, and that has to be confronted."

That cultural condition seems to extend to, and be embraced by, today's white-collar press corps.

Make no mistake: The $70-an-hour claim represents a classic case of conservative misinformation. It's also a very dangerous one. The falsehood about autoworkers is being spread at a crucial time, when a make-or-break public debate is taking place, a debate that could affect millions of American workers.
. . .
What that $70 figure (or $73) actually represents is what it costs GM in total labor expenses, on an hourly basis, to manufacture autos.

Do you see that there's a big distinction? General Motors doles out $70 an hour in overall labor costs to manufacture cars. But individual employees don't get paid $70 an hour to make cars. (The discrepancy between costs and wages is explained by additional benefits, pension fees, and health-care costs GM pays out to current and retired employees.)

Simply put, GM's labor costs are not synonymous with hourly wages earned by UAW employees. Many in the press have casually used the two interchangeably. But they're not.

Felix Salmon at Portfolio did perhaps the best job explaining the misinformation at play:

The average GM assembly-line worker makes about $28 per hour in wages, and I can assure you that GM is not paying $42 an hour in health insurance and pension plan contributions. Rather, the $70 per hour figure (or $73 an hour, or whatever) is a ridiculous number obtained by adding up GM's total labor, health, and pension costs, and then dividing by the total number of hours worked. In other words, it includes all the healthcare and retirement costs of retired workers. [emphasis in original]

Indeed, according to this Associated Press report, a chunk of GM's $70-an-hour labor costs goes toward paying current retirees' pensions and health-care coverage. In other words, that's money that's not going to end up in the pocket of any autoworker when he cashes his paycheck this week. That's money GM has to set aside in order to pay off costs associated with workers already in retirement. That money has absolutely nothing to do with calculating the hourly wage of a full-time UAW employee today. None.

So, no, UAW workers don't make $70 an hour even if you factor in benefits, because a portion of those benefits are going to people who retired years ago.

Nonetheless, that formulation (wages+benefits=$70 an hour) has been widespread. That's what Sorkin did in his Times column: "The average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs."

Not only is that inaccurate, but there's also a problem in terms of perception. It's true that autoworkers don't earn annual salaries and that when calculating hourly wages, the cost of benefits paid directly to the worker can be included. But some media outlets have been so casual and sloppy in presenting the facts that news consumers are left with the false impression that GM workers pocket $70 an hour. That's not true, and it seems some in the press are doing very little to correct that misperception.

For instance, BusinessWeek also used the same convoluted language: "Older UAW members make more than $70 per hour in combined wages and benefits." Dallas Morning News columnist Cheryl Hall did it, too: "GM's average worker makes $78.21 an hour in wages and benefits."

Why does the press use that convoluted equation when calculating how much autoworkers supposedly make?

I have a hunch it's because that $70 an hour is a real eyepopper. It makes a very deep impression within the space of just a few words.
. . .
How much money GM's workers make is certainly relevant when discussing the unfolding automotive crisis. But the press should stop confusing the issue, and tainting the perceptions of news consumers, by casually suggesting that $70-an-hour labor costs represent what UAW workers pocket every 60 minutes.

That's misleading and dishonest.

And that's why it's still not too late for Sorkin and the Times to correct the record.

Help Stop Execution of Farzad Kamangar

2008-11-26T10:31:00.002-05:00

This morning I received news that jailed Iranian teacher union activist
I received email from Labourstart today calling on people to help stop execution of Farzad Kamangar. Labourstart's servers appear slammed, so I found Education International also has a page to support Farzad K. and added widget at top right of page. Come on! It will take under a minute to write in your name and e-mail and hit the send button.
*******
Email from Labourstart:

Farzad Kamangar may be hanged within the next few hours.

According to the Education International, he has been taken from his
cell in Tehran's Evin prison in preparation for execution. The guards
have told him he is about to be executed and they are making fun of him,
calling him a martyr.

We need your help and we need it right now.

Send off your message to the Iranian president:

http://www.labourstart.org/farzad

Pass on the this message to everyone you know who might support this
campaign.

We may only have a few hours left.

I know that I can count on your help. Thank you.

The Money Hole: $4.3 Trillion and Counting

2008-11-25T23:42:00.004-05:00

Tonight on Rachel Maddow:
According to CNBC, US Govt has commited $4.3 trillion to fixing economic crisis. Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation, has calculated the bailout is more expensive than all of the following, combined and adjusted for inflation:

The Marshall Plan + The Louisiana Purchase + The Race to the Moon + The Savings & Loan Crisis + The Korean War + The New Deal + The Iraq War + The Vietnam War + The Lifetime Budget of Nasa

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Calling Garzon

2008-11-24T22:03:00.002-05:00

Bush has begun the barrage of coming pardons, and one of the Washington parlor games is speculation as to whether or not he will issue a blanket preemptive pardon to an entire class of cronies that engaged in war crimes and other illegal activities under his administration. The preemptive pardon would shield all the happy-go-lucky water boarders who are starting to sweat the coming transfer of power. Obama has sent signals that his administration will not prosecute Bush's torturing minions:

Robert Litt, a former top Clinton administration Justice Department prosecutor, said Obama should focus on moving forward with anti-torture policy instead of looking back.

"Both for policy and political reasons, it would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time hauling people up before Congress or before grand juries and going over what went on," Litt said at a Brookings Institution discussion about Obama's legal policy. "To as great of an extent we can say, the last eight years are over, now we can move forward - that would be beneficial both to the country and the president, politically". . .

Asked this weekend during a Vermont Public Radio interview if Bush administration officials would face war crimes, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy flatly said, "In the United States, no."

Senator Leahy's comments reminded me that, pardon or no pardon, prosecution or no prosecution in the US, none of that entire class of criminals will be travelling abroad any time soon. Or ever. It's only a matter of time before charges are filed against both the masterminds and tools of war crimes in Iraq. Writing in 2007:

In an opinion piece in the newspaper El Pais, published on the fourth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon said the war was "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history".

"We should look more deeply into the possible criminal responsibility of the people who are, or were, responsible for this war and see whether there is sufficient evidence to make them answer for it," Garzon wrote.

"There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation and inquiry to start without more delay," he said.
Garzon, who became famous in 1999 when he tried to extradite Pinochet from Britain and try him for crimes against humanity, was particularly critical of the former Spanish government, a major backer of the Iraq invasion.

"Those who joined the U.S. president in the war against Iraq have as much or more responsibility than him because, despite having doubts and biased information, they put themselves in the hands of the aggressor to carry out an ignoble act of death and destruction that continues to this day," he said.

Garzon, famous for his efforts to bring Pinochet to justice, has caused tyrants across the globe to think twice before booking their holiday plans:

On October 17, 1998, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London at the judge's request.
Garzon accused Pinochet of genocide, terrorism and torture, based on testimony from the Spanish families of people who had disappeared in Chile.

The British government eventually refused to extradite him to Spain, citing health reasons.

But the move was not in vain. The human rights organisation Amnesty International said the arrest had a "domino effect".
"The attempt to bring Augusto Pinochet to justice has been of great international importance in the struggle to end impunity for crimes against humanity," it said.

This was especially true in Latin America, where the governments of Chile, Argentina and Guatemala decided to investigate crimes against ex-dictators.

Judge Garzon has nursed a movement born in the Nuremberg war trials and which continued with war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, the International Criminal Court and the recognition of universal jurisprudence by countries such as Belgium, Germany and Canada.

The Spanish judiciary has itself confirmed the "Garzon doctrine" by recognising the principle of "universal competence" under which courts can hears cases of genocide and crimes against humanity wherever they occur and whatever the nationality of the defendant.

Spanish courts have accepted 11 cases involving crimes against humanity, genocide or torture in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Tibet, Guatemala, the Western Sahara and Rwanda.

With or without the International Criminal Court, as soon as one of these war criminals puts their guard down, they're going down.

Auto redux

2008-11-21T08:18:00.003-05:00

I'm happy to see Big Three scrutinized (heard of jet-pooling?), but what about this double standard of throwing money without a plan at Wall Street--where banks only have to fill out a two page application form--while refusing to bail out a key manufacturing industry. Wall Street is using billions in bailout funds to pay their bonuses, while 3 million manufacturing jobs will go down the drain. Excluding the few who voted against the big bailout, the organized opposition to the bailout sees and is seizing a tremendous opportunity to destroy the unionized manufacturing sector.

Pat Buchanan, obviously interested in preserving America's manufacturing base, made this point today on Morning Joe. The death of manufacturing will destroy the middle class. The industry has already lost millions of jobs that have been replaced by Walmart service jobs. Is this not a clear example of class warfare? The cost to the economy will be high, but just think of the disciplined labor force!

Defend the UAW

2008-11-18T15:37:00.004-05:00

To hear the talking-heads tell it, the source of the Big Three's problems is job security and a living wage. The UAW is taking a beating in the press over the proposed auto bailout, and this meme has infected way too many people. Most news segments I've seen on CNN and MSNBC have included attacks blaming the UAW. Do a twitter search on UAW, and you find a torrent of anti-UAW postings.

This is a very dangerous slope we're on. The right sees a chance to destroy the very concept of job security and it's making huge gains in dominating the political discussion. Instead of people saying auto-workers deserve job security, they're saying, "we don't have job security, why should they?" As the UAW goes, so will the rest of the industrial unions. Economists like Jeffrey Sachs are worried that if the govt. doesn't help the Big Three we're going to lose our domestic manufacturing base. I'm worried that we're going to see all manufacturing jobs go the way of hamburger-flipping, with disastrous consequences for the middle class and income inequality.

Non-union manufacturing plants already pay higher entry-level wages than their union counterparts as a result of UAW concessions, and are actually putting downward pressure on non-union wages. The entry-level hourly wage at a union plant is $14, compared to $16 at a non-union plant. The only thing left for them to give away is what remains of their health coverage and pensions. What the public is demanding is that auto-workers who have given their lives to the Big-Three lose their jobs, lose their benefits, and retire to the poor-house.

Recent contractions in demand have already led to massive job-losses, on top of the negotiated job-losses over the past two decades that have made the industry insanely-productive. The UAW has accepted changes in manufacturing and management practices that have drastically reduced the number of unionized auto workers (a majority of the American industry is non-union), and have made working in an auto-plant unbearably stressful.

One of the reasons the Big Three is on verge of collapse is due to these concessions. They operate on a "just in time" system, meaning that parts arrive from suppliers exactly when they are needed at the assembly line so that there is little wasted storage space, materials, or labor time. During the last big GM strike, the UAW was able to strike one supplier and bring most of the company to a halt as a result. Now, if that same supplier is unable to obtain financing to maintain operations, the end result is the same (and GM is in the same financing boat meaning it can't lend cash to help the supplier stay afloat either).

All of these concessions have certainly made the Big Three more "competitive," so all that is left is to jettison the several billion in legacy costs--meaning health care and pensions for current and future retirees. Most if not all of the Big Three's foreign competitors come from countries with significantly stronger social safety nets, including single-payer health care. If you really want to make the auto industry competitive, don't force it into a bankruptcy it will never recover from, nationalize the legacy costs instead. It's a no-brainer. Most people support universal health coverage. How about calling for that, instead of just calling for the heads of auto-workers? If you think the economy is in trouble now, just wait until you fire the only secure workforce the country has left.

The UAW has made plenty of mistakes, including supporting the Big Three's efforts to avoid emission controls, but most of their mistakes have entailed offering too many concessions, not too few. If the popular mood is to put the UAW up against the wall, the country will only succeed in shooting itself in the foot.

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Nachtraglichkeit

2008-11-11T14:01:00.004-05:00

I can't recall the last time I got a good night's sleep. But I do drink a lot of coffee, so that is possibly not a fabrication.

According to scientists, the brain is a consummate liar, a bullshit artist of the first order. To remember is to fabricate.

Why is memory so inherently dishonest? To make a long story short, it's now pretty clear that the act of remembering a memory changes the structure of the memory itself. (This is known as memory reconsolidation; Freud called it Nachtraglichkeit, or "retroactivity".) My favorite analogy is that, while we used to think of episodic memory as a "save" function in the brain (the hippocampus is the hard drive) we now know that every memory is really a "save as". To recall is to create a new file, and instantly overwrite what came before.

Obviously, this has big implications for the veracity of memory. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the memory is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what you remember and more about you. So the purely objective memory is the one memory you will never know. And the more you remember a memory, repeating it to yourself and others, the less honest that memory becomes . . . a bad night of sleep can make you even more dishonest than usual. While it's long been known that we make many of our memories while dreaming - this is why it's so important to get a good night sleep after studying for a test - it turns out that sleep deprivation causes us to make up memories.

[German] scientists conducted a rather sadistic experiment, forcing people to stay awake for up to 44 hours at a time. The end result? The insomniacs were much more likely to develop false memories. (As Freud pointed out, the most dangerous aspect of false memories is that they feel true.) The good news, though, is that there's a cheap and easy cure for such unintentional lies. When people drank a cup of coffee just before they recalled the memories, the dishonesty disappeared. Caffeine is a truth serum.

Sex, red and blue

2008-11-08T07:09:00.003-05:00

I'm done with punditry for a bit, but allow me this last jab: if you thought our current gang of thieves could be trusted to disperse a $trillion, hope the crack was tasty.

Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera has a little post on red sex vs. blue sex.
She quotes Margaret Talbot writing in New Yorker:

Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an abortion.

If only the twain could meet. Pregnant girls should not be ostracized, and rational sex education should be the norm (irrational sex education is on every channel and form of media). Stupid caves. I have no illusions about teenage sex -- pleaze -- but if there is an innate reason for the imbalance in those two mirror-image attitudes, I do prefer the red sex attitude.

One more thumb down: No to RFK, Jr.

2008-11-07T15:28:00.003-05:00

Scienceblogs is giving a thumbs down to Robert Kennedy, Jr. as candidate for EPA. Dr. Offit's Autism's False Prophets devotes a chapter to the role RFK, Jr. has played in flaming the anti-vaccine hysteria. The incriminating item is here. Revere at Effect Measure makes the case:

his uninformed championing of the vaccination/autism case speaks poorly for his commitment to relying on scientific evidence

Revere approvingly quotes Wired's Keim:

His environmental track record is excellent, but he's clung to the vaccines-causing-autism hypothesis long after large-scale epidemiological studies have discredited it as anything but a statistically insignificant cause. America doesn't need more political officials who skew science to fit personal beliefs.

More important, his ignorance has caused thousands of parents to panic and endangered the lives of countless children. (s/t DarkSyde)

I'm running out of thumbs here.

On a positive note, it feels really weird not being embarrassed to be an American. (s/t J.G.)

More on Summers

2008-11-07T14:12:00.002-05:00

Here's the full text of an email I received this morning. The body of text is excerpted fromhere:

PLEASE URGE OBAMA TO APPOINT A TREASURY SECRETARY OTHER THAN LARRY SUMMERS

Larry Summers is on the Obama short list for appointment to Secretary of the Treasury.

Such an appointment would be a grave mistake, and at best, a slap in the face to Mexico and those who struggle for economic justice on both sides of the border.

Summers, while serving as Under Secretary of the Treasury in 1995, engineered the destruction of Mexico’s economy through forced increase of interest rates to unmanageable levels - business & farm loans went from 11% to 56%, credit card rates from 7% to 61%, home loans from 5% to 75%, car loans from 7% to 91%. The result was massive human suffering and the forced migration of millions of economic refugees to the United States.

Appointing Summers would signal a continuance of the greed superceding human dignity as the cornerstone of our foreign policy.

Please review the following background information of Mr Summers and ask whomever you know on the transition team to advise against selecting Summers.

In solidarity,
Peter Cervantes-Gautschi

Excerpt from “Wall Street and Immigration: Financial Services Giants Have Profited from the Beginning”, Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, December 4, 2007, Americas Policy Program, Center for International Policy (CIP):

Profiting From Hardship in Mexico

On Dec. 22, 1994 the Mexican peso was devalued over 40%. This, coupled with an increase in the U.S. prime rate enacted by the U.S. Federal Reserve, rendered Mexico nearly bankrupt largely due to dollar-denominated bond debt to Wall Street banks.8
The U.S. government got the International Monetary Fund and Canada to give Mexico money to put together a bailout package to pay its creditors, most of which were Wall Street banks. The International Monetary Fund contracted Mexico's bailout loan to the U.S. Treasury Department.9 Acting in the interest of Wall Street creditors, Peter King got Congress to adopt legislation that imposed monthly oversight on the bailout implementation by the Banking Committee.10

To get the bailout money, Mexico was required to meet stipulations that violated its own Constitution, which limited foreign ownership of the banking industry to 5% and forbade home mortgage interest rates above 7%.11 The bailout package required that foreign banks get 49% of the banking market. Limits on interest rates for all loans were eliminated to pay off Citi, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America, JP Morgan, and the other foreign bond investors. Another stipulation on the bailout money required Mexico to put a cap on wages nationwide.12

Although it was a major Mexican bond creditor, JP Morgan became Mexico's financial adviser.13 An arrangement like this in the United States would have been seen as a blatantly illegal conflict of interest.

Impoverishing Mexican Families for Profit

Mexico's national bank was forced to raise the money to pay off the inflated bond debts to the foreign bond investors by dramatically increasing interest rates on the full spectrum of loans in Mexico.

Over the next two years interest rates on business and farm loans rose from an average of 11% to an average of 56%. Credit card debt interest rates went from 7% to 61%, interest rates on car loans went from 7% to 91%, and home loan interest rates rose from an average of 5% to 75%.14 In the same period the Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan, and HSBC acquired most of Mexico's banking market.15

The impact of 1995 loan interest rate increases was more than millions of people and thousands of businesses could handle. Thousands of farms and businesses, both large and small, went bankrupt. In 1995 alone over 12,000 of Mexico's businesses filed for bankruptcy, and as economic activity came to a standstill and demand was cut, orders were canceled and plants operated at less than minimum levels. Idle capacity in many branches of the manufacturing sector increased to 70%.16 It became impossible for millions of workers to support their families by earning paychecks in their own country. Unable to earn enough to support their families, millions of workers migrated to the United States to find family wage work.17

The Wall Street banks profited handsomely. In 1998 for example, after recouping and profiting from their short-term bond investments through direct and enabled payments from the bailout package, JP Morgan and Citi owned over $4.1 billion dollars and $1.9 billion dollars respectively worth of loans in Mexico. A few years later Citi became the owner of 23.2% of the Mexican loan market through its acquisition of Banamex.18 The banking and finance sector rewarded the Republican members of the banking committees in Congress with millions of dollars in campaign contributions.19

Excerpt from a special (translated to English) commission report adopted unanimously by the Mexican Senate on September 21, 2007 :

4. A recent book complements the explanation of the excessive interest-rate increase in 1995.

The previous Support Document offered detailed information about a meeting at Los Pinos between the president of Mexico and the undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury, Larry Summers. During that meeting and against the advice of the Mexican team that was negotiating at that very moment in Washington, the decision was made to raise interest rates excessively during 1995. That information is in a memoir written by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, now a chairman of Citigroup, a U.S. company that is the world’s largest financial institution.

In September 2007, the former president of the U.S. Federal Reserve also published his memoirs. Additional revelations appear there about the source of the decision to inordinately hike interest rates, a decision that was to the great detriment of Mexico. Alan Greenspan notes in his memoir:

That experience formed a lasting bond between Rubin, Summers, and me. . . Larry could be shrewd too: it was his idea to put such a high interest rate on the Mexico loans that the Mexicans felt compelled to pay us back early.

In other words, the Mexican government made an unacceptable deal with Undersecretary Summers, akin to what the mother country gave its colonies. Mexico was treated as if it were a country without a history, without prestige, and without institutions. In his memoir, Rubin comments that the result of his intervention in Mexico led one of his colleagues to declare triumphantly to the New York Times: "This was Bob Rubin's Bosnia. And today he got the troops out." Never should the Mexican government have accepted that extremely high and abusive interest rate.

The gravest problem was that these very high interest rates influenced the rates for other loans made to Mexico and also rigidified high levels of domestic interest rates. Beginning in March 1995, interest rates in Mexico exploded. Rates of return went positive in real terms for the next 10 years, and this contributed to the double problem of excessively costly (and almost nonexistent) financing for Mexican companies and high earnings for those who had invested in Mexican bonds, which led to the overvaluation of the peso.

In his memoir, Rubin also acknowledges that the IMF was recommending lower interest rates, but in the end, that institution accepted the excessively high proposal. However, the IMF experts could not have been unaware of the very damaging effect that those interest rates would have for the Mexican economy.

Show more discipline

2008-11-07T10:42:00.001-05:00

Emanuel? Fine. He's an ass, but the fact the right is having fits over
this guy as Chief of Staff tells me he's a good choice. But Summers?
Isn't he a proponent of the deregulation ideology that got us into
this mess? He might be a brilliant mind, but he lacks all common
sense. He lost his last two jobs in part because of this, at Harvard
and at World Bank. At the former for thinking he could get away with
saying girls aren't too good with math, and at the latter for
proposing to make use of comparative advantage by sending dangerous
waste to the country of Africa. You might be able to point to some
contested science for both of those, but it shows a complete ignorance
of politics. Emanuel is a show of discipline, Summers is nothing but
test scores.

Frosty reception

2008-11-06T00:17:00.002-05:00

Maybe Fox is on this bandwagon, who knows (I watch MSNBC solely to spite FOX), but Russia sent mixed signals to Obama on his victory: a tough speech on deploying missiles near Poland's border with a telegram congratulating Obama's victory. If you google "Medvedev congratulates Obama" you get a page of links with that headline, with text: "Medvedev did not congratulate Obama." As I noted in my posts on Georgia, an Obama presidency scares Russia because of the threat of Obama rallying allies to contain Russia's expansionary interests. Russia has been riding high on America hatin', and the last they need is an America love-fest.

The Russian press coverage is interesting: Nezavisimaya Gazeta has an interesting article proclaiming the victory of a velvet revolution (literally flower revolution) in the US, something associated with thorns in Russia's paw Ukraine and Georgia, while Komsomolskaya Pravda has a series of shallow articles on electing the dark-skinned guy, and then this one from their US based correspondent:

This was not my country, not my history, but I got goosebumps as soon as they started announcing the results . . . I was sitting in a bar in Omaha, Nebraska. Near me were sitting simple Americans, glued to the television, crying.

I'll hold your hand. Not!

2008-11-05T13:12:00.002-05:00

I had totally forgotten about these guys!

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

s/t to my big dog JW

VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

2008-11-04T15:08:00.003-05:00

Obama puts a fork in it.

I'm live micro-blogging on twitter tonight. Check my tweets!

s/t nezua.

Where I endorse Obama: an ode to pragmatism

2008-11-02T01:50:00.011-04:00

On Thursday, after I dropped my daughter off at school, I walked over to the Obama campaign office to volunteer. "Do you have anything for me to do?" "Can you sit at an information table?" "Sure." So for two hours, in 35d weather, I sat on the corner of Chestnut and 15th with Barb, a veteran volunteer. We handed out a ton of Obama buttons (suggested donations accepted), some lawn signs, signed up one lawyer volunteer, answered a few questions about the election, and served as a face for the Obama machine. Along the way we were interviewed by Indonesian TV! And a NYT reporter interviewed me as part of a spread this Sunday about "local color" along the campaign trail. The questions from both can be summed up in the sentence above: "We handed out a ton of Obama buttons . . ." All the interviewers were women, and all the cameramen were people, er, men. I haven't really volunteered that much, but I have volunteered a few times over the past two or three months, so when the Indonesian interviewer asked me how long I had been volunteering, I felt bad about saying: "I showed up this morning," so I lied and said a few months. A lie, an embellishment, or the truth? Depends on whether one is Joe six-pack, a lawyer, or a politician, I suppose.

The Obama campaign would have been just as thrilled to read I was a first-time volunteer, since they have been doing a tremendous job of getting new volunteers out. I've gotten a few calls based on voter rolls, emails from a variety of sources such as AFL, and MoveOn, not just the campaign, and I've seen volunteers from all walks of life, and a well-oiled machine. Some hiccups: a few waits, missed calls I would have expected, but all in all, clock-work. No wonder O'Reilly thinks they are Nazis. The infomercial smoothly transitioning into the last two minutes of a live speech in Florida, spending LESS on staff than McCain, mobilizing thousands of volunteers across the country, their innovative use of the web, text-messaging, twitter, etc. I know a few people who doubt the grass-roots organizing orientation of the campaign, but this morning I can walk into the Obama office and start putting together signs without knowing anyone's name or saying a word to anyone. With a sentence or two I can start making GOTV calls or grab materials to go walk my neighborhood. I think Randy Shaw says it well in Beyond the Fields:

We saw glimpses of the potential for this kind of organizing campaign in MoveOn's 2004 and 2006 volunteer operations, the Dean Campaign and even the Bush and Kerry campaigns. And there are great examples of this kind of organizing if you go back to the social movements of several decades ago. But the Obama campaign is the first in the Internet era to realize the dream of a disciplined, volunteer-driven, bottom-up-AND-top-down, distributed and massively scaleable organizing campaign. For anyone who knows how many times this has failed to happen, this is practically an apocryphal event.

s/t Miss Laura

You can really see how Obama's campaign springs from a perfected community organizing model that was promoted by Cesar Chavez and copied in neighborhoods around the country. If Obama wins, this model will signify a paradigm shift for political campaigns,one with tremendous potential for promoting social change.

But this potential has its limits. Over 20% of the country still thinks Obama is a Muslim. Heck, many Muslims think Obama is a Muslim. The power of the name, I suppose.

I was disappointed reporters just asked about what I was mechanically doing. I wasn't asked why I supported Obama, which would have been a lot harder to answer. I know people who are supporting Obama because he is a Democrat, and they are Democrats, or who would have voted for but not supported other Democrats, but who support Obama because he is black. [Racists! The gall!] I'm a little in the latter camp, but it merits explaining. I hate Democrats as Politicians. I think they're vile, lack principles, convictions, either allow themselves to be portrayed as something they are not, or lie for political gain, and have a glass jaw. They have no balls. That's what I tend to think.

I pride myself on having never voted for a Clinton. I used to think Democrats were no better, or to be exact, Republicans were no worse. I was no fan of Bush, but figured his "compassionate conservatism" and history of bipartisanship in Texas meant he would be no worse than his father and perhaps marginally worse than Clinton. Gore's uninspiring campaign and choice of Lieberman as a running mate cemented any doubts I had. I saw a constant erosion of rights under Clinton, and thought things couldn't get much worse. I considered voting for McCain if he won the nomination. I was a proud Nader voter in 2000.

Immediately, I learned that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worst. This was reinforced time after time over the next eight years. From the Supreme Court committing treason and deciding the President, to immediately eliminating the fiscal surplus, it became clear that extreme partisanship was the name of the game. And when 9-11 provided an opening, they ran with it and proceeded to destroy every established legal norm that they could, both at home and abroad, and opened the treasury to be looted by their rich, well-connected friends in one of the most sickening examples of greed maybe surpassed by the orgy of the oligarchs after the fall of the Soviet Union. We're talking about disappearing truck loads of cash. Hitchens complains we've become a banana republic, but that was the guiding principle of the administration he supported over the last eight years. At the helm of a collapsing empire, Bush and Co. tried to take down as many others with them as possible, while stealing as much as they could. No wonder Rumsfeld was able to turn a blind eye to the looting of Iraq's national treasures. That was no mistake, that was a guiding principle. For these reasons, I held my nose and supported Kerry in 2004.

Since that time, we've seen Obama throw out the political playbook, and show Democrats could fight by mobilizing people on the ground. Obama's deft handling of the caucus system was at the heart of the 50 state strategy paying off today. There are plenty of reasons not to be enamored of Obama. He is a battle-proven politician, which means that he is not bound by his ideals. The FISA sell-out demonstrated that. Although I joined the MyBarackObama group against his FISA decision and was one of the many disenchanted, I don't see how one can argue with that decision now. The last month of the campaign has been dominated by the loudest minority calling Obama a terrorist, but they had not a single piece of legislation they could point to. If they had, I do think it would have swayed the "silent" majority.

I support Obama because I have to live in this empire in decline and want to leave a better country to my child. On just about every issue, Obama is not the best, but much better than his opponent. Wealth redistribution, reigning in capitalism, following the rule of law, seeking to encourage rather than alienate allies, expanding health care, getting out of Iraq, resolving the conflict in Afghanistan, on these and more you can make an argument that Obama is somehow "selling out", but in every case his plan is better than the alternative. The country we live in leaves us the choice of incremental change, or of things continuing their downward spiral. Things can and will get worse. Much much worse. And it is not enough to point to the need for a mass movement to address these issues. The only succesful mass movement of the last eight years is the one created by Obama.

If you are a single issue voter, and your issue is support for Iran, you should vote for McCain because he will continue to isolate the US and strengthen the hand of Iran throughout the Middle East. If your single issue is Israel, you should vote for Obama because he will restore the moral authority of the United States and bring the community of nations together in support of common solutions. McCain, as with the current administration, would be unable to lead any other nation out of a burning building. If your issue is unconceived fetuses, you vote McCain. If your issue is ideological purity, you abstain or vote for a third party candidate. But my concern is tangible incremental change, so I'm voting Obama. Whatever his stance on any particular policy, you can point to him as the candidate that encourages people to believe they can change government and have a stake in deciding the path the country takes, and has actively mobilized people in a massive way towards a common goal. That's a dangerous and commendable message.

Plus he's black. That alone is outstanding in this country, and I am very excited that my daughter might not have to deal with as much of the racial baggage as previous generations. How awesome is that?

Grand Rapids, bastion of tolerance

2008-11-02T01:05:00.004-04:00

I remember back in 1988 walking several miles uphill in the snow to attend a rally for Bush Sr on Monroe Mall. I was punked out with long unkempt hair, a motorcycle jacket, combat boots, torn jeans, and I was immediately handed a Bush sign to hold up. By accident, I held the sign upside down and an older buttoned-down gentlemen next to me said, "Better turn that right side up or you'll be confused for a Democrat." We shared a good laugh together, and I turned the sign right-side up. I was always confused by that "insider" camraderie, since outside of that rally I was pretty certain that same fellow would have demonized me.

Still, I was surprised to read McCain is pre-emptively ejecting the "student demographic" from his rallies. The Iowa State Daily reported:

Lara Elborno, a student at the University of Iowa, said she was approached by a police officer and a McCain staffer and was told she had to leave or she would be arrested for trespassing.

“It was a very confusing, very frustrating situation,” Elborno said. “I said that I had a right to be there, I wasn’t doing anything disruptive — I was sitting, waiting for the rally to start.” . . . Elborno said after seeing the people who were asked to leave, she was concerned that McCain’s staffers were profiling people on appearance to determine who might be a potential protester.

“When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked,” Elborno said. “It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic.” . . . [One] girl was crying . . . and she said ‘I already voted for McCain, I’m a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn’t look right,’”. . . “They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked.”

I suppose McCain rallies are rather sparse so a small group of protesters could do a job heckling, but it really shows the lack of confidence within the campaign. Even though they are receiving criticism for the homogeneity of their rallies, they want to keep the crowds homogenous not for appearances' sake but to avoid a disruption that would have long media legs. Sounds like a job for Billionaires for McCain.

I was watching Morning Joe Thursday morning and they ran a schtick where the young (left-leaning conservative?) Ken-looking guy went through his neighborhood on the "Upper West Side" [does everyone know where this is? because I don't think they ever specified] wearing a McCain/Palin t-shirt and trying to give another one away. After a long string of people who refused, ignored him, or said they had no friends who were supporting McCain, he finally found one alienated couple who said they were no longer getting invited to many dinner parties. The blond (right-leaning liberal?) anchor-chick was HORRIFIED. Like, what? Go to the heart of liberalism, OH MY GOSH, you find liberals. Go to the heart of conservatism, bet you find, SHOCK, conservatives. And you betcha can make a strong argument that only educated elites are open-minded enough to pal around with people who disagree on politics. It's been years now that politics joined religion as a topic not meant for polite conversation, so shut the fuck up. I volunteered for the Obama campaign that same morning and although I was in reliably liberal central Philly, I had one guy tell me I should be put in jail. Oh, my god, I just couldn't believe it. Please.

h/t kos

Hold your nose: vote your interest

2008-10-31T06:04:00.002-04:00

Racists for Obama?

From Sullivan's Daily Dish:

From Tim Reid for TimesOnline:

A year ago, she said, she would never have voted for Barack Obama “because he looks foreign and he looks like a terrorist”. She said that some of her friends believe he is the Antichrist.

And now? “I'm probably gonna vote for Obama. He'll bring us jobs and health care.”

From Ben Smith:

And more from Ben Smith. Please excuse the repeat:

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

And then there's this.

The Germanicu$ Pac

2008-10-29T10:32:00.002-04:00

A list of resources to get your disenchanted friends to vote. Vote, Germanicu$, vote! Nader, Barr, Baldwin, or Moore, just vote. That way, if McCain wins, I'll know who to blame.

Baby Killers

2008-10-29T10:11:00.003-04:00

This is the best defense of abortion rights by far. Starts at 2:45.

On a related note, one third of currently tenured judges were appointed by Bush. Nice. For a little balance, let me state that the one "abortion right" that really pisses me off is the one stipulating that minors can get abortions without their parents' consent. As a parent, that makes me ill. I suppose you can make a strong argument when you have ass-wipes like this one secretly naming their child Sarah McCain Palin, but then the exemption should apply to all major medical decisions not just abortion.

Comments

2008-10-27T11:20:00.002-04:00

I've heard complaints that comments weren't publishing properly, so I switched to the pop-up box format. Please do let me know if that doesn't work. I think some of the customizing affects functionality on certain web browsers, but hopefully this will do the trick.

As soon as the election is over, I'll be posting a lot more on science. Can't wait. (Sorry, just felt I needed to comment.)

When Brains Collide

2008-10-27T10:20:00.004-04:00

It seems that every football game I've seen this season has had a player sidelined with a concussion, so it was nice to see Penn State do the right thing at a very difficult moment in the game by benching quarterback Daryll Clark. Clark was clearly unhappy with the decision, and there would have been a lot of second guessing if Ohio State would have gone on to win the game, but the team doctor made the right call. There was a lot of discussion of concussions last season, and some of the increased attention might be due to the increase in weight among players leading to more devastating crashes, but hopefully Penn State's decision will blaze a trail.

Trouble Brewing

2008-10-27T09:32:00.007-04:00

HSBC, one of the few banks to be expanding in the midst of the crisis has a new ad campaign celebrating what? Differences? Class enemies? I'm not sure, but I doubt they've found a new respect for the little guy. If this gains them street cred, it could start a damaging trend for otherwise useful confrontational tactics. Here's two examples:

The first is a full page add I saw in NYT, which they are also running in subway stations, so a massive campaign.

Most of the comments at weapon of class instruction think HSBC hit a foul ball, equating HSBC with rat, so I think it's a good sign that only Zach seems to get it.

The rat is a symbol of unfair labor practices used by unions against bad bosses.
HSBC is using the tactics that workers use against it to sell itself as an enlightened, global brand.

I think it goes beyond that, in that HSBC, by recognizing and celebrating the power of solidarity and clout that the rat represents, deflates the power of the speech.

The other is a jarring commercial depicting loggers vs. tree-huggers posted by Wall$treet Fighter.

See? We can all get along.

Definitely read the comments:

This commercial is awesome, it's really nice to see a large bank like HSBC put out a very strong advertisement to humanize themselves in a manner that isn't cliche or timid. And HSBC is not just doing lip service by producing an environmental ad. In 2006, Time magazine declared them the greenest bank and since then, HSBC has dedicated $100 million to green intiatives aimed at fighting global warming and another $200 million in researching renewable energy

This commenter goes on to add that they aren't as good as Bank of America, but still, "good work." Other comments are even worse:

Guess I'm a sucker then for sentiment. Not that i'm changing banks or anything, but i did get a little teary . . . Is it better to adhere to one's convictions over blood or marriage... or should family always supercede personal politics? Is it possible to compromise without diluting either? I really don't know

I know capitalism is always good at coopting its enemies, but I do hope this ad campaign fails.

America hates children

2008-10-25T10:23:00.002-04:00

The MSM attacks on Palin for charging the good people of Alaska and the McCain campaign for her children's travel expenses are emblematic of this country's true attitude towards children. There's plenty of talk about family values, but when it comes down to it the motto is children should be neither seen nor heard. And this attitude has been happily promoted by an ever-expanding (age wise) youth culture that is horrified by the inconvenience of other people's children. Children are only welcome at children-themed events, and elsewhere day care is never provided. Public meetings? Forget about it. Private meetings? Even less!

I was going to point to the attacks from liberal blogs about this, but you can see it in media sources across the spectrum. I don't think conservatives are any better on this issue, even if they might be mum on this now. Their concern for children ends at conception. It's pretty much an American cultural phenomenon. All the labor events I've attended in Mexico, or any events really, that were truly open to women had children running around and in many cases organizations paid for travel of children accompanying their mothers. The only labor events in the US I have been at that have been friendly to children have been organized by Latinos or immigrants. I might be way off on this, but I also have the impression that maquiladoras have way better day care than your average US factory. Any takers?

Books for Girls

2008-10-25T08:03:00.011-04:00

Maybe it's just my elitist taste, but I always have trouble finding good children's books with girls as protagonists. So, for all my peeps with daughters, here's a few children's books I recommend:

Clara & Señor Frog is a cool take on a little girl who becomes an artist after her mom marries a Diego Rivera lookalike.

Sadie The Air Mail Pilot is a delightful story of perseverance in the face of all logic. Neither sleet, nor snow, nor common sense stops tenacious Sadie!

Maricastaña y el ángel is an awesomely weird tale of a little girl who learns to write, but is horrified by the prospect of her daddy humiliating a goose by taking one of its feathers, so she proceeds to deplumate an angel instead.

Julieta y su caja de colores is about a girl who learns to discover new worlds with her paint brush.

The Knuffle Bunny Too is pretty awesome, especially the midnight handoff at Grand Army Plaza. And I love how my daughter insists on me reading the applelog.

I'm lukewarm on the Winnie the Witch series, but my daughter just loves Winnie.

In general, I also dig ¿Cómo Como? and the Happy Lion series. Bonjour, Happy Lion!

Glad I hadn't had breakfast yet

2008-10-24T09:36:00.003-04:00

This turned my stomach this morning.

Brian Williams: Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition?

Sarah Palin: (Exasperated sigh.) There’s no question that Bill Ayers by his own admittance was one who thought to destroy our U.S. Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There is no question there. Now others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that it would be unacceptable to, I don’t know if you’re gonna use the word "terrorist" there.

The worse it gets, the better it gets. Pt III

2008-10-24T09:24:00.002-04:00

Neuroscientist Peter Whybrow sees a golden opportunity to bring balance to the American Dream.

Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna, said Whybrow, but not the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can't actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed.

That individual weakness is reflected at the social level, in markets that have outgrown their agrarian roots and no longer constrain our excesses — resulting in the current economic crisis, in which America's unpaid bills came due with shocking speed.
But with this crisis, said Whybrow, comes the opportunity to rethink how Americans live, as individuals and as a nation, and build a country that works.

"We're primed for doing things immediately. We're poor at planning for the future, unless we get into circumstances like these, where we're forced to think cleverly about what to do next," he said. "In a way, this financial meltdown is a healthy thing for us. We'll think intuitively again. . ."

"America has always believed that it was the perfect society. When you have that mythology driving your culture, it's hard to look around and say, 'Is someone else doing it better than us?'" said Whybrow. "But you can trace the situation we're in to our evolutionary origins. Now that we find ourselves in the middle of this pseudo-abundance, we're in trouble. And the fantasy that we can restart the American dream just isn't true."

Zen-like tranquility is just around the corner.

Obama's Loss Traced to one Mr. Reyes

2008-10-23T00:10:00.007-04:00

Can you believe this guy? What an ass. MoveOn sure is ballsy.

FRI, NOV. 7, 2008

Single Nonvoter Tipped Election
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No strike on Iran before inauguration

2008-10-22T15:39:00.003-04:00

Jonathan Marcus at the BBC claims that plans for a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities prior to Bush leaving office have been called off.

Within the Bush administration the tensions between hawks and the more pragmatic voices seem to have reached a stalemate.
Perhaps the president himself does not want to leave as his legacy a Middle East in even greater turmoil.
Accordingly Washington has made its opposition to an imminent Israeli attack against Iran crystal clear.
Indeed the recent American decision to supply Israel with an advanced early warning radar system - to be manned by Americans - is intended, paradoxically, both to strengthen Israel's defences while restricting its freedom of action, independent from Washington.

Small favors.

Of course, Uri Avnery called this one back in July.

Boeing profits down due to strike

2008-10-22T11:23:00.002-04:00

Boeing profits down 38% due to "difficulties associated with the strike."

Elitist bastard or just plain bastard?

2008-10-21T23:11:00.008-04:00

I used to like Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, mostly for the company they keep, but naming Mitch Albom an honorary elitist bastard? That fucking scab? And for what? For daring say an average schmo is not an ideal choice for President? Hardly seems like a bold stance against the celebration of ignorance.

On a similar note, will all you liberal media elite bastard types lay off on Palin answering third grader questions [1] ? Presumably she's speaking to third graders. Get over yourselves already. What should she say, the Vice President amounts to a warm bucket of piss?

All I wanna do is blog

2008-10-21T18:38:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago I saw this over at the BBC. I thought it was a little out of place for Powell, but what really struck me was this:

"It took a lot of people struggling to bring me to this point in history," Powell told the audience. "I didn't just drop out of the sky. People came from my continent in chains."

I thought, he's getting ready to endorse Obama. Of course, I didn't post that because, come on, how silly can you get? But, lo and behold, I wasn't alone.

The moral of the story: if you want to get ahead in the blogosphere, you gotta post every silly little idea that comes to your head. Otherwise, you'll never stand out from the plebitude. So, callous and stupid aside, let me say that getting Obama's white grandmother in the spotlight two weeks before the election is just what Obama needs to overcome the Angry Black Mack Truck hurling towards us. In the next ten days we are going to see a barrage of Rev. Wright's greatest hits. The McCain camp is getting us ready, since they have no choice but to respond what with Obama's negative campaigning. Any images of Obama's Kansas born and bred grandma will do wonders.

The worse it gets, the better it gets. Pt II

2008-10-21T15:47:00.002-04:00

Fareed Zakaria on the Colbert Report celebrates the upside of the economic crisis: America will start saving again. And yet all I hear about is lowering interest rates.

Christopher refuses to agree he's wrong

2008-10-20T11:22:00.003-04:00

I love that Hitchens is willing to go on bloggingheads with Alterman to debate if he was wrong. Although, as he says, "at least the subject is me." Many of the comments on this seem to follow the lines of, I agree with Alterman, but just really like Hitchens. Likable isn't a descriptive I would associate with Hitchens, but I guess he inspires sycophantism.

For the record, Macedonia is Greek.

Amor y Cohetes

2008-10-19T00:51:00.003-04:00

I remember as a teen Love and Rockets was one of the few (the only?) places I felt at home. Young chicano punk/goth rockers surrounded by Spanglish, mechanics, wrestlers, and dinosaurs, permeated with an unexpressed left-working class sensibility I remembered from DF. Like seeing a young punk walk from car to car in the Metro selling copies of El Machete with the same twangy sing-song as the kids selling chiclets.

Makes sense that Hopey and Maggie are now in their forties. They must have been in their twenties when I was reading their exploits, and I could only fantasize about living on my own with a poster of Ape Sex on the wall, but I'm glad they're still around.

I came across Love & Rockets searching for an article I read today lamenting the dearth of foreign literature translated into English.

330 works of foreign literature — or a little more than 2 percent of the estimated total of 15,000 titles released — have been published in the United States so far this year.

That apparent dearth of literature in translation in the United States was the subject of controversial remarks by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize, a week before the prize did not go to an American.

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” Mr. Engdahl said in an interview with The Associated Press. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

It has been a long time since I have seriously participated in the big dialogue of literature, about as long since I have read Love & Rockets. I have the collected works of Saramago, in Spanish, stacked on my shelves. Better get cracking.

Every time I post a little angel cries

2008-10-18T23:36:00.002-04:00

It's not quite dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark they shoot bees at you, nor is it a shark riding on an elephant's back, just trampling and eating everything they see, but damn, this fills me with an odd mixture of pity, fear, and revulsion nonetheless.

Meta Voco

2008-10-17T20:32:00.003-04:00

Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is getting flak from PZ Myers and others for asserting that the financial crisis is rooted in the rise of militant atheism. It seems she feels that atheism somehow leads to an ethical deficit in capitalism.

I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is ‘militant atheism’ which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda -- and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.

The financial crisis was brought about essentially by a public which threw away all notions of prudence and committed itself to spending today what it could never afford to pay back tomorrow, and a banking, regulatory and political sector which ruthlessly and cynically exploited and encouraged such catastrophic irresponsibility with a criminal disregard of the ruinous consequences for the poor. The financial crisis and our social meltdown are thus combining to form a perfect cultural storm.

The assertion about militant atheism seems silly and patently false, but I think intelligent people can agree on the relatively recent rise of secularism. I would argue that it is capitalism leads to the rise of secularism as well as the breakdown of morals that Phillips laments. (And does this not fit the essence of Weber's Spirit of Capitalism: Protestant Ethic->Capitalism->Secular Work Ethic, as well as classic Marxian analysis?)

So, my question is, can either Phillips' or my position be falsified, or are both views solely a reflection of ideological stance? I'm having trouble seeing what kind of evidence would answer this question, although the depth of religious fervor in this country seems like a strike against my position.

The Dems' to lose

2008-10-16T00:48:00.002-04:00

I was really curious to see if voters would overcome bias and vote for Obama. Unfortunately, we will never know. The Democrats could run a dead mule and they would beat McCain.

Anti-Obama focus groups are giving Republican strategists fits:

"Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

"I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

Gee whiz!

2008-10-15T22:28:00.003-04:00

One of my SMS ladybugs overheard the following:

M: Buckley lost his job at National Review.
D: So he's not granfathered in? Think he saw that coming? Will the zeitgeist finally lead to a reorganization of conservative movement?
M: I think he just saw the sales potential in a "Saul on the road to Damascus" type autobiography at a time when his movement has lost its mojo.
D: Beautiful. I can see Papa grinning now.

Arteriosclerotic orthodoxy?

The Big Five

2008-10-15T12:41:00.003-04:00

I just took Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundations Questionnaire" at yourmorals.org . I recommend it. Turns out I'm a lot more conservative than I thought when it comes to Loyalty and Authority, although more liberal when it comes to questions of Fairness. A little concerned about the Authority finding, but fine with all the rest. I guess I'm on the fence when it comes to Purity, and not doing Harm. My results are in green.

Here's the authors' description of the survey and results:

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained four questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity.

The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations - harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place a higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations.

This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.

In the graph below, your scores on each foundation are shown in green. The scores of all liberals who have taken it on our site are shown in blue, and the scores of all conservatives are shown in red. Scores run from 0 (the lowest possible score, you completely reject that foundation) to 5 (the highest possible score, you very strongly endorse that foundation and build much of your morality on top of it).

You can download the pdf of Haidt and Graham's article, and take the survey yourself. Registration required.

Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, p. 98-116

h/t to Roscoe for the link.

Wow

2008-10-14T11:20:00.003-04:00

I'm speechless.
AFL-CIO joins the gun wars.

Market rallies 900 points on Krugman Nobel

2008-10-14T10:45:00.004-04:00

Spencer had a sobering take on the rally:

The market bounced back today to almost where it was on Wednesday.

But if you look at how the various sectors did the market is not only discounting that the bailout will work, but that it will be inflationary because the market bet on energy and raw materials today, not financials.

Moreover, the market is betting that the bailout wlll cause commodity prices to rise but not consumer spending..
this is an interesting forecast.

The headline is also his.

Go Philly Hockey Moms!

2008-10-13T11:18:00.002-04:00

When Sarah Palin dropped the ceremonial first puck at the Flyers’ opener on Saturday night at the Wachovia Center, she was greeted by resounding (almost deafening) boos.

Have to agree with commenter number 5 that Palin was nuts for taking her daughter with her onto the ice in enemy territory.

Is a hoax ever more than a hoax?

2008-10-13T10:26:00.002-04:00

I missed this August post by Stanley Fish where he takes Alan Sokal to task. It's in the context of a recent hoax of Wine Spectator's restaurant awards. The bottom line, per Fish, is that for a hoax to be successful it has to be so elaborate that it demonstrates the hoaxer's bona-fides rather than anything intrinsic about the hoaxee. Many moons ago I wrote a critique of the entire issue of Social Text where Sokal's hoax was published and found that not all, but a few other entries in that journal could have easily been a hoax as well. I think Fish brushes aside the argument about standards a little too easily. Both hoaxes were conceived because the authors perceived an incredible lack of standards in the respective arenas: one, postmodern thought, the other foodie awards. The oracle of wiki asserts that Social Text was not a peer-reviewed journal at the time of the hoax, implying it now is. The editors at Social Text correctly note that peer-reviewed journals have also been the victims of outright fraud, and the hoax authors could have simply padded their CVs with their submissions and awards (just think of the amazing publicity for a newly opened Osteria L’Intrepido), but one hopes that these hoaxes have led to stricter standards, at least in the short term.

Mockrates is a math-challenged rat turd

2008-10-12T18:00:00.003-04:00

Unlike his heart-throb Obama, I’m not afraid to use the same gutter tactics mock learned in his days as a member of the Nazi, er, Republican Youth. I would have called him a piece-of-shit, but felt it rude for a header. To be clear, I stand by my claims. Now, Mockrates is not literally a dropping of excreta from a sewer rat, but he will be in the not too distant future. And he has decided to channel his unavoidable future in the here and now. Always ahead of the curve, that mock.

The tortured piety of the “necessary first step”. Right, the necessary first step was to tackle a problem by screaming: CRISIS, CRISIS, CRISIS: IF YOU DON”T PASS THIS THE ECONOMY WILL COLLAPSE. Somehow, the “necessary first step” was to throw away a trillion dollars on a coin toss. The question: Will it solve anything? The answer: “I dunno, but gotta try somethin.” If past actions are any indication, the plan—or the absence of a plan—was to improve the bottom line for the fat cats. It was doomed to failure, and was advocated using the same parasitic gambling mentality that seeks to socialize risk and privatize the profit.

The right approach would have been to, as I advocated, take a deep breath and think of the best way to lessen the blows to the economy. Our “leaders” should have said, there is a crisis brewing, but we are working on crafting a strong solution to the problem. One, the markets would not have become destabilized by the clown show in Congress, and might have been settled by a strong effort to seek serious solutions. Paulson’s screams of PANIC, together with the Congressional bungling both made the economic crisis worse. Voting down a bad plan only to vote for a worse plan a few days later. Your claims that it was a necessary first step are ludicrous. It is the same as claiming that the necessary first step to a potential fire in a theatre is to scream FIRE and run for the exit. Maybe there is a fire, maybe there isn’t, but causing a stampede helps no one. And there are credible voices, even now, saying there is no fire. If this is true, our Bozo the President and Congress of Stooges caused the market instability we saw all last week. To argue that Congress couldn't have passed a better bill is a strong argument against passing any bailout bill.

I assume we won’t hear from Mockrates again for another few weeks. Just as well. This type of apologizing for negligent governmental action beneath a veneer of “learned earnestness” was part of the problem, not the solution. If the Krugmans of the world had put forward useful alternative proposals and joined in putting the screws on Congress, then they would have been forced to anger the Jewish G-d, stay in session, hold hearings, and work the time necessary to iron out an intelligent solution. The country was united in anger at the leadership in a way we rarely see. It truly was a lost opportunity.

Hitchens brings me back into the fold

2008-10-10T21:18:00.002-04:00

From this month's Vanity Fair:

In a statement on the huge state-sponsored salvage of private bankruptcy that was first proposed last September, a group of Republican lawmakers, employing one of the very rudest words in their party’s thesaurus, described the proposed rescue of the busted finance and discredited credit sectors as “socialistic.” There was a sort of half-truth to what they said. But they would have been very much nearer the mark—and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense—if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”

I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be “banana republic.”

What are the main principles of a banana republic? A very salient one might be that it has a paper currency which is an international laughingstock: a definition that would immediately qualify today’s United States of America. We may snicker at the thriller from Wasilla, who got her first passport only last year, yet millions of once well-traveled Americans are now forced to ask if they can afford even the simplest overseas trip when their folding money is apparently issued by the Boardwalk press of Atlantic City. But still, the chief principle of banana-ism is that of kleptocracy, whereby those in positions of influence use their time in office to maximize their own gains, always ensuring that any shortfall is made up by those unfortunates whose daily life involves earning money rather than making it. At all costs, therefore, the one principle that must not operate is the principle of accountability. In fact, if possible, even the similar-sounding term (deriving from the same root) of accountancy must be jettisoned as well. Just listen to Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as he explained how the legal guardians of fair and honest play had made those principles go away. On September 26, he announced that “the last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work.” Now listen to how he enlarges on this somewhat lame statement. It seems to him on reflection that “voluntary regulation”

[It] was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily. The fact that investment bank holding companies could withdraw from this voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the perceived mandate of the program and weakened its effectiveness.

Yes, I think one might say that. Indeed, the “perceived mandate” of a parole program that allowed those enrolled in it to take off their ankle bracelets at any time they chose to leave the house might also have been open to the charge that it was self-contradictory and wired for its own self-destruction. But in banana-republicland, like Alice’s Wonderland, words tend to lose their meaning and to dissolve into the neutral, responsibility-free verbiage of a Cox.

And still, in so many words in the phrasing of the first bailout request to be placed before Congress, there appeared the brazen demand that, once passed, the “package” be subject to virtually no more Congressional supervision or oversight. This extraordinary proposal shows the utter contempt in which the deliberative bodies on Capitol Hill are held by the unelected and inscrutable financial panjandrums. But welcome to another aspect of banana-republicdom. In a banana republic, the members of the national legislature will be (a) largely for sale and (b) consulted only for ceremonial and rubber-stamp purposes some time after all the truly important decisions have already been made elsewhere.

I was very struck, as the liquefaction of a fantasy-based system proceeded, to read an observation by Professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, of the Yale School of Management. Referring to those who had demanded—successfully—to be indemnified by the customers and clients whose trust they had betrayed, the professor phrased it like this:

These are people who want to be rewarded as if they were entrepreneurs. But they aren’t. They didn’t have anything at risk.

That’s almost exactly right, except that they did have something at risk. What they put at risk, though, was other people’s money and other people’s property. How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seems to lose, and to play with a big stack of chips furnished to you by other people, and to have the further assurance that, if anything should ever chance to go wrong, you yourself are guaranteed by the tax dollars of those whose money you are throwing about in the first place! It’s enough to make a cat laugh. These members of the “business community” are indeed not buccaneering and risk-taking innovators. They are instead, to quote my old friend Nicholas von Hoffman about another era, those who were standing around with tubas in their arms on the day it began to rain money. And then, when the rain of gold stopped and the wind changed, they were the only ones who didn’t feel the blast. Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, the former bosses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have departed with $9.43 million in retirement benefits. I append no comment.

Douchashov: Coward and Historical Revisionist

2008-10-10T17:28:00.002-04:00

"You ask for a proactive proposal. In a word, socialism"

No, Douchashov, no one asked for your "proactive" proposal after the bailout failed to immediately garner all the results you believed it should have--we criticized you for not having one beforehand and then parading around afterwards, pretending you saw this coming. Oh, and "socialism" was the solution you knew would work, but were secreting away from us for some reason?

There's a curious lacuna in your thought process that one often sees in vulgar Marxists: Marx viewed fully-actualized capitalism as the necessary precursor to socialist revolution, though most revolutionaries would choke on that scientific interpretation because it clashes with the moral imperative for revolution (which is really why they're revolutionaries to begin with). Similarly, I have't the slightest idea how you thought a plan of flat out nationalization (which I favor) was even a remote possibility until other half measures (like the bailout) had been tried and failed.

"If the economic problem is truly fundamental, a govt. bailout won't solve it. And as we saw it can't even put a floor under it."

I'm not even sure what your hypothesis is about what's causing this crisis. At one point you say:

"The ideology of living beyond our means is why "faith" will not be restored."

Then you say

"Looking for a quick fix is the cause of the crisis. A nice start in getting on track would be punishing off-shoring and out-sourcing, and that could be done immediately."

Putting aside the fact that "punishing" off-shoring and outsourcing is immaterial and completely beyond the realm of possibility at the moment, you seem to be saying that the fundamental problem is that we spend much more than we make, or can hope to pay back within a reasonable span of time.

That's a great meta-critique of US consumerism and over-leveraging in the financial world, but if it is, in fact, the "fundamental cause" of the current crisis (recognizing how quickly this could become a bottomless semantic debate about the term "fundamental"), then surely what we need to be dealing with right now is the proximate cause, which is 1) the information assymetry, to put it mildy, created by the packaging up and securitizing of good and bad mortgages together, 2) the rapid decline in the property values underlying these mortgages, and 3) the seizing up of the credit markets based on the uncertainty created by 1) and 2).

The credit market problems are beginning to have a huge impact on employment--surely you aren't suggesting that we need to sign the country up for behavior modification shock treatment before we attempt to address that. If you are, then I say to you and all the libertarians fulminating about this on the margins: I understand what an important role punishment and pain play in your psycho-sexual constitution, but this really isn't the place to actualize your fantasy lives.

This is going to be a progressive process of varying levels of government intervention, and it had to begin with the highly-flawed bailout that was, by definition, the one that was politically possible at the time. Doing nothing was not a political option--most of the Republican and Democrat no votes the first time around knew that, but felt free to vote against it because they thought there were enough votes to pass it without them.

Republicans were especially loathe to be seen supporting it because it's exactly the type of issue they specialize in demagoguing: one with a complex interplay of costs and benefits that is difficult to explain even in the time allotted on the Jim Lehrer News Hour.

"You're first mistake was in assuming that the bailout was being considered in the best interest of the country."

Which of us thought that? Your first mistake was making the best the enemy of the good (and by "good" I of course mean the necessary first step). Although, then again, you didn't really even do that, did you, as that would have required making a concrete suggestion without the benefit of your retrospectacles.

Now it appears, as you noted, that straight out nationalizations are being considered. That could only have happened once the more moderate options had been tried. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling his socialist self.

Mavericks for Ayers

2008-10-10T09:57:00.002-04:00

Two thousand plus mavericks and counting. I love how the focus is on the character assassination of Ayers, and not Obama. I wish it discussed the actual accusations against Ayers, but I suppose the aim was to appeal to a wider demographic.

Buffet prepares to lay some pipe

2008-10-10T08:36:00.003-04:00

Huffington Post is inviting readers to caption this pic. Another reason to love the Huff Post.

So pocketbook trumps race?

2008-10-10T07:52:00.003-04:00

This month's Labor Notes has a good piece on race and the election.

Labor leaders who want desperately to chase the Republicans from the White House are confronting a hurdle in their outreach to members: the question of race. Obama’s record on economic issues, they say, should put him way ahead of John McCain with working-class voters. But will the facts be enough to overcome some members’ deep-seated prejudice?

“We have people disguise it by saying he doesn’t have enough experience, or they’re not comfortable voting for him,” says Kyle McDermott, field director in the Steelworkers’ political department. “And we have people come at us and say, ‘Look, I’m not going to vote for a black person.’ They don’t use as kind words as I just did.” . . .

A September 8-10 national poll of likely voters by Democracy Corps found that in white union households, Obama gets 44 percent of the vote, 8 points below the local Democratic candidate for Congress and 9 points below the number of those who identify as Democrats. In 2004 white union households backed John Kerry by a 52.4 percent margin.

Putting aside people voting against their own interests, I had this pit of dread in my belly about Obama losing due to race. But now that pit's been replaced by a well of nausea due to the economy. It's striking how economic uncertainty has pushed unease about race off the table.

Now union members, military families, and other stereotypes in states as diverse as Michigan and Virginia are turning hard for Obama. A few weeks ago 527's were running race-baiting ads in Macomb county in Detroit suburbs, and now McCain pulls out of Michigan.

But what does this say about race relations? Does this mean that in bad times a visceral response to race doesn't matter, but in good times it does?

I was against it, before I was for it

2008-10-07T06:21:00.004-04:00

Here's Paul Krugman on Rachel Maddow's show bemoaning the failure of the bailout. He was one of the morons arguing the bailout MUST be passed. Now he's saying the bill was a terrible idea, time to go back to the drawing board . . . Ooh! He's angry! (Must be all that egg on his face.)

That trillion would have come in handy right about now.

It's official, the bailout is a failure

2008-10-06T16:00:00.003-04:00

It’s official! The bank bailout has not worked.
-Peter Morichi, University of Maryland

If policymakers think that adding extra liquidity is going to solve the credit crunch on its own, they are going to be sorely disappointed. This is because upward pressure on interbank rates is a consequence, not a cause, of the crisis.

It is a shortfall of bank capital that has made financial institutions reluctant to lend to one another. Boosting liquidity is therefore only a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for stabilising the financial sector. In fact, until banks are adequately recapitalised, funding pressures may even get worse.
-John Higgins, Capital Economics

Quick! Let's throw several more trillions down the drain before we have any idea what is really going on. The market needs to finish "correcting," then we can look for solutions. We deregulated and encouraged massive bubbles, and the bill came due. We planted the bulbs, and our tulips are blooming.

All you bushy-tailed optimists that insisted the bailout had to go through, or else: Fuck you! Running around half-decapitated has only made the hole bigger. Bet that last trillion we wasted still goes into bonuses.

The Boss rocks the Parkway

2008-10-05T18:29:00.003-04:00

Bruce Springsteen played a great set on the Franklin Parkway on Saturday. You can find the entire seven song set here.

You can also YouTube individual songs. Here he's spoken word, explaining why he was rallying for Obama. It's worth a listen.

Boeing strike looks like a winner

2008-10-05T18:03:00.002-04:00

How does labor strife affect business in the current climate? Capital is and will continue threatening workers that it can't meet payroll because of difficulty accessing credit lines, but how does labor strife affect that same access to credit?

I don't know if that had anything to do with it, but Wall Street appears to be pressuring Boeing management to concede to workers' demands. Business Week asked last week, why doesn't Boeing settle? They're losing more money and jeopardizing future production by not settling. And on Friday the LA Times lamented that the strike had postponed the launch of Virgin Australia and was stifling business travel in Southern California.

If Wall Street is blinking on the Boeing strike, it's time to kick them when they're down. I hope the payback's hell.

Why I hate Identity Politics

2008-10-04T11:35:00.003-04:00

Palin celebrates Idiocy on national TV and gets away with it. Since her idiocy was made plain, her whole strategy entails proclaiming it from the highest mountain top and gathering the idiot minions around her. She is the Last Unreconstructed American.

I was a little disappointed in Pinker's piece in today's Times. I was expecting a little more psychology, instead it was mostly linguistics. I agree that her abuse of the vernacular is irrelevant, and that her effort to hide behind the vernacular is. But, how do the linguistic tools measure as far as motivating behavior? Any ideas, professor? I don't think they measure up, in part because she is a woman. Sure, she offered a lifeline to everyone that desperately sought a reason to adore her, like Pat Buchanan (proving that it is possible to WILL oneself into idiocy). And, sure, she projects this exciting tension as a potential ball-breaker, but I think watching Biden barely conceal his contempt for her lack of knowledge through a forced teeth-bearing smile (with the accompanying command of details) is what led to polls suggesting he won the debate. If she were known as an intelligent woman, like Hillary Clinton, the contempt would be seen as sexist. But since everyone could see Palin can't answer an unscripted question, Biden's restraint came across as chivalry. Any takers? I think Gail Collins agrees.

I'm still coughing up a little phlegm thanks to my germ-delivery cost-center. I hereby proclaim today the celebration of all phlegm-coughers day. It is only your own unexamined bias that makes you uncomfortable every time I spit in front of you.

The worse it gets, the better it gets. Pt I: Crisitunity!

2008-10-03T00:23:00.004-04:00

The Senate passed the awful bail-out bill. As time progresses, my opposition has gelled. More on this later. But, at best, the bailout will keep things from deteriorating further, and at worse it will add massively to the debt while our economy contracts.

Jerry Mead-Lucero at Pilsenprole sees the silver-lining:

So now their lies are clear to all. NEO-LIBERALISM IS DEAD! We must repeat this everywhere and anywhere. It has to permeate all our discussions. The neo-liberal mantras that the ideologues deafened us with for decades finally ring hollow for nearly everyone. We must take the ideological offensive at this moment of crisis/opportunity. Because - beware – the neoliberal spin machine is already hard at work fashioning twisted logic to maintain their lock on the minds of many Americans. Take for instance the announcement today of a rejection of the most recent version of the bailout plan, being attributed primarily to conservative Republicans. Only in America, could the economic elite who have robbed us blind and created the crisis, then come off looking like populist Robin Hoods, rejecting billions for a “greedy few” on Wall Street. And what do they demand as their alternative to the Paulson plan – MORE DE-REGULATION AND TAX CUTS FOR CORPORATIONS AND THE EXTREMELY WEALTHY! It is time to end the surreal madness of U.S. politics . . . So where is the “opportunity” that I refer to in the title of this blog entry? Well let’s take a look at what the last Great Depression ultimately resulted in – Social Security, FDIC, the WPA, the FHA, the SEC, the TVA, and let’s not forget the 8 hour day and the 5 day work week. All the stuff that the ruling class has sought to dismantle in the last 3 decades.

I like how MoveOn.org isn't trumpeting their role in the failure of the bill to pass the House. Grow some cojones, You sent me the numbers to call! But, they had the right idea. Let's get to work on a good, long-term solution. This would be the time to get that done, with Bush in the cellar and the economy tanking, but that WON"T happen if there isn't a strong movement pushing for this. The first step is the left owning its role in tanking the bail-out, and the realization that it took a deep dive into the Depression for all the "progressive" legislation we hold so dear.

Props to the NY Post for their beautiful cover today:

Ask Dr. Farley

2008-10-03T00:16:00.002-04:00

He has a Master's Degree in the Apocalypse.

Ask an Apocalypse Specialist

Dear Dr. Farley,

Should I be preparing a boat or a car?

Distressed in DC

Dear Distressed in DC,

The failure of the modern energy transportation network will make such distinctions irrelevant. It would be better to ask "horse or bike?" I recommend the former; horses can swim, and in a pinch can be eaten.

Dear Dr. Farley,

Is cannibalism really as bad as they say?

Preparing in Peoria

Dear Preparing in Peoria,

As in all things, it depends on who you're with.

Can I call you Joe?

2008-10-02T21:58:00.030-04:00

Daughter's down to bed, so I just started watching debate. An hour behind rest of my countrymen and womyn. So now this is my first half-assed attempt at live-blogging. Criticism welcome.

I was on the phone with el lechero, and he thought Biden was going to spank Palin. I'm not so sure. The clips I've seen from her past debates--she was smokin' her opponents. She does the Joe six pack thing well, and I think she is better under fire than in these friendly interviews where she's been deer in the headlights.

Can I call you Joe?

Beautiful way to begin! Biden didn't fall for it, so we'll see if she calls him Joe.

The American workforce is the greatest in the world.

She's a great caricature of America. It sounded pretty cynical.

She just criticized Biden's years. She's trying to make him snap, and he definitely looks annoyed.

Palin just blamed the crisis on predatory lenders who sold people mortgages they couldn't afford. If she holds her own, she wins by a mile.

She just spoke directly to camera, "to American people," explaining what taxes she cut as governor. Good tactic, but it will get old fast.

In the middle-class where Todd and I have been paying taxes isn't always patriotic. Patriotic is, "govt. get out of the way."

20 minutes in Joe Biden just called McCain's Health plan, "Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere." The audience laughed. They promised not to laugh!

Biden: Post-office box off-shore tax haven is "unpatriotic."

You know what I had to do in the state of Alaska? I had to take on those big oil companies...break up a monopoly. Those tax breaks aren't going to big corporations...Obama voted for tax breaks, and I had to turn around as governor and undo in my own area of expertise, and that's energy.

Biden owns the facts, but he looks mad.

Good Biden line: "I agree with the governor. We want a windfall profits tax to benefit American people. So I hope governor can convince McCain to support windfall profits tax." Here, strategy needs to be, celebrate your opponent and give her all the rope she needs.

Palin is gritting her teeth. Pushing for domestic supply of energy. "Energy independence is key to our economic future."

Let's talk about climate change!

Alaska feels the impact of climate change... I don't attribute all changes to man's activities, but there are real changes. I don't want to argue about the causes, but about impact. I was first governor to form climate change sub-cabinet. Need to reduce emissions. We have to become energy independent because we care about climate more than other countries do

.
The country's IQ just dropped a few points. She started to run on too long. Started stringing nouns together at the end.

Biden: "Climate change is man made." Clean-coal, clean-coal, clean-coal. What a joke. "Dirll, drill, drill! Drill we must, but it will be ten years before we get any oil out of the ground."

Palin: "The chant is "Drill, baby, drill!" Because people are hungry for more oil."

Both support capping carbon emissions.

Now we're off to same-sex marrriage.
Biden: "We support same constitutional guarantees as heterosexual couples."
Palin, somehow, got to say she was tolerant. Apparently, some of her best friends are gay. They wouldn't prohibit hospital visitations. Palin almost ate her toes, but moderator left her off the hook.

Long on Iraq, Biden is way more detailed, and Palin way more stark and emotional.

As debate goes on, Biden treating Palin with respect is starting to pay off. Everyone knows his knowledge is an order of magnitude above hers, and so as debate wears on, the feather-weight is wearing through. However, her statements are punchy and powerful. She's done a great job prepping for the debate.

Fifty minutes in, we're deep in Iran. Biden: "Our friends and allies are saying, "Talk, talk, talk!"

Nice, Biden just stated: "McCain won't even meet with govt. of Spain! They have troops in Afghanistan." Of course, Palin will not touch that... And she doesn't.

Israel love-fest! Who hearts Israel more? Did anyone see this post: if Israel doesn't eliminate settlements, Israeli democracy is dead. Wonder how long that will take? Palin: "I'm so glad, Senator, that we both love Israel." That was a creepy, creepy line.

Palin: "Too much finger pointing backwards. We will learn from mistakes of past administrations."

Respect, respect, respect. Does Palin respect Biden more than Biden respects Palin? She turned the table on him good there.

Palin appeared to drop some knowledge on counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Biden refocused on McCain's judgement.

At one hour in, Palin smashed Biden on his support for Bush's war resolution. As an outsider, it's hard to understand: for it, before I was against it. Good. He deserved that.

Now, they're both humanitarians on Darfur, and sweeping away the line on trigger for intervention.

Palin: "John knows what evil is!.. He'll know how to win a war!"

Iffil just asked them, what wil they do if they become President. Heart-beat away, and all that.
Biden, unfortunately in my mind, injected a dab of assasination fear-mongering. "A tragedy of historic proportions. But I would follow Obama's wishes all the way." They should have role-played that question, and had a lighter answer.
Palin: "A tragey, tragedy. [rubbing hands] We're a team of mavericks! We disagree on ANWR, and we will disagree. McCain wants deliberative debate to make good policy... Govt. get out of my way."

Biden spends a lot of time in Home Depot. Why? Apparently, everyone there knows that McCain equals Bush. "Walk with me in my neighborhood. Middle class has got short end. Obama will change it."

Palin: "Say it ain't so, Joe. Pointing backwards, again. Bush administration."
Apparently, her family is full of teachers. Shout-out to 3rd graders at Gladyswood Elementary School. She's got Biden beat on the name-dropping.

Palin just asked for more authority in working with Senate! No!!! She is scary.

Biden: "Every major decision, I'll be sitting in the room... I look forward to working with Barack... "

Palin opened herself up to questioning on Cheney. Can't really give an answer, except says she agrees with Cheney. Again, No!!! "My executive experience will be put to good use in White House."

Biden: "Cheney is the most dangerous Vice-President in American history. He doesn't understand that Article I defines executive role... Preside over Senate only when there is a tie vote. No authority to Congress. A bizarre notion to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive."

Biden is getting emotional towards the end. Palin is sneering almost as much as during the convention. She is the ice queen.

Palin: "We've not got to allow the partisanship... Whether Republicans in charge, I didn't see a lot of progress there, but neither with the Democrats in charge."

Biden: "A maverick he is not."

As with Bush, Palin has no regrets.

Biden is on top of every McCain policy proposal, and is all about selling Obama. Palin is all about selling herself. And she's all cute and folksy. "It's gonna be okay." She is projecting optimism.

So, she had to call him Senator Biden. She's glad to be able to speak directly without "filter" of media commentariat.

As with Obama and McCain, Palin went to Biden's area of expertise and held her own. Even though she did not get specific, I think she wins. But Biden did right by not attacking Palin and always going after McCain.

She did a great job, but I don't think the fickle polls will bounce. Too late for that.

Maddow thinks she was too gimmicky and way-over caricatured.
Buchanan thinks she was phenomenal. Astonished at how well she did.

I think they're both right, but the crisis and bailout are too present in people's minds. Palin was powerful, but you wouldn't want to put her in charge. Not now. Not anymore.

Palin did skip a lot of the questions. If people picked up on that, she didn't win. If they didn't pick up on that, she did. This was Ifill's failure to keep Palin on point. She must have been cowed by the McCain attacks on her role as moderator.

And now we know the next focus of the McCain campaign will be: "We're looking forward, Obama's looking backwards."

Armageddon Trades

2008-10-02T14:45:00.002-04:00

Where to put one's money in tough times? As it turns out, Soup and Tasers are decent and familiar standbys. I also have to like the chances of the Vice Fund, since when tough times come, people will still drink, smoke, and gamble.

Ifill's bias

2008-10-01T16:15:00.004-04:00

FOX NEWS claims Gwen Ifill is unfit to host the Vice Presidential debate this week, since she has written a book about Obama:

Questions are being raised about the objectivity of Thursday's vice presidential debate moderator after news surfaced that she is releasing a new book promoting Barack Obama and other black politicians who have benefited from the civil rights struggle.

Ifill's book, "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama," is due to be released about the same time the next president takes the oath of office.

In her book, Ifill contends that the black political structure of the civil rights movement has cleared the way for post-racial politicians to ascend to new heights.

Now some are wondering whether Ifill can be fair and balanced, and whether she should be the moderator of Thursday's 9 p.m. ET debate.

"Clearly her books aren't going to do as well unless Obama wins, so it looks like she has some investment, literally, in one candidate or the other. And she's supposed to be sitting there as a neutral arbiter during the debate," said NPR's Juan Williams, a FOX News contributor. "I think the world of Gwen Ifill but I know there's a perception problem."

Has Juan Williams always been a wanker and a stooge? He writes the most insufferable pieces for the Wall Street Journal and he is one of the more meaningless of the Sunday morning pundits. Does he get so much face time because he is a Black Conservative? There are others less annoying.

Speaking of annoying:

FOX News political analyst Michelle Malkin argued in a post on National Review that Ifill is "so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running."

Personally I think Gwen Ifill is a fine example of someone with a pretty obvious personal liberal bias who strives to be an objective and professional journalist. And generally succeeds. I only sort of believed this until I read that Malkin post; now I believe it stridently.

"Loss Aversion and the Stock Market"

2008-09-30T13:49:00.002-04:00

I thought a lot of the share transfers now occurred automatically following a set algorithm. If that is true, how does that amplify loss aversion? Sell! Sell! Sell!

The Frontal Cortex : Loss Aversion and the Stock Market

Over the next few days, lots of people are going to be poring over their investment portfolio, trying to figure out which stocks to keep and which stocks to sell. Unfortunately, many of these investors will make the exact same mistake, causing them to lose vast sums of money over the long term.

The problem is loss aversion. Kahnemanandtversky stumbled upon loss aversion after giving their students a simple survey, which asked whether or not they would accept a variety of different bets. The psychologists noticed that, when people were offered a gamble on the toss of a coin in which they might lose $20, they demanded an average payoff of at least $40 if they won. The pain of a loss was approximately twice as potent as the pleasure generated by a gain. Furthermore, our decisions seemed to be determined by these feelings. As Kahneman and Tversky put it, "In human decision making, losses loom larger than gains."

Loss aversion also explains one of the most common investing mistakes: investors evaluating their stock portfolio are most likely to sell stocks that have increased in value or, during a week like this, have gone down the least amount. Why? Because it hurts to take a loss. Unfortunately, this means that people end up holding on to their depreciating stocks. Over the long term, this strategy is exceedingly foolish, since it ultimately leads to a portfolio composed entirely of shares that are losing money. (A study by Terrance Odean, an economist at UC-Berkeley, found that the stocks investors sold outperformed the stocks they didn't sell by 3.4 percent). Even professional money managers are vulnerable to this bias, and tend to hold losing stocks twice as long as winning stocks. Because selling shares that have decreased in value makes the loss tangible - and losing sucks - we try to postpone the pain for as long as possible. The end result is more losses.

Take a hint: refuse to panic

2008-09-30T08:13:00.004-04:00

“You don’t make the biggest financial decision in the history of this country in a few days’ time without hearings.”

-Rep. John Yarmuth, KY(D)

And in case anyone missed it:

European shares were mixed Tuesday, following a similar pattern in Asia, as investors refused to panic about the failure of American lawmakers to pass a financial bailout and were encouraged by gains in futures contracts on Wall Street indexes.

So nice of them to "refuse to panic." What a joke.

Seriously, the bailout sucks

2008-09-29T22:50:00.004-04:00

Uncle Joe Stiglitz has an awesome break-down of the bail-out at The Nation. (Awesome because I agree with it. Nice to have someone of his stature backing me up on this.)

. . . the banks realized that they were about to get a free ride at taxpayers' expense. No private firm was willing to buy these toxic mortgages at what the seller thought was a reasonable price; they finally had found a sucker who would take them off their hands--called the American taxpayer.

The administration attempts to assure us that they will protect the American people by insisting on buying the mortgages at the lowest price at auction. Evidently, Paulson didn't learn the lessons of the information asymmetry that played such a large role in getting us into this mess. The banks will pass on their lousiest mortgages. Paulson may try to assure us that we will hire the best and brightest of Wall Street to make sure that this doesn't happen. (Wall Street firms are already licking their lips at the prospect of a new source of revenues: fees from the US Treasury.) But even Wall Street's best and brightest do not exactly have a credible record in asset valuation; if they had done better, we wouldn't be where we are. And that assumes that they are really working for the American people, not their long-term employers in financial markets. Even if they do use some fancy mathematical model to value different mortgages, those in Wall Street have long made money by gaming against these models. We will then wind up not with the absolutely lousiest mortgages, but with those in which Treasury's models most underpriced risk. Either way, we the taxpayers lose, and Wall Street gains.

Here are the reasons Congress should not hand the Treasury $700 billion.

There are four fundamental problems with our financial system, and the Paulson proposal addresses only one. The first is that the financial institutions have all these toxic products--which they created--and since no one trusts anyone about their value, no one is willing to lend to anyone else. The Paulson approach solves this by passing the risk to us, the taxpayer--and for no return. The second problem is that there is a big and increasing hole in bank balance sheets--banks lent money to people beyond their ability to repay--and no financial alchemy will fix that. If, as Paulson claims, banks get paid fairly for their lousy mortgages and the complex products in which they are embedded, the hole in their balance sheet will remain. What is needed is a transparent equity injection, not the non-transparent ruse that the administration is proposing.

The third problem is that our economy has been supercharged by a housing bubble which has now burst. The best experts believe that prices still have a way to fall before the return to normal, and that means there will be more foreclosures. No amount of talking up the market is going to change that. The hidden agenda here may be taking large amounts of real estate off the market--and letting it deteriorate at taxpayers' expense.

The fourth problem is a lack of trust, a credibility gap. Regrettably, the way the entire financial crisis has been handled has only made that gap larger.

Paulson and others in Wall Street are claiming that the bailout is necessary and that we are in deep trouble. Not long ago, they were telling us that we had turned a corner. The administration even turned down an effective stimulus package last February--one that would have included increased unemployment benefits and aid to states and localities--and they still say we don't need another stimulus. To be frank, the administration has a credibility and trust gap as big as that of Wall Street. If the crisis was as severe as they claim, why didn't they propose a more credible plan? With lack of oversight and transparency the cause of the current problem, how could they make a proposal so short in both? If a quick consensus is required, why not include provisions to stop the source of bleeding, to aid the millions of Americans that are losing their homes? Why not spend as much on them as on Wall Street? Do they still believe in trickle-down economics, when for the past eight years money has been trickling up to the wizards of Wall Street? Why not enact bankruptcy reform, to help Americans write down the value of the mortgage on their overvalued home? No one benefits from these costly foreclosures.

The administration is once again holding a gun at our head, saying, "My way or the highway." We have been bamboozled before by this tactic. We should not let it happen to us again.

Instead, put the gun down, and consider these simple ideas for how to structure the bailout:

The objective of the bailout should not be to protect the banks' shareholders, or even their creditors, who facilitated this bad lending. The objective should be to maintain the flow of credit, especially to mortgages. But wasn't that what the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout was supposed to assure us?

There are alternatives. Warren Buffet showed the way, in providing equity to Goldman Sachs. The Scandinavian countries showed the way, almost two decades ago. By issuing preferred shares with warrants (options), one reduces the public's downside risk and insures that they participate in some of the upside potential. This approach is not only proven, it provides both incentives and wherewithal to resume lending. It furthermore avoids the hopeless task of trying to value millions of complex mortgages and even more complex products in which they are embedded, and it deals with the "lemons" problem--the government getting stuck with the worst or most overpriced assets.

Finally, we need to impose a special financial sector tax to pay for the bailouts conducted so far. We also need to create a reserve fund so that poor taxpayers won't have to be called upon again to finance Wall Street's foolishness.

Praise the Lord, I finally found someone who looked at what this might mean for the debt. Stiglitz asserts our debt is now $9 Trillion, so my earlier figure was on the board. Looks like NYT was looking at an outdated figure?

If we design the right bailout, it won't lead to an increase in our long-term debt--we might even make a profit. But if we implement the wrong strategy, there is a serious risk that our national debt--already overburdened from a failed war and eight years of fiscal profligacy--will soar, and future living standards will be compromised. The president seemed to think that his new shell game will arrest the decline in house prices, and we won't be faced holding a lot of bad mortgages. I hope he's right, but I wouldn't count on it: it's not what most housing experts say. The president's economic credentials are hardly stellar. Our national debt has already climbed from $5.7 trillion to over $9 trillion in eight years, and the deficits for 2008 and 2009--not including the bailouts--are expected to reach new heights. There is no such thing as a free war--and no such thing as a free bailout. The bill will be paid, in one way or another.

Hat tip to Rdan. Check out the comments if you have steel stomach.

Cutting off one's nose? House rejects Wall St. bailout!

2008-09-29T14:35:00.012-04:00

The House just voted down the bailout. Bam! Luckily, I had Veuve Clicquot on ice for just such an occasion.

TV punditocracy is saying the Leadership didn't work hard enough to sell the bailout, and people don't understand this will affect their ability to get loans, etc. While few people truly understand the bailout (I don't), I think most understand there is a serious crisis looming. People are pissed at these fat cats who have been gorging themselves the past eight years, and I think many feel the satisfaction I do at cutting our nose to spite the gluttons' face. We'll see if businesses can't meet payroll because of this, but gauging from Drew Pooters, unpaid labor doesn't cause enough of a stir in this country.

Two cents: there's no guarantee this thing would have worked. If the system stinks, why would this do the trick? And if it didn't, how many more trillions would we throw in the hole? And what about inflation? And the debt?

Congress should cancel its vacation and take the time necessary to figure this thing out. The markets will wait for them.

Buckley's got his grin on

2008-09-29T01:24:00.005-04:00

News Flash: Washington Mutual collapsed after Hispanic Business recognized its commitment to diversity.

At least the National Review doesn't consider me a spic. Excuse me while I go smash Krikorian in the goddamn face.

No comment

2008-09-29T00:16:00.001-04:00

By the early-trading's light

2008-09-28T23:55:00.008-04:00

So it looks like there's finally a bipartisan agreement, reached just in time before our Masters began early trading in the Asian markets, but, fingers crossed, it still has to get voted on.

A part of me still wants the deal to fall through, but not to feed my schadenfreude. I'm not the only one. Kos has been railing about the lack of transparency in the plan, and underhandedly praising Republican roadblocks. Here's the latest:

The congressional leadership has some sort of deal, 110 pages long (or so), that people are supposed to digest and vote on tomorrow. Whatever the details of the bill might be, the fact that the leadership of both parties have refused to take a breath and explore alternate and less costly (to the taxpayers) options is a disgrace. The only question is whether the rank and file will vote for this thing, and given that the voters aren't happy, we'll see what happens.

And it's always nice to see The Editors on one's side:

Yes, their reasoning was cynical at best; yes, they eventually moved from Devil’s Advocates to Satan’s Assholes; and, yes, there was always the suspicion - since confirmed a few billion times over - that, were they actually put in charge of things, they’d fuck it all up just for the hell of it. But, while annoying, there can be a certain value to being the asshole who responds with a dismissive “O RLY?” to everything you say. I generally valuate this in inverse proportion to my ability to understand the assertion being made; in the case of throwing $700 billion dollars at some kind of fancy Wall Street clusterfuck, for example, I actually value it pretty highly.

It looks like one of my biggest concerns might actually becontemplated in the bail-out plan:

The final version of the bill included a deal-sealing plan for eventually recouping losses; if the Treasury program to purchase and resell troubled mortgage-backed securities has lost money after five years, the president must submit a plan to Congress to recover those losses from the financial industry. Presumably that plan would involve new fees or taxes, perhaps on securities transactions.

Today's NYT had the following nice graphics on the national debt and the bailouts, and they stated it stood at $5 Trillion. On the one hand, that's half what I thought, but on the other that means the debt would be growing by 20%, not a measely 10%. Really, I will not be satisfied until the national debt is in a snug lock-box so it can't grow another penny.

I joined a virtual book club on vaccines and autism

2008-09-28T02:30:00.007-04:00

I've been slowly absorbing this whole autism and vaccine controversy through osmosis, mostly by poking fun of the people I'm told to at the science blogs I frequent. One of those blogs just roped me into joining a book discussion on the subject, since I was one of the fifty first lemmings to sign up and win a free copy of the book. We're going to be reading Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, and I have to post a minimum three comments, or somesuch. It feels like homework, but on the up side, I'll also get to post here about what I learn.

Feel free to join the book club discussion here. I will be posting as douchashov.

To start, let me say that although I am biased towards the anti-vaccine movement, I am also floored by the non-chalant attitude towards vaccination in the medical establishment.

I just had to take my daughter to get medical clearance for pre-school and they wanted to give her six vaccines! What? I said no way, and so they called a doctor to negotiate. "Well the Hep-A booster isn't really needed right away", etc. etc. Turns out, two of the six vaccines she had already been given on previous visits but they are apparently too lax about updating their records to keep track of this. Luckily I was a hard-ass and made them look over everything twice. As it is, she got four vaccines and I had to hold her down while two personnel worked her arms (one on each side.)

I don't think this is a unique phenomenon since I got a notice through school administration that my account was on hold since I wasn't up to date on my shots. I went in and they didn't have a record that I'd gotten my second MMR. (One of the shots my daughter got was also the MMR--Mumps, Measles, Rubella--and this appears to be one of the main vaccines of contention in the anti-vaccine movement). I made them order my charts from medical records, a process that took TWO WEEKS, and yup, I'd already had it. They just hadn't marked the appropriate check-box on their computers. How sweet and fleeting those moral victories.

Which primate's on top?

2008-09-27T13:08:00.003-04:00

I wanted to live-blog the debate, but my wireless router wasn't working properly. I changed the DNS addresses and got back online but surfing molasses. Currently mobile blogging. I don't know that I would have added anything useful to the mass of punditry out there, so just as well. I'll link to an overview soon as I can.

I was trying to gauge if one of the candidates was dominant over the other, but not that much stood out. There's some talk that McCain made NO eye contact with Obama, indicating repressed anger and/or primate submission. I've read complaints about Obama offering too much praise to earlier McCain decisions or stances, and this might prove useful to future McCain ads, but for the unfiltered debates it seemed a dominance display. Patting McCain on the head while putting him in his place. I didn't feel Obama held back on criticizing the other Senator. If this was McCain's area of expertise, then young sizzle owned the old coot.

Let them sweat a little

2008-09-26T00:28:00.005-04:00

Whatever their motives, I am so glad those elephant humpers put a halt to that charade of a thumbs-up photo-op they had planned for yesterday afternoon. I called my two Senators and Rep (PA) to complain about the damn bail-out, and I was shaking with anger. That probably had to do with low glucose levels, but it certainly added to the effect. Probably need to see a doctor about that. On the upside, my blood pressure is A-OK.

I certainly wasn't the only one calling blinded by rage. I had to try several times to reach the Senators--lines were busy or went to voicemail, and the inboxes were full. The staff for Casey and Specter were like zombies, completely flat, listened to what I had to say, and said nothing in return. I think they've been taking a serious beating. It pisses me off when I hear on TV that only conservatives are complaining. My district's Rep seems a lot more relaxed. I had a long conversation with staffers who discussed their support for Barney Frank's proposals. Helped calm me down a bit.

What is our GDP? $13 Trillion? Our debt is $10 Trillion? Just throw another Trillion on there. Can't hurt. Except there are no guarantees any bail-out will work, and if it gums the system up even more adding a Trillion in debt is going to help who exactly? At this point, I see no way that the faith in the greenback can be maintained, which means we will be forced to live within our means as we watch GDP slowly decline over the short term. Why do I see no discussion of the debt in all of this?

I know Germanicu$ is sure these "unpriceable" assets are worth so much more than the confused market claims, and the NYT printed this crap to back him up, but if the going rate is zilch you don't rush in offering a premium. Chrysler is no example. That was one company that produced durable goods. Here you're looking at a systemic problem, and I don't see how it can be solved through a rapidly appreciating I.O.U.

There's other reasons why I think this whole thing smells funny:

Here's one from Devilstower, at DailyKos, asking, Why can't the good assets be sorted out from the bad ones?:

Now the real question: how many of those loans are in trouble?

Foreclosures were up a steep 79% in 2007, reaching just over 1% of mortgages. The numbers are up again so far in 2008 (though not as steeply). We could top 2% in default this year or next. There are some expectations that foreclosures could triple from today's historically high levels, meaning ultimately 3% of mortgages could be in trouble.

And that's where we get that math problem. 1% of all mortgages -- the amount now in default -- comes out to $111 billion. Triple that, and you've got $333 billion. Let's round that up to $350 billion. So even if we reach the point where three percent of all mortgages are in foreclosure, the total dollars to flat out buy all those mortgages would be half of what the Bush-Paulson-McCain plan calls for.

Then we need to factor in that a purchased mortgage isn't worth zero. After all, these documents come with property attached. Even with home prices falling and some of the homes lying around unsold, it's safe to assume that some portion of these values could be recovered. In the S&L crisis, about 70% of asset value was recovered, but let's say we don't do that well. Let's say we hit 50%. Then the real outlay for taxpayers would be around $175 billion.

Which, frankly, is a number that Wall Street should be able to handle without our help. After all, the top firms on Wall Steet payed out $120 billion in bonuses alone between 2000 and 2006. If they've got that kind of mad money, why do they need us to step in now? And why do they need twice as much as all the mortgages that are even likely to implode?

In going for $700 billion, what the Bush administration is saying is:

Our pals on the street have been very creative in coming up with instruments in which they've entangled bad mortgages with good mortgages, and rather than untangle them, would rather we keep them from all that difficult paperwork.
Oh, and while we're at it, we might as well buy up a chunk of the swaps and derivatives that were created in an unregulated shadow market so they could double-triple-quadruple dip on the value of these loans.

There's a few more reasons in this mortgage protest from economists, including several from my own grizzled institution of higher learning:

To the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate:

As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.

3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America's dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.

For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.

Just to make sure no one thinks I'm letting Republicans off the hook, Ken Houghton at Angry Bear, explains why golden parachutes and bankruptcy protection do matter:

Let me say this slowly, so even a NYT reporter can understand it: If you are taking an equity stake in a firm, one factor is how much cash the firm will have on hand. Cash paid to executives is not cash on hand, nor can it be used to produce future capital, investments, and free cashflow, or even "the miracle of compound interest." So executive pay is very much a factor in equity calculations.

Changing the bankruptcy laws is more tangential, but let's again explain this slowly. Mortgage-backed securities are, well, backed by mortgages. Their value depends directly on those payments. If it becomes easier to workout a mortgage in bankruptcy court, the holders of those MBSes are liable to (1) receive a higher value and (2) know sooner how severely their securities are impaired. So changing the bankruptcy law will, again, make the value of the assets clearer sooner. Which is especially important if we're all going to pretend that this thing is going away after two years.

Let Wall Street stew in its juice a little bit longer, and figure out a way to get it to pay for the bulk of this mess.

Pity Poor Connecticut

2008-09-25T15:27:00.002-04:00

Is this Greenwich's Katrina?:

Greenwich collected so many rich bits in recent years that its small population of about 60,000 contributed nearly $600 million in state income taxes in 2006. In other words, Greenwich pays 13% of all state income taxes in Connecticut with only 1.8% of the population.

According to an article by Christopher Keating in the Hartford Courant, the town and state are bracing for lower tax revenue. There are no signs yet that Greenwichers are hurting–Saks, Tiffany and Brooks Brothers are still busy and the local Rolls Royce dealers (there are two) say their clientele is largely immune.

Yet local residents like Lehman Brothers’ Dick Fuld – he of the $700 million stock loss – just won’t be writing the big tax checks that they used to. Charities are expecting a lighter haul this year.

There also is the human cost to the financial floods, the collective psychological breakdown that occurs when Greenwich’s billionaires become mere millionaires.

“It’s the human toll that is frightening,” said State Rep. Livvy Floren, a friend of Mr. Fuld. “Dick Fuld has spent 39 years of his life doing this. It’s more than just money. They’re not going to be in the streets starving….I think the man worked 24/7. His family and Lehman are his life.”

A deeper analysis was offered by local Democrat Ned Lamont, who in one fell swoop compared Greenwich’s money woes to the Japan malaise, Asian tsunami and the New Orleans flood.

“It really is a financial tsunami, and it could go either way,” said the multimillionaire telecommunications mogul who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006. “It took Japan 20 years to recover from their buying binge. How long does it take us to work through excessive leverage? That could take years not months. This is our Katrina.”

Leave it to "Red Ned" Lamont to remind people why they voted for Lieberman.

I'm seeing black helicopters

2008-09-25T14:31:00.001-04:00

When Bush entered office, he quickly got rid of a budget surplus, arguably to prevent Congress from doing anything productive--such as solving the health care crisis. Now, the bookend, he's in crisis mode asking for a massive increase in the national debt with a figure the Treasury admitted it pulled out its ass. Any chance this is a ploy to prevent the next Congress doing anything useful for the foreseeable future? No one's going to support additional expenditures once this boondoggle passes.

McCain Suspends Campaign to Fix the Economy

2008-09-24T16:25:00.005-04:00

It only sounds like the lede to an article from The Onion. John McCain, plummeting in the polls, is suspending his campaign to work on the economy in Washington. The last thing "the economy" needs right now is McCain--forgetting which is the gas and which is the brake--driving headlong into it.

Man, he thinks the American people are even stupider than I do. Time will tell which of us is right.

Nut Cutting Time

2008-09-24T09:33:00.003-04:00

Too busy spit-polishing my douche-boots to blog, so I'll just crib the tubes.

A good friend posted this to my facebook in response to my Cranky McCrank (and no, you can't friend me):

cranky? how about fuckin pissed. the trick is either that the $1 trillion is enough, or they don't have a fuckin clue and it is just the tip of the iceberg (not to mention the $30 billion bear stearns bailout, the $150 billion "stimulus" checks) - either way, I hope the lesson isn't lost that there is enough money out there to cover real human demands (if the iraq occupation didnt already let us know that). universal health care should be right around the corner, free college? infrastructure development? rehabing neighbor schools?

but really, if they knew for sure that $1 trillion was enough that suggests the firms know how much bad debt they have, which in turn means they have been straight up lying about their write downs- in a post-Enron/ sarbane-oxley world, we should be seeing a bunch of CEOs in cuffs. which of course won't happen either way...but if they don't know, $1 trillion should just be the tip of the iceberg.

Capitalism is bad- idiot capitalism seems to be worse

And Paul Campos at LG&M had the following awesome left hook. If the Dems bend over for Bush on this, I'm voting Barr:

Bush's approval rating has sunk to 19% in the latest ARG poll. That's lower than Nixon's the week he resigned. Probably the most telling stat in the breakdown is that Dubya has an 8% approval rating among self-described independents. Basically every Democrat and almost every independent voter in the country hates him. His remaining support consists of slightly more than half the GOP, and Joe Lieberman.

As Matt Stoller points out, you could probably impeach him and nobody would notice.

So the question becomes, is Bush sufficiently weakened for the Democratic leadership in Congress to tell him thanks, but we'll be drafting any bailout legislation we consider necessary, and you'll be signing it? After all there are about five GOP senators that are no position to be backing the president on anything if they want to live to fight another day.

This is what LBJ used to refer to as "nut-cutting time." Somebody needs to remind Pelosi and Reid and the rest of them just who has the knife now.

But my absolute favorite comes from Angry Bear. Apparently this is making the rounds on Wall Street. I love you Angry Bear:

SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR AMERICAN:

I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.

I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.

I AM WORKING WITH MR. PHIL GRAM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR, YOU MAY KNOW HIM AS THE LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT IN THE 1990S. THIS TRANSACTIN IS 100% SAFE.

THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED THE FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE FUNDS IN THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE. MY FAMILY LAWYER ADVISED ME THAT I SHOULD LOOK FOR A RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS A NEXT OF KIN SO THE FUNDS CAN BE TRANSFERRED.

PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, IRA AND COLLEGE FUND ACCOUNT NUMBERS AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN TO WALLSTREETBAILOUT@TREASURY.GOV SO THAT WE MAY TRANSFER YOUR COMMISSION FOR THIS TRANSACTION. AFTER I RECEIVE THAT INFORMATION, I WILL RESPOND WITH DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT SAFEGUARDS THAT WILL BE USED TO PROTECT THE FUNDS.

YOURS FAITHFULLY MINISTER OF TREASURY PAULSON

After you're done emptying your wallet for Paulson, consider signing this petition: Main Street before Wall Street.

At the very least, this can't be a handout. Since the fundamentals are sound, lets get that perpetually preferred stock at a 10% rate of return that Buffett's getting.

P.S. If the following is correct, Bear Stearns bailout actually cost $290 billion, not $29 billion, meaning we can't print any of the Trillion the Treasury requests. Is Buffet going to pony up for that also? China, please save us! Assholes.

Dominance Has Its Perks

2008-09-23T23:55:00.003-04:00

Here's another splashy study that's all over the news but not yet available in print: sexist men make more money than their non-sexist counterparts. A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology appears to find that men who feel women should stay at home and take care of the kids make around $8000 per year more than men who feel a woman's place is where she deems it. Most of the speculation centers around the idea that sexist men are more assertive; entitlement is persuasive.

As soon as I get my hands on the study, I'll say a little more about it. Until then, I'll leave this little tidbit from a previous study by the same authors:

traditional individuals experienced more guilt from family-interfering-with-work, and egalitarian individuals experienced more guilt from work-interfering-with-family.

The authors seemed to have controlled for all the right factors, so I assume that sexist men don't simply work longer hours, but if they put more effort into their work it seems they might be deserving of higher wages. Stay tuned.

Fatties

2008-09-23T14:03:00.002-04:00

It was only a matter of time:

Overweight Americans Sink Old Boat-Safety Rule

The growth of America's waistline has hit the waterways. Since it's not polite to throw a man overboard, the U.S. Coast Guard is revising a standard that commercial boat owners use to determine how many passengers they can safely board and still meet weight limits.

The agency, trying to protect more than 6,000 sightseeing, water taxis and ferries from being overloaded, proposes increasing the assumed weight of adult passengers to 185 pounds, from the 1960s-era standard of 160 pounds. The action was spurred by boats sinking in Baltimore and New York in 2004 and 2005 that killed 25 persons.

``This regulation has the potential for being the most challenging rule for our industry in a long time,'' said John Groundwater, executive director of the Passenger Vessel Association in Alexandria, Virginia. The trade group supports the weight increase if owners are given credit for a strong safety record and practices such as not filling their boats to capacity.

Cakewrecks

2008-09-23T13:37:00.002-04:00

As someone who doesn't particularly care for cake, I was filled with that indescribably warm and fuzzy feeling of satisfaction when I found this blog devoted solely to making fun of decorated cakes gone horribly wrong. As long as these sites exist, I will never need to buy any schadenfreude offsets.

On Your Own, Buddy

2008-09-22T18:33:00.005-04:00

There's been a lot of talk over the weekend about how foreign firms successfully lobbied the Treasury to be included in the impending Mother of All Bailouts, so it was nice to see the NYT report that overnight G7 govts. told the US: "Good luck with that bailout, there. You're on your own, buddy."

Europe and Japan turned a cold shoulder on Monday toward a American request that they bail out banks in the manner now being proposed in the United States.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, also took the opportunity to criticize the United States and Britain for opposing German efforts to put greater regulation, or at least reviews, of the financial sector on the international agenda last year, when she was chairwoman of the Group of 7 industrialized nations.

“Everyone who produces a real product knows what it looks like and what standards it is up to,” Ms. Merkel said. “One also needs to know with a financial product what’s involved. Otherwise, these sorts of things happen that we then all have to pay for”. . . The German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, said, “None of the other six G-7 members will adopt a similar program to the U.S.”

Apart from a manifest lack of sympathy for a crisis they view as created by American banks and regulators, European governments are also constrained by rules within the 27-nation European Union that limit budget deficits and public debt . . . The Association of German Banks hinted that it would oppose the emerging bailout scheme if it gave American competitors a sudden advantage.

“We need to assure that disadvantages for foreign institutions do not arise from the U.S. program,” said Manfred Weber, executive director of the association. “It was, after all, American products that created the crisis and that created the contagion effects."

Nice. I especially like those furein banks crying that we got them into this mess. The takeaway message for me is that this crisis is way more manageable than Paulson and Bush have been letting on. Sure, there will be plenty of pain all around, but if those socialist G7 govts. feel there's no need to intervene to prop up the financial system, things aren't all that bad. Bernie, please, please, please stick it to them.

"From Louis XIV to George W. Bush"

2008-09-21T17:07:00.003-04:00

What!? $700 billion with no oversight? Vomit bucket, stat!
Did anyone miss my preference for replacing golden parachutes with the guillotine?

Lawyers, Guns and Money

From Louis XIV to George W. Bush

By Paul Campos

Here, in just 32 words, is a summation of the state of American democracy in our time: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

Translation: Congress will take $700 billion from the pockets of ordinary Americans, and hand it to Henry Paulson. Paulson then has absolute, unreviewable authority to do with this money what he thinks best.

Many people have pointed out in the past day or so that this is bad. What no one seems to be raising is the question of whether it's even legal. Of course after eight years of George W. L'etat, C'est Moi Bush, the question of whether the biggest financial rescue operation in American history is actually legal is considered nothing more than a bothersome technicality, if that, to be dealt with by the administration's lawyers to the satisfaction of Very Serious People everywhere.

A Strong Argument Against the Unitary Executive

2008-09-21T10:05:00.003-04:00

Watching Ariel's Beginning now ten going on twenty times with my daughter has strengthened my conviction that la décapitation c'est trop propre pour le roi. Banning music? Because your wife died? WTF? What's that got to do with the rest of us? Reminds me of going to war because of a father complex.

First Triton bans music, then he imprisons the entire court for going to a speakeasy, then he imprisons the evil power-hungry female archetype for doing his bidding. It's not her fault Ariel interfered with the capture of a fugitive. Stupid Triton.

"Palin Can Be VP, Unless Her Husband Says Otherwise"

2008-09-20T20:29:00.006-04:00

That first dude's such a liburel. From Right Wing Watch:

Palin is allowed to serve as Vice President because the Bible doesn't say she can't. But if her husband decides he doesn't want her to be VP, then she can't:

Land's wife works as a psychotherapist, but he said he couldn't see himself as "first dude" (a term used by Palin's husband). Still, he thinks decisions about roles are up to each husband and wife -- including Sarah and Todd Palin.
"The only thing that would disqualify Gov. Palin from being governor or vice president, in my opinion, would be if her husband didn't want her to do it," he said.

Is Porn Adultery?

2008-09-20T10:17:00.003-04:00

The Frontal Cortex : Is Porn Adultery?

This is a great post on the bunk idea that porn is akin to adultery. Although Tipper Gore must be creaming herself with the idea that violent entertainment is akin to murder. Also got to love the Jesus reference.

Swallowing the Moral Hazard Chowder

2008-09-19T12:05:00.007-04:00

I am no longer crashing Germanicu$'s party (hope you finished those pork rinds), which means I no longer have daily access to the FT. The upside is that I have my NYT sub back, but neither has really explained the urgency of the frantic last minute bailouts and nationalizations, or who ultimately pays for the wave after wave of moral hazard. Some people see irony in the current administration handling the largest financial intervention since the Great Depression, but I just see rich assholes continue their practice of wealth-transfers straight from the public trough to their pig friends and golf partners. Floyd Norris, writing in Friday's business Times, makes the point that the bailouts are not based on size, but recklessness: too big to fail, has been replaced by too reckless to fail.

If the government is forced to decide whether to save another firm, it will face the same question it faced with A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers. Would this failure cause systemic damage to the financial system?Lehman did not measure up because its chief executive, Richard S. Fuld Jr., simply was not reckless enough as he ran Lehman into the ground.Had he had the foresight to make a lot more bad bets in the derivatives market, the government would have feared financial chaos and might have nationalized Lehman, just as it nationalized A.I.G., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Or it would have subsidized a takeover, as it did for Bear Stearns.

The Paulson-Bernanke Doctrine is not “too big to fail.” It is “too reckless to fail.” If you get your company into enough trouble to threaten the financial system, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, won’t let you collapse.

It may be that they miscalculated. Lehman’s default caused a money market fund to suffer losses, and scared investors into pulling their money from similar funds. If those funds cannot find buyers for their assets, there could be more defaults, and perhaps more failures.The Paulson-Bernanke Doctrine was born not of theory or ideology, but instead from improvising as each new crisis erupted. The Fed’s briefing on the nationalization of A.I.G. did not start until 9:15 p.m. on Tuesday night, which is not a sign of carefully thought-out decisions. When they met with Congressional leaders Thursday night to seek a plan to get cash to banks before they fail, it was almost as late.

If these nationalizations smack of socialism, it is closer to the Marxism of Groucho than of Karl. The Cox Proviso to the Paulson-Bernanke Doctrine is that the rules will change, and change again, if that is needed to avoid another failure.

From unnecessary tax breaks[1], to gobs of lost cash handled by personal friends, to the Blackwater and Halliburton scandals, and the publicly-funded army of golden parachutes now unfurling across the sky, the keystone-cops style bailouts in progress really don't seem so surprising. Pride yourself on removing all oversight, then get all generous with OPM when the chips are called in.

Still, I'm utterly confused about what's going on. And, I'm not the only one. The bailouts seem to be happening because no one has any idea what is actually going on. The ever chipper Mr. Brooks asserts that Freddie and Fannie were over-regulated, while the dismal dudes at Freakonomics assert the opposite:.

The Fannie and Freddie situation was a result of their unique roles in the economy. They had been set up to support the housing market. They helped guarantee mortgages (provided they met certain standards), and were able to fund these guarantees by issuing their own debt, which was in turn tacitly backed by the government. The government guarantees allowed Fannie and Freddie to take on far more debt than a normal company. In principle, they were also supposed to use the government guarantee to reduce the mortgage cost to the homeowners, but the Fed and others have argued that this hardly occurred. Instead, they appear to have used the funding advantage to rack up huge profits and squeeze the private sector out of the “conforming” mortgage market. Regardless, many firms and foreign governments considered the debt of Fannie and Freddie as a substitute for U.S. Treasury securities and snapped it up eagerly.

Fannie and Freddie were weakly supervised and strayed from the core mission. They began using their subsidized financing to buy mortgage-backed securities which were backed by pools of mortgages that did not meet their usual standards. Over the last year, it became clear that their thin capital was not enough to cover the losses on these subprime mortgages. The massive amount of diffusely held debt would have caused collapses everywhere if it was defaulted upon; so the Treasury announced that it would explicitly guarantee the debt.

But once the debt was guaranteed to be secure (and the government would wipe out shareholders if it carried through with the guarantee), no self-interested investor was willing to supply more equity to help buffer the losses. Hence, the Treasury ended up taking them over.

Paul Wilmott--unlucky fellow just invested in A.I.G.--says the cancer has metastasized, meaning it don't matter where you cut.

That’s what makes the question of whether to rescue each institution such a difficult one. Sure, people have to learn a lesson. But, and this is my final surgical analogy, would that be cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face? . . . The moral hazard is so obvious you can almost taste it.

Since no one knows what's going on, and the risks appear too great to sit on our hands, I find these proposals sensible:

Volcker et al's, proposal to create a new federal agency to buy up bad paper, enforce regulations, and hopefully solve the crisis
A failure tax, so these assholes have to pay for their own mistakes
And, my own idea, strengthen and expand anti trust regulations so no company can grow too big to fail. Once a company reaches a certain size, it should reorganize or risk nationalization. SEMCO in Brazil is a great example of what this might look like[2].

Per Norris:

If an activity is important enough to justify a government nationalization to prevent a default, it is important enough to be regulated.

Update: On Friday, the hammer finally came down, and now we're all in with another Trillion dollars. But Paulson is proposing not an independent agency, a la Volcker, but more analysts working at the Treasury. Our country is run by a band of stooges.

Ben White, in Saturday's business Times:

Among the dangers cited by economists on Friday, as word of the plan began circulating: an explosion in federal debt, higher financing costs, an escalating reliance on foreign capital, higher inflation and a further erosion of American economic sovereignty. All of these dangers, these experts stress, are hypothetical — except for the cost, which by many estimates could exceed $1 trillion.

I'm sorry, what hypothetical country are these assholes living in? Explosion in federal debt? Check. Higher financing costs? Check. Escalating reliance on foreing capital? Check. Higher inflation? Check. Further erosion of American economic sovereignty? Check. This is a list of administration priorities, not a new-found risk. What a fucking joke.

1. Paying fewer taxes while enjoying all benefits of federal insurance and services is the same as welfare.
2. Of course, SEMCO spins off companies as it grows because it's the smart thing to do, not because they have to.

McSpain

2008-09-19T09:21:00.002-04:00

Here's one of those great campaign stories that hits all the requisite anti-McCain memes:

1. He's too old and confused
2. He's pig-headed and can't admit when he fucks up
3. He's a liar
4. The people around him are morons
5. He has a recklessly expansive view of who our "enemies" are

Although the story itself is too complex and nuanced to get into the McCain narrative directly through soundbites, the campaign's hilarious response has done some serious damage to his image amongst the scions of the elite media, who have always been his head cheerleaders, and who have been jumping ship lately at an alarming (for McCain) rate. In the words of John Aravosis, at the sublimely titled Americablog:

What's going on is that McCain is so egotistical and so reckless that he'd rather risk major damage to our relationship with a lead US ally than admit that he misheard a series of questions during an interview. Somebody is seriously paranoid about giving voters any impression that his mind is slipping. And that only makes us wonder all the more if it is.

How the mighty have fallen

2008-09-18T09:43:00.028-04:00

Wow! GM ViceChair Bob Lutz went on the Colbert Report to promote the new Chevy Volt, and was left absolutely speechless on global warming. To his credit, he did answer that you can charge a Volt off a Hummer, but it would take a lot of gas. They needs some serious PR training.

Grand Masters of the world economy no more.

She's got legs

2008-09-18T09:43:00.027-04:00

Where would we be without the Guinness BWR? Russian Sveta Pankratova's got the longest legs in the world, 4'4", here posing with Pin-Pin, the world's smallest dude. More pics at KP.RU.

What are the intertubes for, if not for this?

Too Many Monkeys Jumping on the Bed

2008-09-18T09:43:00.026-04:00

It’s been a few weeks since the cheatin’ gene AVPR1a made a splash, and I finally found a little time to write about it, so I hope the story hasn’t gotten too stale. I put Dr. Phil as a placeholder to force me to write this, and I was getting really sick of looking at his ugly mug. What he says isn’t that bad, though. In general, the coverage is better than I would have expected, with a fair number of caveats, but the headlines—Oy Vey! Language Log compiled a great list of AVPR1a gene headlines:

"Is monogamy genetic?"; "Baby, my genes made me do it"; "Some men carry 'commitment-phobia' gene"; "Is Lover Boy a Louse? It May Be Genetic"; "Infidelity: It's All In the The Genes"; "Would you abort George Clooney?"; "Study: For men, genetics might untie marital bonds"; "Marriage Woes? Husband's Genes May Be At Fault"; "Marriage problems? Husband's genes may be to blame"; "Study Finds Fear of Commitment May Be in a Man's Genes"; "Commitment phobes can blame genes: A man's reluctance to marry may be down to a genetic 'flaw', say researchers"; "Marital crisis? Blame it on male genes"; "'Bonding Gene' Could Help Men Stay Married"; "Divorce gene linked to relationship troubles"; "Scientists Discover the Monogamy Gene"; "Gene Variant Holds The Key To A Long And Happy Marriage"; etc., etc.

Nuanced soundbites just don’t have that zing!

The Today show had the following piece, which reached the right conclusions, but for all the wrong reasons. My favorite part was their resident expert asserting that the "one-night-stand gene" was necessary for cave-men to raise armies. The video includes two women-on-the street encounters, one pro-genetic testing "to be sure", the other opposed because, "relationships have to be founded on trust so you just have to trust your partner.” Yeah, but what if your partner has the lying gene along with the cheating gene? Bet you’d wished you’d done the genetic vetting then. The correct takeaway message from the video is that it is the phenotype, meaning genes plus environment, that determines behavior. So if you use AVPR1a as an indicator of future behavior you're gambling either way.

What the study really found was that there was a small but statistically significant correlation--this was an observational, not an experimental study--between the presence of the RS3 polymorphism (allele 334) on the AVPR1a gene and reported satisfaction in a relationship. The AVPR1a gene codes for vasopressin (or AVP) hormone receptors in humans, and is the equivalent of the V1aR gene in voles, those cuddly rodents that get so much attention because they form monogamous pairs. Well, some do. There are three highly related species—prairie, montane, and meadow—that are almost identical but behave in radically different ways. Prairie vole males form long-lasting pair bonds and help take care of the roost, whereas meadow and montane voles are known for their slutty dead-beat dads. Turns out if you give prairie vole males a V1aR antagonist, to block the vasopressin hormone from binding they start acting like their meadow and montane brethren, and if you give meadow or montane voles a nice big hit of vasopressin they start acting like true gentlemen scholars. So it is not extraordinary that they found this effect associated with AVPR1a.

The researchers looked at 552 same sex twin pairs and their partners participating in the Swedish Twin and Offspring Study, TOSS. I wish I could have a sample size like that. (As soon as I can get NIH to cough up millions of dollars . . .) So all these twins and their partners filled out several questionnaires and gave up saliva samples, and then the mathemagicians went to work looking for associations between gene length and self-reported behavior.

The authors were pretty slick in calling their main questionnaire the Partner Bonding Scale, stating that it was derived from “behavioral patterns observed when measuring features of pair-bonds among nonhuman primates,” which is a smooth way to try to influence scientists who have been doing research on this topic. Tell people on the street that you are doing research on pair-bonding and you are going to get a lot of blank stares, but it means a socially monogamous relationship, when two individuals cooperate to raise offspring or share resources over an extended period of time.

The questions in the Partner Bonding Scale included questions such as:

You and your partner are involved in common interests outside the family.
You and your partner have a stimulating exchange of thoughts.
You and your partner calmly discuss something.
Have you ever regretted getting married/moving in?
Do you kiss your partner?

You can evaluate for yourself if they correlate to pair-bonds for monkeys (IK, IK, and apes). I get the impression that some of these came from the back of a Cosmo magazine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am actually very impressed by the strong association between the presence of the 334 allele and kissing.

Mean scores on the Partner Bonding Scale were associated with the presence of the RS3 polymorphism (bonferroni corrected P<0.01, and the mean PBS score was significantly lower among men carrying copies of the 334 allele (corrected P<0.001). RS3 was not significant for women. Further, the PBS score was dose-dependent, meaning that relationship satisfaction decreased as the RS3 polymorphism grew from one to two 334 alleles.

The study authors then cherry-picked two questions to look at incidence of behavior, and found that 15% of the study participants with no copies of the 334 allele reported marital crisis or threat of divorce, compared to 34% of the men with two copies of the 334 allele. The authors claim this suggests that the presence of the 334 allele doubles the risk of marital crisis. They don’t discuss if it simply doubles the risk of honesty. Even though all participants had been in a relationship for five-plus years, many of the couples in the study were unmarried, and they found this common law status associated with 32% of 334 homozygotes, compared to 17% among those with no copies of the 334 allele. Put another way, 334 homozygotes still exhibited a 68% risk of being married. But they ONLY looked at couples who had been together at least five years, so it is an open question if any of this translates to a general population. Although almost all couples in the study had children, they don't discuss controlling for age or number of children.

If you have the TOSS at your disposal, why not examine unattached individuals as well? This is either a piggy-back study—a crippling limitation, or they are not reporting all results. There is a lot unstated in this article. The only variables they report examining are sex, marriage status, and recent relationship distress. Either the peer reviewers fell asleep at the wheel on this one, or the editors were too excited about all the press this would generate for PNAS. That’s not to say the study isn't important, but too much was left unsaid. For example, why is there no mention of OTXR, the oxytocin receptor gene? Oxytocin and vasopressin are both protein hormones composed of nine amino acids, with a two amino acid difference between the two. The vole literature on vasopressin is significant, but dwarfed by the oxytocin literature. And, although vasopressin might have a stronger role in males than females, oxytocin has a clearly established and causal effect on social relationships in both sexes and across species. If they did not find a relationship between OTXR and the PBS, that would be important to know and replicate. Also, what about genes such as CD38 that play a role in oxytocin expression? Receptors are one thing, endocrine expression is another. What if the reported differences in the PBS are also tied to differences in endocrine expression? If you aren’t getting enough peptide to the receptor it won’t bind and make you want to kiss your partner, regardless of how many receptors you have. There is growing evidence of the environmental role played by early stressors in the development of the oxytocin delivery system, including human evidence, and presumably the vasopressin delivery system as well, but the effect this might have isn't discussed. Genetic determinism is the sexy deus-ex-machina of the day, but even if these findings are correct, one in six couples with no 334 alleles to get in the way still won’t be in fairy-tale land, and two out of three with the 334 allele will still finish each others’ duet.

I’ll give these guys the last word, since they did temper their findings:

The relatively small effect size of the AVPR1A polymorphism on traits tentatively reflecting pair-bonding in males observed in this study clearly does not mean that this polymorphism may serve as a predictor of human pair-bonding behavior on the individual level. However, by demonstrating a modest but significant influence of this gene on the studied behavior on the group level, we have provided support for the assumption that previous studies on the influence of the gene coding for V1aR on pair-bonding in voles are probably of relevance also for humans.

Walum, H., et al., Genetic variation in the vasopressin receptor 1a gene (AVPR1A) associates with pair-bonding behavior in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008. The article is open access at PNAS.

Mr. Fixit

2008-09-16T14:31:00.003-04:00

I am happy to join the VivosVoco team, and hope that my contributions will prove accretive to shareholder value.

Sort of like John Thain, the CEO of Merrill Lynch. His contributions to his prestigious and storied company's bottom line include a 70% drop in the company's stock's value since he took over. But what he'll really be remembered for is keeping Merrill out of bankruptcy, by selling it to Bank of America.

Or maybe he'll be remembered for his solid-gold parachute:

Thain, hired last December following the ouster of Stan O’Neal, stands to collect about $11 million on the vesting of free shares if he doesn't stay after the sale.

Any payouts triggered by a change in control are on top of a $15 million signing bonus awarded to Thain last December.

The payouts wouldn't be much of a raise compared with the $20.2 million Thain got during his last year at Goldman Sachs in 2003.

That should buy him a solid gold house and rocket car, and leave him enough left over to eat salads made from $50/hr lettuce.

"I doubt Thain understood the magnitude of risk and exposure on the Merrill's balance sheet,'' Bove said. "I don't think anyone could have done a whole lot.''

Yeah, he probably didn't really understand the whole "balance sheet" thing when he signed on to this job - it's pretty tough to get your head around all those acronyms and stuff. But I'll bet he understood to the penny the part of his contract detailing the compensation he'd receive when he left.

Lettuce

2008-09-16T11:21:00.005-04:00

I don't think I would want to pick lettuce for $50 an hour. But if that were the going rate, everything would be so bloody expensive, I'd have no choice but to pick lettuce.

When's Obama going to Alaska?

2008-09-16T11:07:00.005-04:00

Keeping with this idea of Obama walking a Boeing picket line, he should also go hold a rally with USW Local 8888 in Alaska. Palin's been up-playing her down-home roots by proudly mentioning that her hubby's a member of USW, so this seems a natural opening to highlight the McCain ticket's stance on unions. Here's Leo Gerard, USW President, at theAFL blog:

Ms. Palin needs to stop trotting out her husband as an exhibit until she explains her positions on workers’ issues. Just exactly where does she stand on the Employee Free Choice Act?
Her family has benefited from her husband’s ability to be part of a labor union. Workers in labor organizations earn higher wages and are more likely to have pensions and health insurance. Because he works for BP and is a member of the USW, which collectively bargained a good contract for workers at BP, Todd Palin earns a good wage and has good health insurance. The Employee Free Choice Act would make it easier for other Americans to join unions and earn better money and obtain health insurance. Polling shows that 60 percent of Americans support the Employee Free Choice Act.
Inquiring minds want to know, Ms. Palin. Where do you stand on Employee Free Choice? Where do you stand on privatization of Social Security? Where do you stand on job-killing free trade?
Are you with McCain—and against workers—on these issues? If so, you need to stop using your husband’s membership in the USW as a prop, because then his union card cannot possibly cover up your or John McCain’s worker-savaging positions.

Ted Palin's USW card is a good tool for the McCain campaign, which I bet is why they haven't made an issue of Palin's dues supporting Obama. It would be so awesome if they made a public stink about that.

Boeing Strike and Requisite Obama

2008-09-16T09:51:00.005-04:00

PilsenProle has a good quick take on why to support the strike at Boeing. It's about time there was a major strike to stop outsourcing to China. Reading some of the comments on the tubes, I'm amazed that people can blame current economic woes on unions. I guess it's easier than knowing how dangerously unregulated financial markets are. Luckily there's a few IAM members out there posting some knowledge, but the funniest thing is this idea that Airbus should get Pentagon contracts because Boeing's workers are unreliable and won't let the company outsource jobs. So workers should shut up so the Pentagon can pay a higher premium on high-skilled jobs sent overseas. What?

Is Airbus/Northrop-Grumman a back story to the IAM and Obama relationship? Remember, IAM's President Buffenbarger deserves a lot of the blame for the meme that Obama is an elitist--him and all his latte sippin' supporters. (I like my coffee black and strong, thank you.) It seems IAM was slow to back Obama because he wasn't vocal enough on the Airbus contract. They didn't endorse him until their convention last week, with Hillary at the helm. But was Obama lukewarm on the Airbus deal because of Buffenbarger, or vice versa? What comes first, Airbus or the latte?

Obama should be filmed walking a Boeing picket line--that would get the Republican attack machine going and help put all those blue collar Palin moms back in line, as well as get the strike some added media attention.

Palin/McCain

2008-09-15T17:51:00.002-04:00

What Would a Maverick Do?

2008-09-15T17:22:00.003-04:00

My Friends, now is the time to renew our discussion about transferring the low-return Social Security trust fund into the capable hands of Wall Street bankers--people who know something about money, not just government bureaucrats.

Giants.

2008-09-15T03:29:00.003-04:00

Giants!
All Internet Traditions Awareness moment.

Because the internets suck.

Georgia on China's Mind

2008-09-15T01:43:00.005-04:00

In response to Mockrates, it's no doubt Obama gave up all leverage on attacking McCain's gun slinging efforts to start a war with Russia, which is dumb, but I figure it's because Obama was in his swimming trunks at the time and McCain was getting way too much play off the crisis. We are all Georgians made great soundbite. Obama's position is as believable as his pledge to re-negotiate Nafta. As the mock stated in an earlier discussion:

Obama would be wise to hold a press conference and say "welcome to the world of a completely ineffectual US in international affairs, courtesy of Bush/McCain's diplomatic and military disasters and overstretch." Instead, he'll probably come at him from the right, using some unsightly, incoherent Frankenstein's monster of a position.

Since counters seem the order of the day, we should start an Obamastein counter. His health-care plan should be at the top of the list.

I am more and more certain that there is zero chance of a confrontation with Russia, even with a President Palin. The reason is that Russia's military is still too weak to confront the US military in open battle, and they've made it pretty clear that any attack on Russian territory will be immediately answered by a nuclear strike. Even though they successfully copied US tactics in their swift strike into Georgia, they suffered relatively heavy losses from anti-aircraft fire.

Congress has started hearings into what role the US played in instigating Georgia to move forces into S. Ossetia, as well as investigating who drew first blood, and Iran was a huge part of the discussion. With this in mind, check out this crazy assertion that Bush goaded Georgia as cover for a limitednuclear strike on Iran. On a sidenote, I just learned that the price of oil rose dramatically in June following rumors of a thwarted nuclear strike on Iran.

Everything the US is doing pretty much plays into Russia's hands. So keeping with the meme of watching the actions of our new Chinese overlords, I think the real action is in the Asian response which has been politely negative. Russia can't be too happy about that.

Draft Drew Pooters Now!

2008-09-12T11:15:00.002-04:00

This is how Obama can completely and utterly wash out the bullshit lying and propagandizing of the McCain campaign. Get Drew Pooters on the stump, out there telling his story--flood the airwaves with ads of this guy doing nothing but telling this heartbreaking, infuriating story about getting repeatedly screwed by corporation after corporation. You don't even need to mention John McCain's name.

And do it quickly--before this stupid fucking ad about John McCain not knowing how to send an email is completely destroyed by ridicule and becomes its own story about Barack Obama hating seniors, or whatever the fuck.

Vivos Voco

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