Cobb

It Must Be Class Warfare

I have heard it insisted in the monster thread of the week on Obama and Social Justice that McCain and Obama have met in the middle. I find no logic in that argument at all. Here's some text to rather split the contradiction implied in that assertion in half. It involves the often heard canard that blacks 'vote their interests'. If the difference between McCain and Obama's programs are so slight...then it must be personality. Or put another way:

Thomas Frank (who, coincidentally, has a new column out praising his hero William Ayers) famously asked what the matter is with Kansas where people vote Republican presumably against their class interests. Sure, those who are poor enough to get welfare are rational to vote Democrat, but the working class in "red states" is acting perfectly rationally along its economic interests, since the working class in America is not poor in any meaningful sense of the word; for example, their material standard of living clearly exceeds that of the middle class in almost all European countries. As for culture and values, to the extent that the working class is politically anything, it is deeply conservative and right-wing. To demonstrate this, assume a group of 100 randomly chosen working class males between ages 20-50 with no college education, and another group of 100 randomly chosen males of the same age but all with master's degrees or higher. Now tell me: which group do you think has significantly more supporters of affirmative action? Wide open borders? Gay marriage? Surrendering the War or Terror? In fact, can anybody name even one "left-liberal" idea or policy that has more support in the working class group? I can't think of any at least right now, even though logically there should be something. Can you?

Aside from this airtight and relevant logic, here of course is that brilliant prognosticator John Murtha with Nulan's point of view. Obviously that explains everything.

Comment Weirdness

I don't know why comments aren't showing up. I've got them.

The Zombie Factor

I've gotten two new pebbles for my economic slingshot. One is a big fat dictionary of terms, the other is the biography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball. So much to learn. Frugality is the new black.

Today's lesson has to do with the example of Japan. But first, what Bernanke has done is to emerge as the man with the last theory standing. His theory about what went wrong in the Great Depression is that the big banks were allowed to fail. This is apparently the wall that Bernanke is making against the storm of chaos we are facing - these banks will not fail.

But now that they have been reanimated, will they become zombies? Therein lies the danger, given the example of Japan whose banks were supported long enough to stay alive but not well enough to make the kinds of business decisions that are healthy for the economy. And so while the original idea of TARP, to buy off toxic assets, has turned out to be a dead idea within a week, what are we going to be thinking next week. As it stands, Bernanke's 250B into 9 top banks has been spent not on the bottom but the most preferred assets. So what encourages the bankers to do their best when the preferred stock is going to pay dividends not retained earnings? Basically if the top dogs at Citi would have gotten x% of a bonus pool from a 10% net profit in the old days and now a fraction of that net now goes directly to the new government shareholder, what's the point? Who knows what punitive taxes an Obama administration will tack on to that to satisfy the primal urges of the torch and pitchfork populists?

Moreover, what is the exit strategy? OK we agree with Brad DeLong that when it comes to central banking, everybody is a socialist. But how do we ultimately get government out of banking and everybody else and everything else they rescue?

Imagine this 250B works. Liquidity crisis over. Then what? What about that commercial paper market? What about the insolvency of everything else the Feds have taken a piece of? What's the fair market values for stuff the government owns, and who decides when the Feds take an L? I mean can you imagine some group of investors, you know, some multibillion dollar consortium wants to buy back all of the government stake in JPMorgan. But instead of some profit on the 10Billion share, they want to pay 8Billion. Who in government decides that's OK? What Critter is going to say OK, the taxpayer is stuck with the 2Billion net loss on the government investment, especially if we're in (when we're in) a deficit situation?

Yeah. Scary huh? Meantime? Zombie bank, not responsive to the real market. How do you turn a zombie back into a human again? That one's eating at my brain.

Ron Paul: Curiously Silent

Last December, when I officially declared Ron Paul to be a crackpot as far as I'm concerned, I found a chorus of animated naysayers who defended Mr. Paul on a number of grounds. As I think I'm on slightly more solid ground with regard to my economic savvy, but still not enough to brag, now is perhaps a good time to second guess what we were saying then.

My biggest run-in was with a cat named John Reading, who declared me an idiot and the Fed as counterfeiters.

The IRS is an extortion racket. The FED is a counterfeiting racket. The Selective Service is a slavery racket.

1. Money is not neutral. It's value depends upon its quantity.
2. Deflation does not need to be in check. There is nothing wrong with money growing in value.
3. Savings are encouraged by deflation because the saved money will have greater purchasing power in the future. Saving does not destroy liquidity or lock up cash. The savings are the basis of investing.
4. That I do not discuss something with you does not mean that I do not understand it and am "simplistic". You are running out of logic and turning to insults again.

I have already explained the clear and present danger of counterfeiting. It is a form of stealing, as any child knows.

I find you to be both ignorant and insulting, so I will let you have the last word. I'm done. I hope some of your readers will check out Austrian economics.

So are people lining up to ask Ron Paul for advice? Is there anything at all he was correct about with regard to our economic situation? I think he has gone to hide in a corner, and people are breathing a sigh of relief that he's not the GOP's guy. Not that this is any great comfort. But why not pile on Ron Paul?

 

Don't Worry, Be Sad

It occurs to me that the thing that annoys me about Hitchens' recent flipflop is that somewhere in his logic is some need for charisma. It occurs to me that without question John McCain is the boringest character to run for President since that other paragon of virtue Bob Dole. My answer. So what?

As much as I like the thrill of a fiesty press conference, I can't bring myself to believe that the most important thing about my electing of a president is the feeling I get in the voting booth. I'm not supposed to vote for the candidate that makes me happy. I'm supposed to vote for the candidate who is going to do the best job in the White House, the one I trust with the boring job of running the government of the United States. Not whom do I like in the campaign, but whom do I trust in the job.

In the end, there's nothing I've seen that makes John McCain a spectacular anything. He's a determined bipartisan workhorse who focuses on the serious issues. Somehow everybody has managed to find reasons to dislike him because he can't pick VPs who excite the public on both sides of the aisle. He can't manage to suppress the odd lunatic anywhere they speak ill of his opponent. He can't change the perception of people determined to associate him with Bush. These are things that people wish he would do, it would elevate their mood - it would get them charged up to support him, or give him the benefit of accumulated doubt.

But when it comes to core values, McCain is my guy. Always has been, always will be - so long as he is a moderate conservative. It's really that simple. I cannot see why anybody who calls themselves conservative has any excuse to vote for someone who is not, especially given the fundamental conservative principle that it is not the government's job to provide happiness. That pursuit is on you, bub. So don't worry, be sad, and do the right thing.

Hitchens has decided to raise the properties of character and temperament over values and direction. He sees McCain as dishonest and Palin as a 'sick joke'. I don't see McCain as dishonest, I see him as running a sloppy and lackluster campaign. But I'm not voting for the best candidate, I'm voting for the most trusted president.

Bush Lied, Iceland Died

This is tangential, but I can recall how the Bite America First crowd likes to compare America disfavorably to various small European countries. Especially when it comes to nationalized health care, gay marriage and military spending. Since this idea popped into my head, I have been singularly unable to find my previous post on the inapplicability of Scandinavian statistics to American problems.

However it strikes me odd that those who are content to monkey with the laws of causality now that it's election season, and lay blame for America's financial troubles at the feet of irrational Republican deregulators have nothing to say about Iceland.

Explain.

Audacity

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us -- the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of "anything goes." Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.
-- Barack Obama

Prophetic?

Obama didn't say anything about a >250k America. We know what he has in store for those Americans.

Take It Or Leave It

I understand. You found paradise in America, you had a good trade, you made a good living. The police protected you and there were courts of law. And you didn't need a friend like me. But uh, now you come to me and you say - 'Don Corleone, give me justice.'.
-- Marlon Brando

Paulson has skipped the drama and come with the hardline. He didn't wait for the banks to come with their hands like cups, he basically said, here's the favor. You owe me. As the consensus of the economic heads have hoped, the offer comes in the form of preferred stocks, which means the Government gets their piece back first, just like the Godfather, when it comes to collecting that little favor.

So there's the bail.

Note this little para:

Another part of the government’s remedy is to extend the federal deposit insurance to cover all small-business deposits. Federal regulators recently have been noticing that small-business customers, which tend to carry balances over the federal insurance limits, had been withdrawing their money from weaker banks and moving it to bigger, more stable banks.

Hmm. I wonder if those small businesses make more than 250k?

Tuesday Fragments

Sol Stern on Ayers

Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”

As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive. As a leader of this growing “reform” movement, Ayers was recently elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of ed school professors and researchers.

Barnett Loves Petraeus

If you can believe it, General Petraeus has already taken a quick read through Great Powers and sent me comments. He couldn't have gotten the book more than a week ago. The good general was also kind enough to provide some student feedback from my last time at Leavenworth. Is he a complete freak of nature or what? It's not just the volume but the breadth that impresses, along with the ability--as Steve DeAngelis likes to say--to "ride the elevator" from the top to the bottom of the organization on a daily basis. It's rare to find the person who's that good at both the details and the big picture, as most people (like me) lean one way or the other. My guess? Petraeus looms large in an Obama administration--the honest broker of civ-mil relations (like Powell aspired to be when Clinton came in). Then, just like Powell, there will be talk of Petraeus running for president come 2016 (along with premature, loose talk in 2012, because I suspect he'll still be in uniform, replacing Mullen as CJCS--even if some rules must be bent (and I may be mixing up the logical dates on this)). At that point he'll be 64 and my guess is he'll still be able to crank somewhere in the range of 6-min miles, which is frightening to consider. [Speaking of which, my son Kevin's four-year quest to get a ribbon at the big central Indiana (with teams all the way from Terre Haute and Bloomington) CYO XC championship meet was consummated yesterday with a 12:02 3k performance that netted him a champion's ribbon for 19th place. Kev now moves on to higher competition and I start with younger son Jerry next year--a change in capacity that I welcome! So clearly, we have respect for competitive runners in my family.] And no, despite the age range, Petraeus wouldn't signal the return of the Boomer presidency. Far more than McCain, in my mind, this guy constitutes his own political genus--like an Ike (to whom he will be compared if he does anything in Afghanistan that resembles his success in Iraq). And if I assume he'd be a center-right candidate (educated guess, but guess nonetheless), he'd be the GOP's perfect follow-up to an Obama presidency. Actually, it's almost sick to start hypothesizing about 2012 and 2016, but such is the nature of the beast.

Pretty Bouncy for a Dead Cat

The DJIA closed up 11 percent today. That pretty bouncy for a dead cat. It's the biggest one day percentage gain since 1933. Then again, we did sink pretty low. And once again, it's too late for me to be a day trader. I'm happy with my cash position.

I missed Squawk this morning, but I think maybe some of this has to do with Mitsubishi getting its stuff done with Morgan. I spoke briefly with Mr. Jones last Friday night and he shows some concern for the Automotive industry. So the rumor is that the Fed is likely to bail out GM and Ford too.

There is a difference between this sort of nationalization and socialism, but I'm pretty worn out today and will get into it later.

Obama and Social Justice

Let's get very deep into the intellectual roots of Barack Obama.

Submitted for your consideration. Barack Obama represents himself as a candidate for Social Justice, and as such, based upon socialist ideas, defies the authority of America as the ultimate philosophical origin of his legitimate power. Obama believes more in social justice than in the American Constitution and will seek to change American life in deference to principles originating out of Leftist critiques of Capitalism and of Western Society.

Obama will exploit class, race and gender narratives in order to achieve his vision of social justice and will attempt to transform the political consciousness of America by convincing it that its principles of equality as envisioned by the Founders was insufficient to sustain a moral society. This vision of social justice will of necessity hew to principles of Marxism.

As President, Obama would be necessarily constrained to effect significant changes in the way America works, but his emphasis and attempts would all come in defiance of the individual for the purposes of the collective.

I challenge anyone to show what principles Obama has championed and what rhetoric he has spoken that contradict my assertions here. I believe that Obama is intelligent, opportunistic and ruthlessly pragmatic and that any argument that fails to locate his core beliefs is further evidence of his ambition. Therefore, whether or not he wins this election, those core beliefs and their intellectual provenance must be identified.

I don't trust him and I don't trust anyone's trust in him until these things are clear.

Hitchens Capitulates

Christopher Hitchens, in the top five of my living intellectual heroes, has thrown his hat in the corner for Obama. Not for what Obama plans to do but for what McCain seems unable to do.

I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven't felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot's running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America's most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn't qualify him then and it doesn't qualify McCain now.

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

I had a feeling this Monday would be crazy, but here is another curveball.

The Economist Says Economists Like Obama

I have a subscription to The Economist. I need to remember to renew my subscription, and perhaps buy one as well for the WSJ. It's the very least I can do if I'm going to continue as an occasional commentator on NPR. But I often don't have time to read. This week I'm catching up and they've dropped a bomb on me.

AS THE financial crisis pushes the economy back to the top of voters’ concerns, Barack Obama is starting to open up a clear lead over John McCain in the opinion polls. But among those who study economics for a living, Mr Obama’s lead is much more commanding. A survey of academic economists by The Economist finds the majority—at times by overwhelming margins—believe Mr Obama has the superior economic plan, a firmer grasp of economics and will appoint better economic advisers.

Our survey is not, by any means, a scientific poll of all economists. We e-mailed a questionnaire to 683 research associates, all we could track down, of the National Bureau of Economic Research, America’s premier association of applied academic economists, though the NBER itself played no role in the survey. A total of 142 responded, of whom 46% identified themselves as Democrats, 10% as Republicans and 44% as neither. This skewed party breakdown may reflect academia’s Democratic tilt, or possibly Democrats’ greater propensity to respond. Still, even if we exclude respondents with a party identification, Mr Obama retains a strong edge—though the McCain campaign should be buoyed by the fact that 530 economists have signed a statement endorsing his plans.

You can tell in reading the article, or perhaps it was the voice in my head, that it sounds very grudging to give these props, but they are what they are.

If there could possibly be any reason why I might have comfort under an Obama administration, this would be it. I have not put together any reasonable assessment of the specific economic plans outlined so far by either candidate, but I have taken rhetorical clues from the last debate. Neither one has been particularly bracing. I take McCain at his word that he will reduce government spending and that he has the willingness to push hard for spending cuts, but Democrat rhetoric about the deficit ain't hay. I hear it's around 2Trillion, which means debt service is now a significant part of the Federal budget.

I'm particularly disgusted with the popular conversations about the campaign, approaching the moment I changed the blog earlier this year. Although I admire his restraint, his record of bipartisanship and his lack of priority on social evangelism in that particularly annoying Christian Conservative way, McCain has been boring me from day one. His announcement of Palin has laid to rest any question that he would unify the party, but it has obscured his ability to present his vision to me or to anyone. Now that he's going negative, as he should, what exactly is so great about McCain is something even McCain can't seem to explain. Nevertheless, I trust the man.

Obama on the other hand is about as oily as they get. His ability to communicate and master all media is more like a virus than a press release. I have to wonder if he hasn't bamboozled the economists as well. I think he is disingenuous on the order of Bill Clinton and that he is so busy working his miracle that nobody knows what he's really all about. He has no seasoning and his geopolitics are worthy of ridicule.

Before Obama slip slided to the Right, I had some confidence that if he won, he would not have the power to change much. Now he knows he would have to deliver to the nation and has turned his rhetoric. I don't really know if it makes me trust him more or less. I would like to think (wishful thinking) that Obama is actually maturing politically, but I cannot make that leap of faith. He is not a whole candidate to me and I cannot buy the whole package. That is because the man is not talking to me, and never really has, and quite frankly I do not admire the way he talks to the people - he sounds good, but I have no reason to believe he will do good.

If in fact, the Obama economic plan is superior to McCains, and specifically if it can be demonstrated that it makes more sense in the long run, this is a way I could see clear to giving him support.

Here is my reservation. I think that Obama is not above sacking Petraeus out of spite. It would be unforgivable.

Jones, Last Bank & Insecurity

I am pleased to say that I do have a fairly solid understanding of what has gone wrong in the credit crunch. I don't believe that I have made any significant misstatements to date. I get the following from The Belmont Club - a summary of the causes and effects of the crunch. The example is first rate and for a good fifteen minute read, you can find all of the pieces and how they fit together.

Download Credit_Crunch_Report.pdf

The Report is what a board of accountants in Australia is telling its membership.

My Dogs

I forgot T. Coates. And so I looked up his Atlantic blog to see what's up. It has been a little corner for people who can't stand and cannot respect Republicans.

As usual, there are several million Americans, who have decided that this whole enterprise boils down to one thing. It never does, but then not many people can focus on more than one thing at a time. I'm going to talk about one of those boiling points in this post, and that is race. What is interesting to me is how McCain/Palin has, for so many supporters of the other guy, come to represent 'the racism of the Republican Party'.

Coates notes the nexus and has it both ways. One of his commenters says:

It's not contradictory to say that McCain has lost control of his campaign and to say that he is responsible for it. It's entirely predictable that you will have some ugliness out there, but that means that you plan for it and make provisions against it. Not only did McCain not do that, he poured gasoline on the flames, and expressed surprise when he got a big fireball. And now he has insubordination within his campaign.

I have heard the phrase 'coded message' so many times in conversations with the opposition. It's a cleverly stupid logic trap. All that's necessary is for them to perceive that some dog whistle politics are going on, which doesn't take much because they always suspect it. (Confirmation bias), and then they wait for the 'other shoe' to drop.

I don't pay attention to all that, quite frankly. I do more writing at my blog than I do reading widely, I read to research what I say here. So when I occasionally venture out to Booker Rising or some other public joint to add comments, I am invariably called a stooge for the racists, and sometimes they send a link to the latest outrage. But I can't say that I follow the zero-tolerant troops sluething up more evidence of Republican racism.

Given that it's Obama who is the democratic nominee, I wonder if they would be just as adamant that Romney would be the 'leader' of Republican racism if he were the nominee instead of McCain. There are a bunch who have obviously had it in for Giuliani, and Ron Paul has his own dicey history. You would think that the racial fear of Palin would have its own Jena-sized incident. But there is none, its just that Palin reps her hood, and her hood is full of them. As I mentioned at T. Coates' joint, this is merely a proxy war. There is us and there's them. They hate us, so we must therefore disrespect them - because obviously they are wrong because we are moral. Thus, any and every moron, racist, crackpot and Snidely Whiplash whose head pops above the blogospheric or major media radar becomes prima facia evidence that they are wrong and that their leader must be destroyed at all costs. It's not what the man says, it's what he signals to his dogs.

I would laugh. I never heard 'snowbilly' before this campaign. I never heard 'post-racial' before this campaign. But apparently some Americans, ironically many who cheer when Obama says 'we must all work together' have decided to fear, hate, distrust and disrespect those who support the McCain/Palin ticket. And those haters have the floor because it is the people of America that can't stand the people of America, and the people must be heard.

How many more days left?

I am not in McCain's gang. I'm just going to vote for the man. It has come down to a choice between two, and I like him better. I don't associate with people merely because I pop out a piece of chad in the same place as they do once every four years. I don't get to feel vindicated if he wins, I don't get to feel stupid if he loses. I just do my part as a citizen - I'd be blogging whether or not an election was happening. And I'm still going to mix it up with people who do more than merely vote, but think about the issues facing the nation every day. But I'm noticing how all the roaches are coming out of the woodwork in this overlong season of bile, and seeing how they vent their private hatreds into public spectacle and call it democracy. It is something awe-inspringly detestable. It is fear and ignorance made plain. Fear and ignorance of self, of home and country.

Today I don't have an answer. I only hang my head in shame.

Just A Guy In My Neighborhood

Barack Obama famously said that Bill Ayers is 'just a guy in his neighborhood'. The GOP site notes, that among other things, Obama heaped praise on Bill Ayer's book about the juvenile justice system. I'm parsing through a lot of wonky details to substantiate the intellectual locus between the two. I happen to believe that Barack Obama was a fairly conventional Leftist with Marxist intellectual roots as is fairly typical of the black power, white liberal nexus. Except nobody wants to go there, especially not the Obama campaign, which is why, since August of this year, the Right has been pounding on the Ayers connection. It is a section of Obama's real political history that all of his supporters wish to keep buried because it's clearly not a winner with the mainstream or with independent voters who will make the difference this November.

Anyway, in my spelunking, I came across a mention of Obama in Ayers' book 'A Kind and Just Parent'. It is just as interesting to me why Ayers would be interested in Obama as why Obama would be interested in Ayers. As far as I know, Ayers doesn't want to say. Of course if I were running Obama's campaign I wouldn't have him say... It's curious to see whether or not the Right can force this issue, as they did successfully with Obama, Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church. People have said this comes late, but a lot can happen in four weeks. I digress - to the text:

..university and its allied neighborhood association have worked to maniuplate borders and boundaries to assure 'stability' and separation. Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayer Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives a block from our home and adds, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of "safe neighborhood watch"L the Fruit of Islam, his security force, has an eye on things twenty-four-hours a day. I pass Farrakhan's mansion, offer a cheery wave to the Fruit, get a formal nod in respons, and turn north two blocks across 47th Street, into the lap of urban blight.

To my right the lak, a shining sea of blues and greans, Navy Pier all glitter and liver light jutting a haf mile into the lake, museums, planetariou, giant ferris wheel way up in the middl of the air, a fairyland skyline. To my left, vacont lot, vacant lot, vacant lot, abandoned building, vacant lot. Here a knot of young men stand around a stoop talking and passing a bottle. A little further on, a makeshift tire repair business operates from behind a ragged fence. Another large empty space - once a substantial community church, then headquarters and Mosque #1 to Jeff Fort's powerfule El Rukn Nation street gang - the result of a police seizure and subsequent demolition. I pass the building where Eric Morse lived, the exact spot where he was dropped to his death. I hang a left and shoot past a legendary blues club, toward Comisky Park, home of the White Sox.

Just south I see the Robert Taylor Homes, named for the first head of the Chicago Housing Authority whse daughter, a neighbor and friend is president of the Erikson Institute. Freddie was arrested at Robert Taylor; so was Andrew.

Wendell Phillips High School
Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church
Harvest Memorial Church
Dave's Liquors.

Here is a spot where two plainclothes cops stopped me while I was picking up a friend at her apartment and checked my ID at gunpoint two years ago. One of the cops, asked, "What are you doing in a neighborhood like this?"

What indeed.

I find it remarkable that Ayers mentions Obama only once in the book and does so only in the context of the black ghetto, presumably as an example of institutional racism. The fact that Obama's first campaign was started in Ayers' house only compliments the picture that Ayers himself has painted in his book - the book that Obama praised.

Corsi, Kenya, Odinga, Obama

Of all the nitpicking and sniping that goes on in the name of democratic debate, few have managed to hit the nerves of the electorate as has Jerome Corsi, author of 'Obamanation'. I take the book to be a shotgun blast of factlets which are either a whiff of grapeshot or a barrage of cluster bombs, depending on your sensitivity to criticism of Barack Obama. I'm not so undecided that I would need such ammo, but I did hear something very interesting yesterday again, as the long knives come out for our Democratic Nominee.

Corsi has been declared personna non-grata and deported from Kenya having done in that country what ordinarily goes on here - biased investigative journalism. He has taken from political enemies of certain parties some evidence that Obama has supported, to the tune of a million dollars, Raila Odinga to be prime minister of that country. What I believe we have here is a class of scandal that will go nowhere without some official investigation, and no official investigation will come. That is because whether or not something untoward or illegal happened, if Obama wins, it will be suppressed and if McCain wins nobody will care. So right about now is the only time that it matters whether or not we can get to the bottom of it. And, such is the case with all of the legal matters associated with the candidates, every -gate you can imagine matters now and not later.

What is striking about this particular charge by Corsi, whom I automatically classify as a kind of author like Gary Webb, is how it flies in the face of Obama's promise to do right by a particular school in his homeland for which he hasn't spent a penny. Baldilocks is my expert on this. Something very suspicious is going on here - and while I have to be skeptical of the source, the implications are too large for that skepticism to foreclose any investigation. If Obama approved for money from Illinois to go to a political party in Kenya, that's a very very serious error. Either Corsi or Obama will go down for it.

1988: Summer With Cyndi

We Got Our Own Thing

I swear to God this video brought tears to my eyes. I've only begun to, out of nowhere, look at the videos from the days when they mattered to me and as I went through some Michael Jackson, notably 'Jam' I remembered Heavy D & The Boyz. This was for me the signature video of the late 80s, at the time in my life when I partied like the only oxygen in the world was inside dance clubs.

If you ask me, the greatest spirit of hiphop is right here. Pure, energetic, upbeat, sophisticated, positive, novel and fun with a twist. This was my hiphop, in the days before gangsta, and already during this time period, decidedly logical against the hilarious yet grungy degeneracy of the Beastie Boys. You will notice that there is no irony in Heavy D. He is not playing against anything on the sly - he delivers the pure entertainment and his message is of self-ownership, an uprightness that works the system into beauty and pride. But in the end it's not about that - it's fun, it's a happy, even wacky goodness, a celebration of success that doesn't bite back at haters, talk down at suckers or beat down pretenders. It just glories at the top and it dances. It dances.

Preferred Assets

OK I think I finally understand another part of the Rescue puzzle. This goes back to what folks were saying between the Pelosi Dodgeball and the Senate passage of the TARP.

There are two ways under consideration, not counting the Irish Solution, that banks can be rescued. The first is the only way we talked about initially which is buying up all the toxic assets and then setting them aside - taking all of the question marks off of the books of the banks. The second way is the new interesting way which is to have the banks issue new preferred stocks for the Fed to buy. The Fed holds them and that encourages common shareholders to try and get the more secure capital, the new preferred stocks. The second way adds value directly with cash.

I'm not clear if the preferred stock sale is necessarily a new issue of stock or if most banks already have preferred stock. But this idea looks pretty simple considering how deflated most financial stocks are right now. Surely there are 50 regional banks whose total market cap is now below 5 billion. Putting a billion each into those with a preferred issue would increase them up to 20% and be relatively cheap. I assume that the Republicans would probably insist that such preferred stocks be non-voting shares, I'd bet the Dems will want the government to wrest control from evil capitalists.

Tyler Cohen examines some implications:

We are used to invoking shareholder unanimity theorems, whether they are justified or not. But say the U.S. government owns twenty percent of each major bank. Exactly what instructions do they give the management? ("Hey, guys, just get stuff going again!"?) Presumably the twenty percent shareholder wants something different, and more in line with the public interest, than the desires of the remaining eighty percent. Are we to assume that the twenty percent wins out? Can managers be sued for violating their fiduciary responsibilities? Does the twenty percent explicitly tell the managers to do something other than maximize profit? What if the eighty percent votes to override them?

Hmm.

The Evolutionary Threshing Floor - A Racial Perspective

If you are a regular reader at Cobb, you probably are familiar with my bete noir Craig Nulan. One of his favorite terms is the 'evolutionary threshing floor'. Today we ask the question. Exactly what is that, what does it do, and who is going there?

Today's Economic Meltdown Breakdown

Well, dour analytic geek that I am, I find it rather interesting to have something more exciting to talk about than geopolitics. That is the economic hash we're swimming through these days. I have found a new primary source of prime juicy information which is the daily Bloomberg On The Economy podcast hosted by Tom Keene. Every day I'm learning something new, so I will try to share what I understand here.

The Irish Solution
Today's talk circulated around the problem of LIBOR. LIBOR is the overnight interbank lending rate. Right now it's around 6% which is academic because banks are not lending each other money. They essentially don't trust each other. Ireland, who has had some problems in their banking industry has come with their angle and it is for the government to essentially guarantee all bank liabilities.

It turns out that the FDIC does indeed have the ability to do exactly that, and what raises eyebrows all around is that according to its charter, all it needs to do so is the agreement of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury (Paulson) and of the President. Guess whose input is not required? That's right, Congress.

But exactly how big is the sum total of all bank liabilities. According to today's guest, it's around 11Trillion dollars. American GDP for one year is 14T, so it's a very big number.

What's Broken
The economy is not. It's just part of the big business cycle with the small caveat that we are in a panic. The panic has a lot to do with the fact that an somehow incalculable amount of credit swaps are leveraged against a dicey set of mortgages which in turn are leveraged against real estate in a soft market. We are experiencing a rolling set of downturns starting in real estate markets which have affected the financial sector which in turn is restricting credit, which will have a negative effect on the ability to buy inventories. Everything will slow down.

The panic, the selling on Wall Street has destroyed a lot of capital, and today, now that the moratorium on short selling is off, cost the market another zillion in capital. But short sellers do help establish a bottom - or at least a psychologically quantifyable bottom to the market which is what we need. Once the panic is over, all we have is a slowdown, a real recession. The question of liquidity is very specific and is being addressed by the Fed which has it within its power to put money into the system and take money out if it gets inflationary.

What I've come to understand today is that although it is a precedent for the Fed to buy commercial paper, which helps particularly with inventories, since banks are not buying it, this can work. There are problems of course. What if they buy some and not others? Does this change the credibility of commercial paper ratings and rating systems? These are the unknowns.

Clearly there are a lot of options, I am coming to understand some of them - there are a huge number of things to learn here. But it's clear that those people who know how monetary policy and the Federal Reserve and money markets work, will have a close eye on developments. They are certainly not saying that our economy is broke.

Mark To Market
What I also heard today is that the idea of 'mark to market' pricing of financial assets is a good idea and has served us well. It's a common sense kind of logic behind that. Bottom line, when you mark to market it makes visible those assets which are in trouble. The alternative is to use a 'book' value of your assets. In the current crisis, the effect of marking assets by book value would be to mask the effect of losses in value to those assets.

The Immorality of Racism

It has been asserted by various wags, some of them thoughtful, others less so, that there is some fundamental flaw by way of apology of racism in blacks who are conservative and travel in Republican circles. I speak for myself.

My interest in racism is primarily academic, and it has been longer than I actually thought. Race has very little to do with the reason I am a Conservative. In fact, my interest in race and racism was probably the only reason that I was a Progressive so long. It can honestly be said about my interest in racism, that it was a 'special interest'.

The more often the subject of race and politics comes up, the more I tend to be convinced that Cornel West was right about blacks in his 'Breaking Bread'. He essentially implied that African Americans, by and large, do not see their participation in Western Democracy as a 'natural phenomenon'. He said that there is a set of existential dilemmas - a need for meaning - that gets in the way of blacks' ability to play the game of rational self-interest according to the rules of the System. That their interpretation of the System's exclusion of them from it on the basis of color has become a large mental hurdle.

This essentially means that in order for blackfolks to perceive that there is a level playing field, there must be affirmative action. I have come to believe that this is an axiom for a significant number of black people.

I have always asserted, from a cultural black nationalist perspective, that the mental liberation required to beat this existential hurdle is the responsibility of black people - that the solution is known and all that is lacking is the discipline and willingness to accomplish it.

I also have asserted that the diminishing presence of racism in American society requires less attention to this problem, despite its focus in much of black politics and culture.

And thirdly I have always asserted that the success of the civil rights movement and anti-discrimination laws in America is essentially irreversible and that any separatist ideology is doomed to failure. Integration is destiny, all Americans have a multi-racial future.

Something that is new that I see, which was a surprise to me, was that black culture has become transparent. There are no black things that non-blacks cannot understand. It is just as likely that blacks don't understand themselves that whites cannot. That doesn't change the fact that many blacks and whites do not seek any open or honest communications between themselves individually or as players of racial games. They both only own their respective ghetto mentalities.

In the end, I have long had no interest in facilitating 'race relations'. I see no real benefit to establishing any sort of rapproachment between groups of people who find it necessary to assert some irrevocable racial standing for themselves. They are only representing irreconcilable sins of the past into the future. I find such people small minded and morally suspect. And I find intellectuals who advocate for such groups as ultimately foolish.

There are those, and I have been among them, who would agitate for a criminalization of racism, to put additional moral power in the hands of the state. On the issue of 'hate crime' I have been a supporter. But I have come to recognize that the existence of hate crime statutes are not a deterrent to crime and that what anti-racist activists truly desire is to change the way of thinking, not just of would be criminals, but of most Americans. This then is a political and a moral imperative - not a matter of crime and punishment.

The presence of racism as a phenomenon in American society is adequately handled by the law, and all 'subtle' racism that doesn't rise to the level of a crime is a manifestation of sin, of evil. There are no acts of racism that cannot be explained simply, those which are not crimes are simply moral errors, expressions of dysfunctions of personal character and integrity. A morally upright person cannot be racist, nor can any racist be morally upright under any circumstances.

It is clear that in American history whites benefited in numerous ways from the suppression of non-whites, and much legal assistance was given in the maintenance of laws which defined who was and who was not white. The very system of law was poisoned. It is now clean. Those who seek advantage by dint of race must do so in collusion with like-minded individuals. The locus of action against racism, therefore must seek out such individuals and expose them. The moral climate of our society is such that exposure and shame are powerful and effective methods. Obviously if some crime has been committed, appropriate action must be taken.

But above and beyond that there remains a legacy of distrust between blackfolks and whitefolks in various parts of society such that we must contend with a politics and a culture of opposition. There remain unresolved general accusations and scapegoating of a broad racial nature across many quarters in America. And there are always opportunists who try to make the most of this sort of sniping. But any participation in this racial fracas must be approached with the following ideas in mind.

All racist acts are immoral. Some are crimes. All racist people are immoral. Some are criminals. All punishments should fit the offense. Only the guilty should be punished. Vigilance against immorality is central to the maintenance of society.

This is basically all anyone needs to know.

One should always suspect the racial theories of people involved in cultural or political activism. There is a always a great temptation to take one's own racial identity too seriously - to assume that it is or should necessarily be significant. The same is true of one's assessment of others' racial identity. In particular one should be aware of such accusations and scapegoating which assert things of races of people, even in casual observation. This is because the only effort required in the maintenance of civil society is vigilance against immorality. So let me state it plainly. One should never make the assumption or accusation that a group of people is immoral, especially designating that group by its race.

In light of the fact that Americans do exactly that all of the time, what is to be done?

It seems to me at long last rather obvious. That is because I have spent so much time in attempt to be anti-racist, which I now see as a rather expensive and academic enterprise. I had become pedantic to the point of zero tolerance, and I finally realized how foolish that was. The turning point was when I began to look at racism in America, just before 9/11/2001 as a system in equilibrium. At the time, I was debating fiercely the merits of an apology for American slavery and Reparations for same. Ultimately I came to understand that any real reconciliation of people had to come from likemindedness. Which meant that they had to view immorality on similar terms, and crime on similar terms. That is a general problem with societies and people. The only thing that is agreed upon in a free society is what is law. As for the rest, all of us have varying levels of comfort with human vice, sin and immorality. And to suggest that at any point in history that one could get likemindedness on one's response and tolerance of immorality is more difficult the more people one considers. In other words, how can you get people to equally hate racism and fight against it? The same way you get people to hate sin and fight against it. It is a question for the ages, and it is a solution that only exists in paradise.

In the meantime, we all know that moral and upstanding individuals fight against immorality all the time. Everyone does it their own way. Everyone is motivated for personal reasons which vary in intensity, duration and effectiveness. That is the way people operate.

As finally to the narrow question of blacks in the conservative movement and the Republican party, the answer is the same as it would be no matter what the context. Only those whose tolerance of immorality is low are likely to be outstanding in their fight against racism or any other corruption of the soul.

The Second Crime

I've been listening to people whine about the racism of the Republicans and all sorts of outrage, but there have been essentially two crimes in this entire campaign season. The first, now completely forgotten, was the suicide bomb attempt on Hillary Clinton's office in NY State. Basically a suicidal schlep over the brink and desparate for attention, not an enemy combattant. And now the second crime, of which this little punk ought to certainly be found guilty, the hacking of Sarah Palin.

David Kernell, self-named “Obamacrat,” has plead NOT GUILTY today into hacking into Alaska Governor and GOP Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s private e-mail account.

David Kernell, 20, of Knoxville, Tenn. entered the plea in federal court in Knoxville, the same day prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging him with intentionally accessing Palin’s e-mail account without authorization.

Kernell, an economics student at the University of Tennessee, was brought into court wearing handcuffs and shackles on his ankles.

He was released without posting bond, but the court forbade him from owning a computer and limited his Internet use to checking e-mail and doing class work.

Kernell’s father is longtime state Rep. Mike Kernell of Memphis, chairman of Tennessee’s House Government Operations Committee. The lawmaker has said he had nothing to do with the hacking incident.

David Kernell was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Knoxville and faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release. Trial is set for Dec. 16.

As usual, I will continue to downplay and mock all complaints of disrespect of The One.

Wedneday Fragments

War on the Cheap
Not that anyone cares right now, but I want to take a moment to point out something about the war Obama wants. He wants a poke and pop war. Essentially, he wants a search and destroy mission into Tora Bora and Whateverstan that captures and kills Osama bin Ladin. And then he wants the war on terror to go away. But I still want to ask him if he's ready to disband the TSA. Fire all x-thousand of 'em.

D1 Gran Prix
The other day on the HD Theatre channel, I watched a couple of guys and a protoge in a documentary on drifting. This nascent motorsport shows promise and it sure is exciting. There is something fairly awesome about a high performance car moving sideways down a track in a cloud of tire smoke at 90mph under complete control as it burns through a corner inches from another car doing exactly the same thing. I say it is the first Extreme motorsport.

The New Fiscal Discipline
Robert Reich, who tends to annoy me more than ever, put it to the Sunday Show guys that the average American carries 9 credit cards with a total of about 9K in debt. Those days are over.On the one hand, I expect JP Morgan to issue me a new Visa that was originally from Providian but then got bought by WaMu.
I can remember when people got this spooked in the 80s when the Japanese were buying up American real-estate. Today it's China that has everyone spooked. Keyword Chimerica.

The Wealth Channel
There is, believe it or not, something called the Wealth Channel on my FIOS box. It's Lifestyles of the Affluent, Rich and Unfamous, and it's got the corny kind of commercials you expect would be of interest to women in their 50s.

There's only one show that I ever tape from the WC (heh) which is Classic Visions or some such. It's a 30 minute program that has those slowly panning magnificent HD shots of old European cities, villages, farmers markets, boat landings, woods, mountains, churches and cute people, all played to that genre we call Classical Music. Generally, they will show the birthplace or the place where the composer penned the opus on the soundtrack with some bits of trivia. Pretty cool. I have found that with a cocktail, there is nothing that takes the edge off a hectic day like hearing Debussy's Le Mer and seeing the white cliffs of the north shore of France. Now that I've found the switch on the audio that makes the built-in speakers in my Samsung sound good, it's the best HD viewing I've got.

Leaving St. John's
It is with some regret that I announce what was apparently inevitable, my departure from my church of record, St. John's Episcopal. Their decidedly political stance on the war in Iraq and Gay Marriage have sealed it. This week I went for the last time for the blessing of the animals, and I figured out finally how absurd it is to have 40 foot banners in the rear of the church half covered with plastic wrap, the uncovered bits with crosses for every dead American soldier in Iraq. They're prepared for the numbers to double and have their banners just waiting. All this among barking dogs. Out front, a huge purple banner on church property saying vote no on Prop 8. I expect a church to do better than Chaka Khan - Any love that you feel is real... fine, but is it Marriage? Nothing is sacred.

I'm Voting Democrat

Just in case you haven't seen it.

Four Points from Roubini

Bank Triage

Deposit Guarantees

Preferred Share Purchase

Asset Repricing

I subscribed to the daily Bloomberg economics podcast last week and it's been rather revealing. I once looked over at Roubini, or what I thought was Roubini last spring and instead I got this rant from a guy whose name I forgot. At any rate, I highly recommend the Bloomberg podcast.

Bank Triage
The government has to decide which banks are going to succeed and which are to fail. Simple. Depositors and investors have had no way of knowing which banks were close to insolvency or which the FDIC was in the process of negotiating mergers. If you would have asked me two weeks ago if Wachovia, of all the major strong banks in America was in trouble, I would have been shocked.

Deposit Guarantees
Roubini favors a blanket guarantee on cash deposits. It ultimately makes sense and as a temporary measure, I don't see the risk. Cash should be cash, and people should not make a run on banks thinking that their cash might disappear. I don't know how you work the details of getting the FDIC capitalized to insure all that, but I agree that this is an important step. It was a goody thrown in to bump up the limit. So that's better than nothing.

Preferred Share Purchase
I'm starting to understand this part and I think I like it. Instead of the government buying the only the dirtiest and most dubious assets of a bank, let them buy the best assets. It creates a 'flight path to quality' for the common shareholders, and then allows those shareholders, over time to convert their common shares into the preferred shares. It creates a new class of trust in those institutions, not just bailing out their stupidity. It's a tricky proposition, but I think I get it.

Asset Repricing
This is clearly the most controversial part. I don't like the idea of the government seemingly arbitrarily deciding how much mortgages are ultimately going to be worth outside of any market mechanism. It's possible that I don't understand the thrust of this, but it sounds similar to what Biden was saying about having bankruptcy judges arbitrarily whacking principle off mortgages and house prices. Roubini is no fool and I'm sure he is aware of the moral hazard of such an idea of creating a new kind of bankruptcy. So I'm going to keep my ears open on this piece.

Roubini says, and I agree, that the Paulson plan was thrown together very quickly without the cooperation of an independent panel of economists, either academic or professional. My reaction was to the Democrat reaction and Pelosi's dodgeball.

What's not clear to me is that the Congressional action was a be-all end all and last effort. It better not be.

Obama's Idea of a Small Business

Obama suggested last night in his debate that most small businesses would not be affected by his tax increases for folks making < $200k. He said, and I quote:

Now, Senator McCain talks about small businesses. Only a few percent of small businesses make more than $250,000 a year. So the vast majority of small businesses would get a tax cut under my plan.

What does the SBA say about small businesses?

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a “small business” according to its average annual receipts or the number of its employees. Here are examples from the SBA’s Table of Small Business Size Standards setting forth the maximum average annual receipts by industry that a business can have and still be classified as a small business:

Crop production of all types — $750,000
Animal production except for cattle & chicken/eggs — $750,000
Cattle feedlots — $2.5M
Chicken/egg production — $12.5M
Forestry & logging — $7M
Fishing — $4M
Irrigation, sewage, water supplies — $7M
Housing construction — $33.5M
Heavy and civil engineering construction — $33.5M
Dredging and cleanup — $20M
Concrete, framing, and other housing contractors — $14M
Car dealers — $23-29M
RV, motorcycle, & boat dealers — $7M
Furniture, hardware, clothing & sporting good stores — $7M
Electronic stores — $9M
Supermarkets, gas stations & department stores — $27M
Pharmacies — $7M

There are many more examples at the link. In addition, most of the industries in the Table — such as manufacturers of food, beverages, apparel, print, oil/gas, plastics, plumbing, machinery, computers, electronics, electrical, transportation, and furniture — are considered small businesses based on their total number of employees instead of average annual receipts. In those industries, the cut-off between small and large businesses ranges from 500-1,000 employees per business/industry.

I cannot find any statistics that tell me average reciepts by small businesses. I pored through this huge document and I don't see very much that tells me what kind of revenues small businesses are making. If you can find it, good luck.

What I did find however is that about 39% of small businesses have average payrolls over 196k per year. So if you payroll is greater than 196k you've got to be making more than 250k.

I think Obama is conflating a bunch of terms. The 250k was about personal income before taxes and FICA extending beyond the current income cieling of about 100k. I'm sure this is what he was probably talking about, although it makes no sense to talk about personal income if you are supposed to be talking about small business. Even so, I have issues with that. If he's taking FICA, which is Social Security money and putting it someplace else, I have a big problem with that. My nickel says he's playing that old game of making the budget deficit look smaller than it is by counting FICA as revenue, when it's actually an entitlement which is supposed to go back to the taxpayers in retirement.

So he is either making a big dumb misstatement or being evasive about what percentage of small businesses are going to have to heel to his new tax regime. His characterization is just wrong. And that's a big deal to me.

McCain implied that he was, by and large, going to leave the revenue side alone and give a couple specific cuts. I basically find his approach more fair - the more kids you have the bigger deduction you can take. Whereas Obama says the more money you make the less you get to participate in his tax cuts. I read that as anti-rich, whereas McCain is pro-family. But that's just me.

The Fully Annotated Debate

The McCain Obama Debate. Word for word with Cobb's consciousness on just about every paragraph. Making me crazy, making me late for work, but this is the moment.

A Few Debate Notes

The thing that strikes me most about Obama's debate performance Tuesday is how much his intentions for Afghanistan sound exactly like George W. Bush. But then when you hear the rest of his rhetoric about capturing or killing Osama Bin Ladin, you realize how little he cares for winning against the jihadi movement, and how little he has actually studied this problem.

Everything he says about pursuing Bin Ladin smacks of the old 'cut off the head and the snake will die' strategy. It's beyond wrong, it's foolish, especially given how he's just posing like a hawk on Pakistan. He is decidedly clumsy on matters of war, peace and diplomacy. The very nerve of him to call Musharraf a dictator on national TV is demonstration enough for me that his foreign policy would be a disaster.

It's about this time that I wish that Obama were debating Romney. Because even though Romney takes you right up to the limit of his knowledge, which is sometimes inadequate, at least he gets to the point quickly. Romney would have turned Obama into lawn clippings.

--
I listened to the debate after much hesitation. I really didn't want to. As soon as I heard Brokaw's voice and the two minute rule, I immediately thought that it's nothing more than a game show. Finally I relented.

Obama said nothing new in anything he presented. All of his responses sounded exactly like things I've heard him say before, and he never seemed to have time to give quick, direct responses to Brokaw's questions. Plus, he violated time limits. Still at least he didn't bore me to tears like Biden did, and he kept his cheeky colloquialisms to a minimum unlike Palin.

For the things that matter most to me, McCain was a clear winner, but not decidedly so. He simply didn't have the rhetorical skills to put Obama away, who was punching like Mike Tyson against Buster Douglas. If Obama is supposed to have these legendary oratorical skills, I didn't hear them, He sounded like an average politician to me. Then again, I've been listening to him say empty stuff to cheers for months now, I didn't expect any big words tonight.

Obama unabashedly puts himself in the position of saying that the past 8 years has killed the American dream. It was a strikingly stupid remark. Anyway I've decided to do a full annotation of the debate. Stay tuned.

Channelling McCain: How to Destroy Obama

(I wrote this Tuesday morning long before the debate.)

On this one, I have to give the tip of the hat to Rush Limbaugh. It took me 20 seconds of listening to him to realize he was dead right. I will now speak as John McCain.

My friends, I will explain to you quite clearly how I see my opponent and why...

Barack Obama will have you believe in hope and in the future. There is a long tradition of people who see the future clearly, but I do not believe Obama to be a visionary. Rather, he would have you look at the future because that's where all of his accomplishments are.

Obama has tried in every way to associate me with the Bush Administration. It is a clever tactic. Obama would have you believe that I was in the White House all the time planning and scheming with George Bush and Dick Cheney. He's got a vivid imagination. In fact I was on the Senate floor voting important legislation in the interests of the American people. If he had been there as often, he would have seen me. Anybody and everybody has criticisms of Bush including me. But criticism is not leadership. Leadership requires that you have a plan and that you can succussfully implement that plan.

If Barack Obama were responsible, then he would have had a plan that puts the interests of the country first. Not a plan that responds to the changing dynamics of a long campaign season, but one that will stand the test of time and be judged by history. Except Barack Obama refuses to be judged by his history. He triangulates.

Obama would have you believe that if we had listened to him, that an Obama plan would have settled the war in Iraq by now. That what America has done was wrong, but what Obama wanted all along was right. That more soldiers would have been home by now and the Iraqi Army would have handled their civil war just fine. That we had no business putting together a coalition - a coalition he'd break up as soon as possible.

Obama would have you believe that if we had listened to him, that an Obama plan would have settled the war in Afghanistan by now.

Barack Obama would have you believe that if we had listened to him, that an Obama plan would have kept homeowners out of foreclosure. That what America has done was wrong, but what Obama wanted all along was right. And so he asks you to give him the keys to the future.

Barack Obama would have you believe that if we had listened to him, that an Obama plan would have given health insurance to everyone who is uninsured. That if you are crippled now, you might have been walking. That if you are blinded now, you might see. He says we were all deaf and couldn't hear him. And so what America has done was wrong, but what Obama wanted all along was right.

How can we trust the keys to our future to someone who keeps avoiding his past?

When we wanted to look at the way he came to power in Chicago machine politics. He said, don't go there. It's not fair. When we wanted to examine his connection to radical leftist education policies. He said, don't go there. It's not fair. When we wanted to examine the connection between his positions on Iraq war funding and the business interests of a certain Mr. Rezko, He said. don't go there. It's not fair. When we wanted to examine his relationship to his faith and his church. He said don't go there. It isn't fair. His educational transcripts, his voting records, his political philosophy. These things wouldn't be a mystery to us from a man unafraid to be judged by history. But he deems us all incompetent to judge him. And so he doesn't stand on his record, instead he tells us to hope for change in the future. In fact, he is bold enough to say that an Obama plan is Change you can Believe in. Why? Because he knows how America has done wrong, when what he wanted all along was right.

IIt's not hard to understand why a man as brilliant as Barack Obama would forgo a lucrative career in Law or Wall Street. He's got all the educational credentials. Clearly he didn't have the motivation. Instead he wanted to be a community organizer. That is a noble ambition. Altruism can be admirable. But it can also be self-serving. I don't think Barack Obama has a holier than thou attitude. I believe that he genuinely wants to do right by the people. There are many great Americans who have taken this path, and we look to their successes for inspiration.

But it is hard for me to understand why a man as brilliant as Barack Obama has not presented us with the evidence of his good deeds. How exactly has he done right by the people?

Obama Biden wants to increase Federal government spending by 30%. But I'm not going to do a typical Republican complaint about taxes. The American people already know where they stand and where I stand on taxation. But I want to talk about that 1 Trillion dollars in new programs. Surely, Barack Obama can point to where his success in the past earns him the right to spend hundreds of billions in the future. Or should we just hold our breath and hope?

We've just had the longest and most expensive presidential campaign in American history. My opponent has one of the thinnest records. He was President of the Harvard Law Review, but never wrote an article. He was a Senate Committee member for Afghanistan but never travelled there. He had over 200 opportunities to vote on legislation for the benefit of the American people, but Barack Obama is the Great Abstainer.

Barack Obama is a very very ambitious man. A young man who has dared to wrest control of his party from his better-known and more experience compatriots. Is the Democratic Party better? A man who is convinced that he is the one to lead America. He is an upstart. A challenger. Would America be better under his leadership. That is a chance, a risk that some of you are willing to take. But we are now just beginning to pay for taking too much risk. This is not the time for risk. This is the time for calm and experience. This is not the time to respond to his ambition, but to my experience and service.

Obama-Ayers for the Record

Here's what the official GOP website has to say about the connections between Obama and William Ayers. Outside blockquote is from Patterico.

The GOP claims Obama and Ayers have more extensive connections. Here is my summary of the main points:

Ayers and Dohrn launched Obama’s Illinois State Senate candidacy in their home in 1995.

In March 1995, Ayers was asked to help Obama formulate the Chicago Annenberg Challenge by-laws.

From March 1995 to September 1997, Obama and Ayers attended at least 7 meetings of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge including 5 Board of Directors’ meetings.

In 1997 and 2001, Obama and Ayers appeared together on two academic panels. The 1997 panel was organized by Michelle Obama to discuss the juvenile justice system, an area Ayers and Obama apparently agreed on.

In 1997, Obama praised Ayers’ book on the juvenile justice system.

From 1999 to 2002, Obama served with Ayers on the Board Of Directors for Woods Fund Of Chicago. During this time, Ayers was quoted in the New York Times (9/11/01) as saying “I don’t regret setting bombs … I feel we didn’t do enough.”

And of course you can see that the GOP website is just dripping with racial innuendo.

The World Is Still Mysterious

It took a year, but they finally found Steve Fossett's plane wreck and a bone or two. It sounds rather grim to consider that you might still get lost in this world. Surely he could have been part of the grid. He might have worn an emergency beacon watch, but chose not to. I am heartened by this.

I don't mean to get all fuzzy, but there is something about crisis that brings out the best and worst in people. It's when we are forced to improvise that we are at our most human, and it is when we are at our most disciplined that we are most part of some machine. An ordinary life must balance discipline and spontaneity, but it is during those moments of chaos that reveal our true character.

I don't like thrillseekers, but I understand their motivation. People must get out of the planned life. I think such nerve would be better spent on gallantry than extreme sports. Fossett died flying into a mountain. As tragically as that can be interpreted, I think it's more than a little bit foolish. Gerard writes this today:

In the end, it is not our failure to learn from history that condemns us to repeat it, but our mind's turning away from even the briefest glimpse of what the dark passages of history were like that damns us. We may know, but we refuse to see. We blind our own mind's eye. It is our inability to imagine the most evil things that all men are capable of that corrupts us.

No, do not say "our inability" to imagine. Say rather, "our refusal" to imagine since the imagination itself -- if we were honest -- can indeed visualize carnage and depravity with ourselves as the actor and never the acted-upon. Our mind can and does see things that we cannot stand to admit. Our mind can bring to an image and hold in our mind's eye things of infinite vileness.

To risk one's life for the thrill. That's the ultimate celebrity, I suppose. Perhaps the TV show 'Fear Factor' can amp up its stunts to lethal levels, and we can be Roman spectators again.

Life is still mysterious and the world is still too big to find everyone and everything when you want to. For me that means I have reasons to look for more reasons to bond with my fellows. More reasons to make our human family what it is supposed to be, guarding against those dangerous elements, both human and natural. That is a challenge that requires both spontaneity and discipline.

Eight Points Up, Thirty Days Out

According to the polls...

Well it's finally coming to the short strokes, and as I have found in most things I am more concerned about secondary repercussions in this election than the primary ones. Which is to say I like McCain because what should automatically happen in the GOP when he becomes President, not so much because he is leading me in an inspired way because of his campaign. I felt the same way about Schwartzeneggar.

I have a feeling that one way or another things are going to slowly fall apart no matter who is in office. And I'm not sure whom I'd rather see take the L. The Republican party is exhausted and exasperating. The Democrats are rabid and random. It seems like only a handful of Americans out of every hundred has any idea where the country might be headed.

I haven't heard either side say anything new over the past month except dealing with the nastyness surrounding Palin. As that goes, Michelle Obama has managed to salvage her reputation in front of the American people and make a graceful exit from center stage. It has been the only graceful thing I can think of. I have every sense, therefore, that Obama is going to do some foot dragging and basically play a prevent defense. He's going to run down the clock and hope nothing happens that makes him look foolish. He's exceptionally good at that for people who have no reason to suspect Democrats of anything especially cheeky. His teflon coating is thick enough for gasseous diffusion of UF6.

Speaking of Palin, I think she's going to be hounded into becoming the second-coming of Ann Coulter. Go down swinging is what Right radio is saying today. Speaking for myself, I've just about had it with McCain's inability to get the right words out to the right press. McCain is not hitting me in the gut. Or as the caller to the Dennis Miller Show said, McCain has used Palin as a hot chick to get him to the front of the line of the club. Now it's time for him to take off the cardigan, put on the leather jacket and open a can of whoopass on the opposition.

We all know that McCain cannot stand Obama. I want to see some fur fly. I want to see the gloves to come off. I want to get some gut feel for these guys, because I think they're both floating their way home. I need to hear them talk about why America is going to be wrong under the other guy, in a convincing style. Then again, how often do I get what I want.

The ball is clearly in Obama's possession, because according to the grapevine, the McCain camp is convinced that they can't win talking about the economy. That's a copout. Somebody has to say my economist can whoop your economist, and nobody is saying that. All they do is talk about tax plans and go backwards from there. That is insufficient. The person who talks most clearly and philosophically consistently on the economy wins. Quite frankly I think McCain will talk too slowly to give anyone confidence, and I think Obama will say something crazy that sounds like a good idea but isn't. Just like he did on Pakistan and nobody called him on it. Just like Biden did when he said we outspent Iraq over Afghanistan 120 to 1.

The Ten Things need to be updated.

What raises my eyebrows about this campaign is the air of inevitability it now has. It has dragged on entirely too long. I want it over. I am emotionally spent and I'm tired of repeating myself. Every new thing that comes across the press is shallow and biased and we spend all of our energy deconstructing elaborately crafted, self-serving messages from the candidates. For all his promise of Straight Talk, McCain has little to show. Or perhaps he has been saying quite enough, just with nowhere near the style of Obama. Yet for all the posturing and posing, I have heard not one sentence in 18 months that captures the spirit of their energies. Instead I have been drenched in themes and good looking photography and negatives about the other guy. I'm weary of this game. The more I play it, the more stupid and angry I feel.

Oh Yeah, Gay Marriage

I keep forgetting to remember that one of the areas of what I consider moderate cultural and political agreement made itself patently obvious during the Vice Presidential Debate. No denial of rights. No redefinition of Marriage.

I certainly hope we can put this sucker to bed. BTW. I'm voting yes on Prop 8. And I'm leaving my old Church for putting a 35 foot banner on its property agitating against the proposition.

On the Internet Nobody Knows If You're A Wahhabi

Who is Doodad Pro?

The People's Zillionaires

Barry Diller. Sumner Redstone. Steven Spielberg. David Geffen.

Gods. On. Earth.

I'm just thinking about the fact that we've just been through a writer's strike and an entire gaggle of Hollywood types - entertainers, technicians and multifarious yoemen of the Industry - have had their romantic flirtation with all sorts of 'power to the people' sloganeering in their own defense. But I don't think I've ever heard anyone suggest ever, that the moguls of the entertainment businesses be run out of town or stripped of their pay and hauled off to jail.

Sure. It's not the same. Or is it?

Let's say we've run the economy into the ground, for argument's sake. Where should we pull our money, from banks or from entertainment? What do you suspect are the chances that any of those four will suffer after this recession is in its deepest trenches? So how many people will call on them to suffer?

It begs a lot of questions that relate to the culture war. I mean consider this short train of thought. What if Proctor & Gamble simply canceled their media buys? Would Americans stop bathing with Ivory Soap? Would we stop using Tide detergent? In 2005, the only figure I could find, P&G spent 2.5B on TV ads. That's supporting an awful lot of awful television. Do we actually need that TV? Do we need to spend the money on the electricity to watch the TV and power those cable boxes? I mean you know how much the entertainment industry hates Tivo. What if we just cut back on TV and movies and... I don't know, played sports instead of watching sports.

Blockbuster did 5.5B of revenue last year. Why not consider them a drag on the economy. I mean after all isn't this entire crisis about smart investing?

I know, this is crazy out of proportion and nobody would dare suggest that we get rid of the humor liquidity of the entertainment biz. We'd have a happiness crunch in addition to the credit crunch, and then we'd all join the Crips, smoke crack and start shooting and raping each other, like our friends at Subrealism believe.

Just thought I'd throw that out there as the populists start lighting their torches and sharpening their pitchforks on Capitol Hill over Lehman executive pay.

Want your money back? Think about where you spend it.

USNS Carl Brashear

It's not a sin to get knocked down; it's a sin to stay down.
-- Carl M. Brashear

Many of us are familiar with the film Men of Honor starring Cuba Gooding Jr. Well it turns out that the real-life hero of that film, Carl M. Brashear has become more than an icon in film, but that a ship has been named after him and was launched a few weeks ago in San Diego.

Brashear himself was an extraordinary man with a highly distinguished career in the Navy. He was awarded plenty of honors as the Naval History website shows. But having a ship named after him is, by my reckoning the coolest. I don't know if there are other Navy ships named after African Americans, but I suspect that there might be another considering that I didn't read anything about the Brashear that indicated that it was the first. The USNS Carl Brashear is a 210 meter Lewis and Clark class cargo ship. Others of this sort have been named after other great explorers like Peary, Earhart and Alan Shepard. Fine company indeed.

Fascism in America: Portents and Possibilities

A while ago, I was defending the Investor Class and American markets against charges of Fascism. I couldn't really fathom where those charges were coming from and in the end I let it go. I think we were arguing at cross-purposes. Since then, I have observed that there are extreme elements in the electorate whose response to populist rhetoric by Obama raises the stakes for him to resist fascism. As well, since that time, a book by Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism has been published.

It is difficult to disaggregate, at this particular moment when markets are in chaos, the sorts of dangers we face from a Left administration but I don't believe with any strong conviction that Fascism is one of them. Nevertheless, it is clear to me that there are strains of fanaticism within the broad electorate which verge on becoming cults of personality, and there are probably some out there.

First and foremost I think a Fascist ideology has no chance in America because we are significantly political divided. There is nobody who can speak to all of the American people and unite us to a cause. We are red and blue and getting redder and bluer all the time. There might be some point in the not to distant future when we get sick of being at each other's throats politically, but given how that happened in the 70s, I don't think that Fascism has a good chance.

What I mean by Fascism is the use of iconography and thin appeals to patriotism to cede power to a small elite whose power flows strictly from that popular adherence with little recourse to reality. I think most Americans are well versed in the skepticism that guards against such a system, to the extent that we sense the Orwellian as it approaches. I would say that in order for America to become a Fascist state, it would have to be Totalitarian. Essentially one of our two great political parties would have to be destroyed. The chances for that in our lifetime are very slim. Nevertheless I could see elements of fascism working in either party.

I tend to believe that populism leads to fascism. That if we are facing any aspect of fascism in the near term that it has everything to do with what sort of economic thought proceeds in the general population as this financial crisis evolves. At this point I defer to what I consider a strikingly apt definition in Wikipedia:

Yay India!

Through no choice of my own, I work for an Indian company. The company I work for was acquired by a company that was acquired by an Indian company. However, my company Rolta, is not your typical Indian IT company. Rather, I have been explaining it as the Perot Systems of India. But it's that and more, it's a global engineering services company. If you're going to build a large power plant, Rolta makes for a good partner.

Here's the news:

With an emphatic vote Wednesday, the US Senate assured that America will take part in India's $100 billion nuclear-energy sweepstakes.

The 86-to-13 vote to resume civilian nuclear trade with India for the first time since 1974 is a signature diplomatic achievement for the Bush administration, cementing ties with a nation seen as a counterweight to China.

But it is also a major piece of business. In 20 years, India aims to increase its nuclear power 10-fold, and will rely on international businesses to do it.

This is the excellent news we've been waiting for. It unlocks a bonanza of energy business.

Edjumacation Part Two

You get what you pay for.
-- Ancient Cliche

One of the best things I ever learned as a conscious progressive in the early 90s was the name of Samuel R. Delany. Delany's Neveryon series made me think about learning and the value of education in a completely different way.

The Neveryon series is an extraordinary look at how a pre-literate society becomes literate. It is the story of princes and paupers, of warriors and slaves, of kings and chosen ones, of bondage and liberation of sex and of education. It conjures up a world on the brink of revolution and the vagueries of chance that make some men into legends and some deeds into obscurity. If you've ever considered the aphorism about history being the tales that survive, or that lions never have their histories, then the Neveryon series explores that in its entirety. This has always been significant to me politically and professionally, because I understand the power of narrative. Software, no matter how brilliant, has to be sold. Policy, no matter how brilliant, has to be sold. Jesus himself could not establish his Church without word of mouth. The stories of my black communities never got to any pages in the LA Times, as much as I and other local poets desired our end to be told. The very question of why bloggers matter less or more than published authors - who gets to write about Crips in Los Angeles, literate Crips or culture vultures? There were a thousand reasons why the forces that make a literate society literate and why that matters, have always been of paramount concern to me.

I can distinctly recall how Albert Murray said that literature was his religion. The moment reverbrates in my skull. If you asked me who I was in 1989, I'd tell you that I wrote for computers and people. But what I meant was that I wrote for people through computers - except at the time such a concept was unbelievable even for me. I saw myself as a writer and I saw the professional part as writing for the deterministic world and the poetic part as writing for the stochastic world. I have come to understand how much of the stochastic world is actually only comprehensible to the extent that it is determined by ideology and how much of the deterministic world is under hegemony, yet random and wrong.

Education is the series of hurdles and hoops over and through which much of our meritocratically oriented culture must jump in order to give our lack of power the appearance of consent. The fact that the overwhelming majority of that education can be acquired freely must always be considered when assessing its value.

I am not post-modernist. I understand the French intellectual approach to 'regimes of truth' and I recognize that most people function quite well, like global functional illiterates, only understanding a fraction of what it is they 'need' to know. How much of Shakespeare you can quote, even if perfectly relevant to the situation, doesn't matter if you live in the ghetto. You must have an audience receptive to your lingo, to your narrative, to the framework of the arc of your ambition. But that doesn't discount the value of Shakespeare. While he is convenient to the English language, those truths in his tales are indeed the truths of humanity. To not know those truths is to not know humanity, and yet because Shakespeare's body of work is not universally transcendent some have taken a Sapir-Whorf detour down a strange path. It is not language itself that bogs us down. Shakespeare is not a 'regime of truth', it is not relative. Those who understand it, do indeed understand human truth, those who don't do not. The applicability of Shakespeare depends entirely on the honesty and integrity of the instructor. Anyone who teaches that the value of truth in literature is relative is either morally crippled or dishonest. That is why post-modernism has produced such vacuous casuistry, and it is why the work of so many authors we endure leaves us hungry for more eclecticism. Eclecticism is a search for truth by people who have been poorly instructed or are consciously vested in multicultural gluttony. Pity those who consider themselves postmodern.

To be educated is to submit one's time and dollars to a system of instruction that makes a basic promise. The free public education we receive in our state and city schools function under the premises of the modern nation state. The modern nation state promises a set of material comforts under which the common man is to benefit. Our nation promises, military defense, health care, civic justice, property defense, free expression, unemployment insurance and employment skills. The nation state, underwriting its own survival teaches us to value our vote and to vote our values. It is the bond between the citizen and his nation.

But what does a private education promise? Moreover, why should anyone who knows how to make their own clothing, build their own shelter, defend their own property and feed their own family bother to participate in either citizenship or public education? I think that the answer is that people who do not own themselves fully have no better choice, but that our natural inclination would be to secede from this arrangement. More properly stated, the more independent and self-sufficient one becomes, the less value one puts in that system of education that can be had for free. That's why kings teach princes, and why queens teach princesses. They don't send them out to public school. This is what Delany investigated in Neveryon. What kind of individual starts a school in the first place, and what would he know worth teaching?

It makes sense to me to go to a Warren Buffett school of investing, to a US Marine school of self-defense. I would go to a school of driving taught by race drivers, to a class on computers taught by IBM. But what do I get from Kennedy High School or Lincoln Elementary? What would I get from Moscow University? What do they teach in finishing school in Beijing? If I homeschooled my children in Brazil, what would I teach them? What indeed does anyone need to know in this world and how do we get to know it? More curiously, what can we not know without specialized instruction? Aren't there a million things we don't understand for which we must defer to our superiors? How do they actually get to be superior anyway?

When I was a high school student, the scariest sentence I ever heard was "It's not what you know, but who you know." That's because I had complete confidence in my ability to learn anything, but I knew there were going to be secrets that I would not be taught and these were keys to kingdoms that I would never enter, much less rule. I had street wisdom, but I didn't want to rule the streets. So I became a scientist - a student of the natural world itself, armed with the discipline I would need to make my own observations, apply logic, derive my own conclusions. I became philosophical, concerned with the world of thought itself. I became a programmer, enamored of the ultimate tool created for the processing of logic, the computer. Eventually, I became a writer for people and for machines, ultimately for people through machines. And so here I am today, I daresay bold enough to suggest it's me that is a who worth knowing.  And yet I know very well that there are men I should know but don't. There are women I might have known but didn't. There are stories and narratives, fables and legends I will never hear - words equivalent to the great vivid efficiency of the language of Shakespeare that illuminate human truth no honest instructor has ever introduced me to. Or then again, it could be my own incuriosity that has walled me off from the very truth in front of my face.

Either way, I know that it is not a matter of intelligence. Intelligence is only speed and capacity. What one genius can figure out in a day, four intelligent men can figure out in a week. But if the genius never explains it to the four, well then he might as well be a madman.

I listen to what it is that people say they want from public education. Who would bother to ask that it teach them about how to avoid the moral hazards of certain economic policies? Who would bother to ask that it teach them to avoid the moral hazards of certain entertainment programs? Of certain political philosophies? Those, I think, are not part of the public education program, and it doesn't seem to be in the interest of the nation state to educate its public about certain things for free. The shape of the nation, for the freely educated citizen must be a certain thing for citizens to be content and thus grant their consent. But we in America are something larger than that.

There is no expectation, I think, in anyone's mind that our public education might instruct us honestly on how to juggle four balls or to build a nuclear trigger. While they certainly require a certain amount of intelligence and discipline to learn it is not the matter of intelligence that excludes them from the curricula of our free schools. Rather it is the appropriateness to the premises and promises of free education. We are a society who needs a certain number of bomb engineers and buskers but they do not come from the mainstream, per se. They come from people who have decided that the free education is not enough, or from those who had the privilege to know somebody who knew something of value. More likely, in those two examples, they came from somebody who read our society, saw the inevitable need, and arranged to get themselves in the right situations.

I consider education first in these meditations about our nation state and the prospects for the market state as we are in transition (perhaps) from one set of ideas about our basic capacities and fidelities to another. Clearly we are divided, and somewhat comfortable in our divisions about what our patriotism means and how we are morally justified in our positions. I don't think that the most intelligent among us value the same sorts of education, nor do we educate ourselves similarly, and the implications for those who have not yet been educated are vast considering what they will know and whom they will know. Which of these people comprises the nation that will survive?

Pelosi's Dodgeball: Rove Names Names

Last Monday when the House decided to play dodgeball with the US economy, we knew that the Democrats could have forced a party vote if they wanted to. It turns out quite truly that Pelosi was determined to let the bill fail in order to make McCain look bad for halting his campaign.

Here Rove names names. Interesting that among them are three from Chicago including Jessie Jackson Jr. who crossed his father by supporting Obama.

About That Fascist Temptation

OK this is embarrassing. I have pledged a black fraternity old school and I recognize the format, but reciting health care plan provisions? This is fringe. Pray to God that this is fringe.

I know, and I'd swear on a stack of bibles that Obama himself is not stupid enough to have anything to do with this, but I know he wants their votes and their organizing skills. Some of these kids are out there canvasing, for sure. Yike. Don't say you haven't been warned.

I Got Your Wachovia Right Here

I know that it's difficult to believe this week of parsing the utterances of politicians, that anything gets accomplished by the rest of the world, but Wells Fargo is on track to snap up the shares of Wachovia.

Now let me check my Coulda Woulda Index. I seriously considered buy Wells Fargo at about 35 bucks a share last week. The Spousal Unit flexed and told me to slow down, and I agreed. I opened up a new ETrade account anyway but I have yet to transfer any of my cash over to it. Putting my money where my mouth is, I intend to do a quick two month investment cycle and cash in for my Christmas shopping and year end bills. So now let me check what I woulda got for WFC. Better than two bucks a share. (Sigh)

I am not a day trader.

And still, I was fairly confident that I was going to buy that big hunking BRK.B. Mr. Jones gave me the thumbs up. But it was running contrarian for a couple days. When the market bounced up on Tuesday, it went down. And now it's up. My buy price was $4500. I would have made about 160 bucks. Feh.

I am not a day trader.

Like most Americans, I still can't figure out everything that's going on. When it comes to figuring the impact of derivatives and swaps in the market, there are just a whole lot of that dynamic I am still unable to connect. It's not that I can't keep my eye on any investment ball, it's rather that I'm not sure what to keep in my peripheral vision other than stocks related in the industry. So for example I know for a fact that now is a great time to drop some cash on GE and Shaw Group and maybe a Toshiba ADR for their Westinghouse unit. Why? Because India is going nuclear in a big way, and we're going to help. Buffett bought GE and that's an obvious clue.

But Wells Fargo decided to buy Wachovia like a cheap whore. Wells could probably finance the entire deal just with the money it got from depositors fleeing Washington Mutual over the past few weeks. And Citi thought, like Paul McCartney 'the girl is mine'. Apparently the FDIC may have something to say about it, but i think they should butt out. Let a bidding war break out. This is how we settle things out here in financial land. Let the shareholders decide, not the voter. Let the shareholders take the risk, not the taxpayers. Save the FDIC for another bank in trouble - Citi, put up or shut up.

People out here with cash are thinking long and hard about how much and where to invest. We are second guessing ourselves and coming up with some informed decisions. That's how this country works. Watch it.

A Question of Intelligence

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being mentally inert and 10 being beyond Einstein and five being 1000 on the SAT please answer the following questions. You are encouraged to add your own florid descriptions of the numbers you select and you may describe, a la multiple intelligences theory, exactly what kind of intelligence you mean.

A. How intelligent did you think GWBush was as a candidate for office in 2000?

B. How intelligent do you think he is now?

C. How intelligent do you think Sarah Palin is as a candidate for office now?

D. How intelligent do you think a good president has to be?

E. How intelligent do you think a satisfactory president has to be?

F. How intelligent is some world leader of your choice in comparison?

G. How intelligent do you think Barack Obama is now?

H. How intelligent do you think the average American is?

and finally

I. How intelligent do you think the average Congressman is?

Rural Free Delivery

Sarah Palin delivered. Delivered as in RFD, as in Mayberry, as in shuckins ma I got a cast iron stomach. The Republican Panic is over and the GOP is feeling way better today in the lee of the debate than when we did upwind of it. No implosion. Just Palin.

My overall take is that anybody who has paid attention to the issues learned very little from the debate. There was nothing to suggest a reframing of the issues. Red is still red and blue is still blue and I think we're all getting used to that. Nevertheless I have a number of observations and take-aways from last night's imperfect storm, as well as my radio show this morning.

The Elephant In The Room
Palin's biggest unchallenged assertion was that Obama-Biden wants to increase the federal budget by 1 Trillion dollars. I expected they would increase spending but I had no idea it was that much. That's an expansion of 30%. HUGE!. There was no counter whatsoever by Biden on that point.

Speaking to the People
It is my observation that Joe Biden never once turned to the people of America and asked them to do anything but vote for him. And I suppose the biggest point I can make about the difference between the two campaigns could be organized around this matter, but I'll leave it to the context of the debate. Palin, as I mentioned on the Barbershop this morning, talked to the working class of America and asked them to pledge that they would never again be duped by deceptive financial practices, that they would not drink the poison koolaid of Wall Street. When McCain was asked why Palin hadn't made more interviews he responded that given a choice between spending a day with American votes in their hometowns or spending an hour with some reporter on TV, he'd choose the former. Palin did in fact dismiss at least one of Ifill's questions to speak beyond her to working class American people.

Holding Back the Tears
Biden had his emotional moment and really came clean out of his deliberate, enumerative debating style to talk about his understanding of being a single parent. It was genuine and made his Home Depot and Joey at the Gas Station stories rather weak by comparison. But we get it. He's a human being.

Pointing to the Past
I think Palin did an admirable job framing the debate in such a way that Biden was at a loss to rejigger his debate tactics. Although it wasn't working for me, I could see where his categorization of 20 McCain votes against this or 94 McCain votes for that could sound definitive. Of course I know that there are any number of provisions in legislation that nullify the significance of votes, which is why Critters flip by definition. McCain votes against troop supply because there's a rider for a published timetable for withdrawal. Well of course that makes sense - and there has been no published timetable for withdrawal and the troops have been resupplied. So it's a dumb nullification of the debate point. Nobody agrees that the Congress has been doing a good job anyway - Pelosi's approval rating is below that of Bush. So it was smart of Palin to say later for those details. Again - even when it's clearly in favor of McCain who authored legislation (a distinction that almost nobody made either for McCain or against Obama - authorship, sponsorship and support of a bill are three significantly different levels of committment ) reigning in Fannie Mae, Palin passed on the scorekeeping. I read that positively - although I know many wonks hate her for those same reasons. I say a leader knows when to abstract and when to dive deep. She showed that.

McClellan vs McKiernan
The name of the commander in Afghanistan seemed to make a huge bit of difference to certain pundits. I'm merely going to say this. If memorizing names means X, then shaking hands in person means 3X squared. You know how many times Obama went to Afghanistan and Iraq to meet with military commanders as compared to McCain.

God Forbid
There are plenty of reasons to worry about what happens if the President of the US dies in office, and succession is one of them. I can't imagine which would be worse between Palin Pelosi or Biden Pelosi. Nothing ends well with Pelosi. But Palin did give us an idea what she would focus on as VP and I was quite satisfied with her three point program of pushing for energy independence, checking government and Wall Street corruption and attending to special needs children. It's not Cheneyesque and I'm confident she could handle such a charge.

Maverick Maverick Maverick
I have to laugh at Bill Handel this morning on his Right radio show, who is a huge skeptic about Palin - he's a sharp and cantankerous attorney - noticed how she did several Ronald Reaganesque 'there you go again' kind of remarks. We're the mavericks was pounded home without saying what exactly that meant. So when Biden quizzed her on differences between a McCain and the Bush Administrations, she gave up no details. Which means that Palin was not handed any iron-jawed scripts carrying the supporting messages of the campaign that she could drill into Biden's ample forehead. But she's a maverick who is all about reform and looking forward to the future.

The Most Important Election
I knew I could count on Biden to rehash that old shibboleth, but you know I really think it's not the most important election. I know that when McCain wins (wink) that he's going to get the best people from both sides of the stupid aisle to sign legislation, hopefully with no earmarks, that is going to move the country as well as it can be moved. One of the things that Biden wouldn't dare have you know is that in all 8 years of Bush's term in office he used the veto only 10 times. That is a 200 year record. The Congress has had its way, period. With all the talk about an executive branch out of control, there is nothing the Bush Administration has done running afoul of the legislative agenda. All of the experts, the best Congress we Americans could elect, have made mistakes. This election, is less important than the last election, and GWBush has done what we elected him to do in 2K4, which is bring us closer to victory in Iraq instead of cutting and running.

As a theme in this seasons bloviation, the conduct of the wars still remains important, and the differences between the parties is clear. But much of the wiggle room to second-guess Petraeus & Crocker has been squeezed out. An Obama Administration would have to lay serious misdirections to circumvent the judgment of the US military. Then again, we know the 'Betray-us' extremes.

Next
I think the debate was cordial because we all know who is in the driver's seat. It's the candidates for President. Biden's on the record criticisms of Obama don't matter that much - he has to play follow the leader no matter how much he condescends to 'be there at every meeting' with a President Obama. What matters is that Obama and McCain can't stand each other, and it shows. And I hope it shows more in the next debate. It's time to put away the side shows and let the big dogs slug it out. There's the beef.

Halo: Still Going Strong

I don't exactly remember the date when Halo3 came out. I'm not that much of a freak for the game. But I'd have to guess that it was about a year ago. Just this weekend they added a new style of gameplay and a new ranking system for the online interactive competition. I have to say, this game is still going strong.

Halo fans have been waiting for movies, eaten up books, consumed podcasts directly about and indirectly about this franchise.

On Gwen Ifill

Some people, notably Rush Limbaugh surprising no one, have complained about Gwen Ifill's role as moderator of tonight's Vice Presidential debates. Why? Because she has a book out in January about Obama. I take this not as a rallying point but as a tell.

The Right has been complaining for years now that the media is in the tank for Obama, about liberal bias and the leftiness of the mainstream media. We have known this forever. So what? Now they are not only whining but implying that Palin can't handle it.

This, my friends, is called panic.

I happen to like Ifill. She's poised and respectful, smart and what a good reporter should be. If she's biased I can't tell it. When it comes to the Right being afraid of her, then it can only mean that they're scared for Palin. I heard the generally gracious Dennis Miller skewering Catie Couric on the radio last night. By the way, if you want to hear my attitude on most any day of the week, Dennis Miller's grown ass man is the closest approximation. I smack around the Lefties but I laugh while I'm doing it. If Miller, who admittedly snaps a bit to attention watching the picture of Palin holding her baby like 'a lioness with her cub', has to take digs at reporters, something else has fallen out of his repertoire and that is the kind of respect a White House officer should have.

My guess is that the severity of the financial crisis in the American banking system has given every one a bracing cold shower. This is exactly the kind of eventuality Conservatives have been saying that the Obamas of the world were in absolutely no shape to handle. Now we have one, who's looking Presidential? Nobody. Nobody at all.

In a world where the Vice President of the US can't handle a PBS reporter, I want to have my money in a Swiss bank.

BTW. Here's a hint to the idiots on the McCain team. Remember all those times that Obama and his wife kept bragging that 'he could have had a job on Wall Street, but instead he went to the ghetto'? See if you can spin that to your advantage, you morons.

Get Off The Plantation: Evidence Exhibit 'A'

Now if there was any question that Cynthia McKinney was off her nut before, I think that question is settled now. Now you know and I know that the people moaning in sympathy to her tall tale are old black women. Of course we have no proof. But whomever the audience is to this 'testimony' about the Prison Industrial Complex, very likely people with relatives in jail, they are being hoodwinked. This is the kind of very well known conspiracy theory stuff that passes for political thought in many black communities, and like McKinney herself, has been bankrolled and empowered by the Democrat Party.

As you know. lots of people ask what the Republican Party is going to do for black communities. And one of the stock answers is that it will free them from the deprivations of the Democrat's induced Plantation Mentality. If you ever hear this kind of political speechification in your community. Run! Run as fast as you can to Republican safety.

Nutter Alert Buzzphrase: Prison Industrial Complex

700 Billion vs The Slacker Life

What can you do with 700 Billion? You could get the rescue of the American financial system under way or:

• You could buy houses for about 3% of American households.
• You could buy 1/3 of the assets of Citibank.
• You could pay for every American's Unemployment and Medicare benefits for 11 months.
• You could be the EU for 19 days.
• You could pay for the world's oil consumption for about a day.

Most folks are not used to dealing with numbers that big. I know that I'm not. But it's not the biggest number, and nowhere near the biggest number that the world of finance deals with. The FDIC, for example, estimates that the assets on deposit of the US banking system is about 11 Trillion. And with current banking rules, those can be leveraged 10 to one. Which means American banks (not including investment banks) could conceivably manage 110 Trillion of credit.

110 Trillion of credit in the US represents a whole lot of trust. Do we trust each other that much? If we don't, then the whole system can come crashing down. The fact of the matter is that we have indeed been trusting each other that much, without much thinking about it - in fact laughing about it. Now suddenly everybody is serious. Or are we?

If the shit hits the fan, we just live like slackers, for 20 years. No promises of fidelity so that we live up to expectations - just no expectations. No credit where credit is due.  But you already knew this.