I am not at peace with the bailout. The public commons are being plundered by elitists who don’t really work for a living. The least we can ask for is that it’s longer than three pages.
Category: Politics
Playing the Markets with Fraction Man
Fraction Man Aims for the Fences
Like Duncan, I’m not an economist or a financial analyst but it is useful for people like us to think about these things in metaphors and he made a ton of sense today:
The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they’re [CNBC business pundits] lamenting the possibility of more regulation. I don’t think the sports/referee metaphor is perfect, but it’s probably good enough. People who prattle on about “the free market” are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the “rules” had to be to to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc… etc…, did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created.
Earlier, he likens what’s going on to a building fire:
It might have been the right thing to run down to the river with buckets to collect water to throw on the burning building, but it would have been much better to have better fire codes and a functioning fire department.
You can also infer the situations involving Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA here.
Finally, the sports metaphor linked to at TPM in the first quote goes like this:
…the markets operate like team sports — like say, a football game. Team sports don’t operate well without referees, and that’s exactly what’s happened under the Republicans.
They can blame Clinton all they want — the fact is, the Republicans under leadership of such brain trusts as Phil Gramm have methodically removed the referees from the games, and look what’s happened. One of the primary reasons investors shy away from putting money into third world countries is an ABSENCE OF REGULATION.
Honestly, the free-market whiners who bemoan regulation sound like the corporate welfare socialist pigs they are and I’m here to stuff some punk rock in their ears.
Astroland Not Dead Yet
Last shots of Astroland? Maybe not.
So the world got a little less fun last weekend. Except now, Mayor Mikey is trying to negotiate another year-long extension… and then rezoning? It still stinks of inevitability… like in those Hollywood rescue movies where the trapped survivors wonder if it’s worth trying to stay alive, and the scriptwriters in their infinite sense of lesson-giving fatalism have a bunch more people die before the end anyway.
Have you ever had a housefly infestation? Maybe your cat left a dead mouse behind a desk. Maybe something died in your basement and/or your landlord knocked a hole in a wall to mess with the plumbing. Not fun at all. Well, Thor Equities knocked a hole in the universe to mess with all the fun plumbing and now all the house Disneys are flying in. Fly paper works pretty good on all that stuff.
Palindrome
Offered without comment except to say that this is the person who wants to step into Dick Cheney’s shoes. I wonder how he feels about that.
Deep Thoughts
the light at the end of the tunnel is on the wrong side of the tracks
The Hail Mary pass is the pie in the sky. (Why does no one ever say “He threw an Our Father pass”? or “a 23rd Psalm pass”?) The effect of listening to two hours of shameless spin doctoring is to jump the shark while waltzing with zombies a million times. Which makes a better American story: the gun-totin bikini governor or the senator playing pick-up basketball?
Knitting My Curls with Nebula
Stoner rockers can’t wait to bang their heads
I can’t take a rock band picture with my camera to save my life (without flash which I don’t use because flashes bug me when I’m onstage) so here’s another bar shot.
Nebula and Totimoshi and Orphan performed last night at the Knitting Factory for a great triple bill of stoner rock. The moniker is for the sort of heavy bluesy rock first formulated by Black Sabbath which is unfortunate as for me it’s just kick-ass. Being a Monday, only about 50 people attended which is fine by me as I find myself sometimes getting claustrophobic at crowded shows.
I listened to the Democratic Convention and speechifying in Denver a little bit. I have a few problems with the nominee but anything is a damn sight better than four more years of tremendously worse. The best critical lines I recall went something like, “McCain voted with George Bush 95% of the time. That’s not a maverick, that’s a sidekick!” and Mark Warner, the keynote speaker said something like, “Some say George Bush was born already on third base. Well, after the gazillion dollar surplus and 22 million jobs left to him by Bill Clinton, George Bush came into office on third base. And in his eight years in office, he didn’t make it to home plate, he stole second base.” Ahahahaha.
Amplification
Can’t wrap my 3D fence around it
I’ve been rehearsing the Crimson Grail with over 200 guitarists and these massive guitar orchestra composers never seem to learn anything from each other. The score is in letter sequences that don’t follow one another. Solution: Provide a score that explains the parts in between your cues. Granted, Chatham does provide a lot of that but it’s not presented in an easily understood manner when a conductor is constantly waving at you. (I’m never going to be accepted into another guitar orchestra again.) Each part of the orchestra has different letters. There are conductors trying to cue people when to play and they’re doing hand gestures. Solution: more cue cards so everybody can be on the same page at certain points. Tonight we were in a church and no one had a mic and could not be heard unless their head was pointed at you. There were some cue cards for parts where everybody is supposed to be playing the same note. More cue cards! It still sounds very cool so show up if you’re interested.
My bass head fell five feet on the cold hard marble. Hm. Gotta go in early and test it again
I watched “Natural Born Killers” last night for the first time since I saw it in the theaters and it was way better than I remember. It’s Oliver Stone’s best satire. Stone’s skill is to amplify history through his films regardless of the absolute historical accuracy. With NBK, he made a film about the “popularity of violence” in the same way. With amplification, people might hear you in Poet’s Corner. Tell a story as truthfully as you can and if the facts are in dispute, your story may be the truest of the lot. Maybe it will stick. If the truth sticks, it looks prettier than when the shit sticks. Get off my lawn you kids — buy some guitars and make rad movies.
Ok, what else. I hope you’ve been reading TPM lately which has been following the McSame response to the Russia/Georgia conflict etc. McSame wants to be Nero and Caligula. He really wants the U.S. to follow in the footsteps of every failed empire in history. He’s running a shit campaign that appeals to the worst in America. The YOT (youth of today) must put the crusty old douchebag in an old folks’ home if they want hope.
Calling All Celebrities
Fall through the cracks
On billmon’s return to bloggity blogging, he sez McSame is doomed because the media is finally catching on to what an ultimately shallow codger he is for being the self-serving flip-flopper non-maverick he is and also incapable of thinking outside the Bush policy box. (A great read I might add.) At Sadly, No!, Brad sez Obama might be doomed for underestimating the shallowness of voters. I’d like to think it’s somewhere in between. A lot will shake out when the VPs are presented and there are a couple of debates.
Also consider the wisdom of a surge in Afghanistan. Remember how much fun the Russians had there.
I’m reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Things are getting loopy.
Bartering with Satan’s Lattes
The Longshortsmen of South Street Seaport
The Bush administration has learned a creative accounting trick or two from The Smartest Guys in the Room™ [Enron]. Like Enron’s PR douchebags, we’ve got waterboys like Ben Stein and Phil Gramm telling us everything is fine. Recall that some of Enron’s shenanigans ultimately led to California’s rolling blackouts of 2001. Extrapolate as you will.
Via ThinkProgress and (in a rare fit of actual journalism) ABC:
ABC: Without ‘creative White House accounting,’ Bush’s deficit is actually $600 billion.»
Yesterday, the White House “increased its estimate for next year’s deficit to nearly $490 billion, a record figure that will saddle the next president with deepening budget problems in his first year in office.” But, on ABC News’s Good Morning America today, Claire Shipman reported that the deficit is actually much higher because “creative White House accounting” didn’t include the war, the unemployment costs, Medicare fees, or the housing bill in its calculations. If those numbers are included, it brings “the grand total to about $600 billion.” […]
To illustrate how big the deficit is, Shipman explained: “If every American were to pitch in 2,000 dollars, we could pay off this year’s deficit. Or if we handed over each of us 500 gallons gasoline. Or, in terms we can all really understand, if every American gave up 666 lattes for a year.”
666 lattes. A Hawaiian vacation with hotel for a week for every American! The contents of every 99¢ store across the land inside our homes! The mind reels and reels.
Nasty dirty embarrassing campaign tactics aside, If I Ran the Zoo invokes Cheney on why the aging McSame must be kept away from the Whitehouse:
Cheney is the epitome of the politician without a constituency, the indifferent technocrat and autocrat who owes his allegiance not to the people but to himself. Cheney went into the VP slot with the stated understanding that he would never run for President or compete with Bush in any way by appealing to the people or to the party. What did we get for it? An activist VP who never cared about either the fate of his party or the country after his stint in the White House is finished. He’s got no political future, and so his actions have been unconstrained by calculations of long term effects, popularity, legality, or morality. The lesson I take away from Cheney’s terms in office is–never elect a dead man walking. He’s got nothing to lose. McCain is similarly situated. This is the last stop, for him. What does he care about your kids education? the environment? America’s laws? the popularity of his political programs. None of these will affect him in a few years.
Now recall that Cheney pretty much set up the current administration’s energy policy in 2001. Now of course, McSame is in the pocket of the head-in-the-sand oil industry. Dead Men Walking Faster.
Throwing a Party? Fascist!
Pandagon and Digby confront the growing meme that Obama and his fans represent a rising onslaught of American fascism.
We have to recognize this and understand it. There is a very concerted and completely ahistorical effort to make “fascism” synonymous with “popularity.” As Jesse Taylor notes:
On the one hand, it’s an awful abuse of the concept of fascism, disrespecting the millions upon millions of people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed because of the dream of nationalist identity and corporate power uber alles. On the other hand, it is remarkably entertaining to see them try to figure out how Barack Obama’s favorite ice cream flavor plays right into the hands of the fascist dream.
By this dumbing down of the word fascism, any concert, movie, speech, nice meal at a restaurant, disco dancing that a large group of people might pay money for becomes American fascism flexing its mighty fascist muscle. Give me a break.
The Urge to Define Surge Success
This video at TPM prompted me to haul out one of my old DJ flyers.
(Yes, that’s from 2007.) Over at Kos, there are a couple of posts spelling out the conflicting accounts citing the recent GAO report and other sources on whether the surge has really succeeded or not. Even as the White House and McSame insist the surge has succeeded, the GAO report also implies there is no post-surge strategy. And all that aside — if we have succeeded, why can’t we leave?
Anchors Aweigh On That Magazine Cover
Somehow the Peking appears to be sinking
After hmm, 3 days of fallout from the New Yorker cover, Dowd today uses the opportunity to yet again call Obama an elitist for not having the required sense of humor to “get it.” Sure they could’ve reacted with a lighter touch but I’m mostly on the “what’s the big deal?” side. Yes, it’s remarkable the campaign has hired a Carbon Advisor to document and reduce the campaign’s carbon footprint but I would also call it spectacular. It’s refreshing to have the potential leader of the “free world” setting principled examples for behavior and this also includes taking the high road on a satirical attempt that ultimately failed. (For instance, cleverly incorporating the cover’s actual title, “The Politics of Fear” into the piece might have conveyed the intent better.)
Also, if you really think the Obamas are more elitist than the McCains, see this Sadly, No! post.