"Kramer" Runs For City Council

Jonah Goldberg tweets:

Fundraiser for my brother was great fun. Very strange mix of folks there. But a success over all. Goldberg for City Council!
about 9 hours ago from web

When the King's Jester from the Land Of Bat-Shit Crazy says the crowd is weird, be very afraid. Electing The Other Jonah, an ex-tour guide, to public office would be like electing the real Kramer. You could do it for the laughs but in the end Lucianne would have to clean up the mess, and, much like the Grand Canyon, she's not as young as she used to be.

Still At Work

This is killing me. I have to work while Megan McArdle has a wedding post and more Matt Taibbi insults up. I'll get to them later.

That's Entertainment!

We are behind in our mocking. Let's see what Megan McArdle is up too. Hmmm, a tribute video of Monty Python. Does McArdle really like Monty Python or is she just trying to fit in with her liberal friends? On the one hand they are British and upper class, which is Good. But they also make fun of the British and upper class, as well as everyone else. That's Bad. Plus they are anarchic, which is Bad, and some of them were scathing critics of Bush. That's Very Bad. I'll vote for "fake tribute." Moving on.

Gourmet is dead, and McArdle is "shocked and horrified." Since torture didn't shock or horrify her, I'm very impressed. Gourmet must have been a heck of a cooking magazine.

Conde is keeping the decidedly mediocre Bon Appetit, which might be described as "things you can make your girlfriend for Valentine's Day without setting the kitchen on fire." Conde may be making the right commercial choice--maybe America's food culture has slipped so far that there's no real reason to publish a magazine aimed at people who are willing to spend all day making a meal. All I know is, when I go onto Epicurious, and I have a choice between a recipe from Gourmet and a recipe from Bon Appetit, I choose the former--and the few times I've violated this rule, I've always been disappointed with the results.

Remember when McArdle talked about "New York food culture"? That was funny. McArdle seems to think her own likes and dislikes, as well as those of her friends, embody the entire nation's "food culture." Now we're supposed to believe that Bon Appetit is bourgeois because McArdle prefers Gourmet. Why? We are not graced with a reason beyond McArdle's personal taste. We need no further authority or explanation.

Here is more Food!Megan, for your enjoyment. (Remember, children, cooking sherry is not as good as drinking sherry!) And, here, if you can stomach precious young Julian Sanchez's precociousness, is the famed cooking contest that McArdle mentions during her macaroni and cheese recipe post. I lasted about five minutes but I have a high tolerance level for pain, so use caution.

The Utter Moral Bankruptcy Of Our Elite Us

The first thing we have to remember is that we will not get national health care. Politicians spend millions to get elected. The money comes from corporations. The corporations are making that money by selling us insurance we can't afford and kicking us off the rolls when we need that insurance. The medical industry also makes billions off of us. They bought the politicians and no amount of $200 grass-roots donations will change that. Politicians need to know that when they need millions the millions will be there and they turn to corporations for that money, not the little people. Our grassroots are just as fake as the Republicans' grass-roots, for the exact same reason.

The left lies to itself just like the mouth-breathing morons on the right. They act just as naively, ignorantly, and idiotically trusting as the Michelle Malkin followers, as the weeping Glenn Becks, as the 70-year-old Medicare recipients who want the government out of their health care. They are every bit as deluded and dangerous. We are every bit as deluded and dangerous, because like the right we lie to ourselves. We refuse to admit the truth--we have traded our freedom for credit cards and health benefits. We have let them kill us off for money, and if we thought about it we would be so ashamed of ourselves that we would not be able to function. So we don't think.

We are going through a replication of the bank bail-out scheme. The right whips itself into a tizzy about moronic issues like dogs chewing over red meat their masters tossed to them to keep them busy. The left discusses the "issues," debating the best way to achieve their goals, arguing over more and more trivial gains which they will never get anyway. Meanwhile the elite continue to rake in billions while the peasants bicker among themselves. They consolidate banks, run up debt to be paid by the tax-payer, build fortified compounds with private security firms, and set the peasants against each other in amusing pit matches. How they must have laughed at the tea-partiers, fighting so vigorously and emotionally to be bent over and screwed by the elite. They must have been choking on their Crystal and Sapphire martinis, overcome with laughter as the boobs in the streets begged to be ripped off by their betters.

And the left has been no less amusing. See how they run in fear as they are being murdered by the frenzy of hate, bought and paid for by the likes of Steve Forbes and Dick Armey! They are so cowed that they are afraid to even raise their voices against lynchings! Shhhhh, mustn't be shrill! Mustn't embarrass one's peers, or risk being criticized by someone on the internet whom we depend on for links or approval or acceptance to the liberal club! Most of all we must never say that the powerful laugh at us, mock us, steal from us, send us off to die in wars, watch us collapse of illness and die in the streets or cheap apartments. No, we must lie instead.

We lie about our country. We are not the best and brightest. We are vain, greedy and murderous. We lie about God. There aren't any and we know it. But hey, maybe there is and maybe we'll get something out of it at some time. And it's useful for keeping the stupid masses in line. Plus people would fight back and that's hard and unpleasant and hey, let's have another glass of wine. We lie about our families. Our parents treated us like crap but we still want them to love us, still want to inherit their property (what's left of it), so what the hell, better not remind them of all the times they called us stupid, said we'd never amount to anything, hit us, used us, manipulated us. If we don't have them to kick us around love, who will we have?

Our elite are killing us. And we are handing them the rope, writing FED on our chests, wrapping our mouth, ankles and hands in duct tape, and for our final act, telling our fellow citizens to not investigate, because you never know, our imminent death could be a suicide. Which, come to think of it, it is.

Work Day

Too much work today to post further.

Arthur Silber says war is always a choice and the decision is always based on politics, not "intelligence." It's clear that war with Iran is unnecessary, even if they do get nukes. Iran has pointed out that countries without nukes are invaded by the US and countries with nukes are not, so it seems entirely sane for them to pursue nukes--whether or not they are doing so now. Also, they have no desire to be The Country Formerly Known As Iran And Currently Known As A Sheet Of Nuclear-Blast Glass, which is what would happen if they actually obtained and used a nuke.

Megan McArdle seems to be dialing down the stupidity a little of late. (She'd have a hard time increasing the stupidity from her current level and it's something she should have thought about a very long time ago.) But don't worry, she's still Our Megan.

I'm not sure we can fix this problem without knowing the answer to the question we've been asking for a year now: why did the ratings agencies underestimate the tail risk, and is that reason fixable?

For money. That is rather obvious.

The Brilliant Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell embarrasses himself in his latest Townhall essay. He writes that brainy people are dangerous--just look at FDR, Robert MacNamara, Hitler, and Juan Peron, who were all smart people who did stupid things.

There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.

Such people have been told all their lives how brilliant they are, until finally they feel forced to admit it, with all due modesty. But they not only tend to over-estimate their own brilliance, more fundamentally they tend to over-estimate how important brilliance itself is when dealing with real world problems.

Many crucial things in life are learned from experience, rather than from clever thoughts or clever words. Indeed, a gift for the clever phrasing so much admired by the media can be a fatal talent, especially for someone chosen to lead a government.

Does Sowell know that his fellow-travelers often call him brilliant? I hope he isn't too insulted. Sowell rose from poverty through his intelligence and hard work. He was a Marine and photographer, went from GED to doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, and must be a remarkable man. He probably has both street and book smarts, which makes it very sad to see him write such puerile, anti-intellectual boiler-plate garbage. He is obviously capable of much more yet prefers to flatter the proudly ignorant and pass on the wisdom of the failed thinkers of the Chicago School.

Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama's style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots-- the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world's largest banana republic?

He should be ashamed of himself.

Political Abortions

Megan McArdle finds something in the health care debate to agree with.

I think that not paying for abortions is morally and politically correct; you cannot use public money to subsidize an activity that half the public thinks is something akin to murder. Even if Democrats win this battle, the minute the Republicans get control, they'll just undo it. If you think crowding out is real, then you need to accept the fact that national health care may reduce access to this particular procedure. Maybe Republicans could learn to love this plan after all . . .

Do you know I think is akin to murder? Murder. Yet I am forced to pay for our murder of innocent Iraqi women and children and unborn babies. Somehow the right never seems to think of that while weeping over all the dead babies.

Mistakes

I took down the anti-pope post because it needed too many corrections. Stupid facts, getting in the way of my erroneous rant.

What's Shaking, Jonah?

Jonah Goldberg tweets:

bellweather? For first time, Reagan Nat airport stores now fronting anti-Obama t-shirts. "Don't Blame Me I Voted For McCain
about 1 hour ago from API

The Reagan National Airport had pro and anti-Obama t-shirts when I was there in June. Goldberg could investigate and discover the facts of the situation, but that would cut into his lunch and drinking time, so I understand why he has no idea what he's talking about.

Every time I see Goldberg I'm tempted to shout, "Norm!" Or maybe "Morn!"

Fairy Dust

Shorter Ross Douthat: If Obama closes his eyes real tight and claps his hands real hard and really believes, he'll magically win in an impossible situation.



Why bother with facts and reality when superstition works so well? When choosing belief over reason is so satisfying, especially when someone else suffers the consequences?

Sweet Blessed Relief

Ohthankgod, Megan McArdle has stopped blogging about economics. I'm thrilled for her. Finally she has realized her limitations and has accepted her path in life, to give womanly moralizing lectures to her flock and concern troll the left. No doubt she out buying skirts that go below the knees and pill-box hats as we speak.

Roman Polanski has been arrested on his 32-year old statutory rape charge and is scheduled for deportation to the United States.

[yip]

The French, too, have forgiven him of course....You would think we'd busted him for unpaid parking tickets. The guy drugged a thirteen year old girl in order to rape her. Perhaps the French have some sophisticated, European point of view on these things that I, with my puritan ancestry, simply cannot rise to. [my bold]

Miss Megan McArdle, Irish Catholic daughter of immigrants, most of whom fled the potato famine in the 1840s or came over in a great wave at the turn of the century, who would have been looked down upon as a dirty, Popish Johnny-Come-Lately by the Protestants who had been in America for generations, hearkens back to her fake-Puritan ancestry to declare that Europe is too sophisticated and European and immoral and therefore offends her deep, moral, fake-Puritan soul. Why not Catholic morality? Is that not hip enough for her?

BREAKING!: Damn! I spoke too soon.

Shorter Miss Megan Mary Margaret O'Leary McArdle: The FHA is to blame for the economic crash.

Will We Fight Now?

Some news about the lynched census taker has surfaced.

A part-time census worker found hanging in a rural Kentucky cemetery was naked, gagged and had his hands and feet bound with duct tape, said an Ohio man who discovered the body two weeks ago.

Authorities have also said the word "fed" was scrawled with a felt-tip pen across 51-year-old Bill Sparkman's chest, but they have released very few details about the case and said investigators have not determined if it was a homicide, suicide or an accident.

Someone at the scene said his census ID was duct-taped to his body.

When an authority gives permission to attack, there are consequences.

Earlier this summer, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) waged a high-profile, wildly-dishonest campaign against the Census. The Minnesota congresswoman said she was so worried about the threat of the government asking “very intricate questions” and collecting information that she would illegally refuse to fill out the form. “They will be in charge of going door to door and collecting data from the American public,” she said. “This is very concerning.” She repeatedly used inflammatory and fear-mongering rhetoric against the Census:

– “I think there is a point when you say enough is enough to government intrusion.” [6/25/09]

– “If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps.” [6/25/09]

“You will receive approximately six contacts from them [Census workers], either through phone calls or they will knock on your door. If you still do not give them the information, they said they’ll contact your neighbor to the left of you, to the right of you to get information.” [6/25/09]

Bachmann’s irrational diatribes about scary stalking Census workers quickly spawned a right-wing movement. During an interview with Bachmann, Fox News’ Glenn Beck said, “Ok, so let me talk about the Census because there’s a lot of people that are concerned with it because they don’t want to fill it out, they’re not comfortable with ACORN members coming to find out all this information, they don’t want to give the government all this kind of information.”

Apparently Bachmann is mostly funded through the far right.

Michele Bachmann (R)
Contributor Total
Club for Growth $92,630
Susan B Anthony List $15,201
TCF Financial $14,600
Verizon Communications $11,000
ACA International $10,000
American Crystal Sugar $10,000
Associated Builders & Contractors $10,000
Campaign for Working Families $10,000
Cmte for the Preservation of Capitalism $10,000
Credit Union National Assn $10,000
Eagle Forum $10,000
Every Republican is Crucial PAC $10,000
Freedom Club of America $10,000
Help America's Leaders $10,000
House Conservatives Fund $10,000
Keep Our Majority PAC $10,000
Koch Industries $10,000
Longhorn PAC $10,000
Majority Initiative-Keep Electing Repubs $10,000
National Assn of Home Builders $10,000
National Auto Dealers Assn $10,000
National Beer Wholesalers Assn $10,000
National Fedn of Independent Business $10,000
Northstar Leadership PAC $10,000
People for Enterprise/Trade/Econ Growth $10,000
Texas Freedom Fund $10,000
Together for Our Majority $10,000
United Parcel Service $10,000

Koch. What a surprise. No Tea-bagger Left Behind, I guess.

Consequences

Number of Megan McArdle posts savoring the fall of ACORN: 3

Number of posts decrying the murder of a census taker: 0

I'm not sure why an economics writer is discussing ACORN at all. But since the right is whipping up hysteria about ACORN and its assistance in recruiting census takers and a census worker was lynched with the word "FED" on his chest, it would only be equitable and fair--and wise--to point out the consequences of that hysteria.

I won't hold my breath.

Speaking of consequences, I see that yet another person has died for lack of health care. But she was young, and Megan McArdle has said that young people don't need health care, so I guess she can just ignore that person's death as well.

No wonder she can't sleep at night.

UPDATE: McArdle posts on the killed census worker, to say that it's unlikely he was killed by a right-winger because they have nothing against the census.

She's paid to be a "journalist," by the way.

Pharma Chameleon

Good Heavens, Megan McArdle is still trying to convince people she wasn't lying about health care innovation. If she doesn't learn to let go she's not going to have a very good marriage with young Mr. Suderman.

When I was talking about pharma's role in innovation, a lot of people confused this with being pro-pharma.

No, mainly we thought you were pulling statistics out of your ass. We just assumed that lying to support pharma meant you supported pharma.

The implication was that I should be in favor of anything that's good for Big CDrugs.

Are you on Big CDrugs right now, or are you just an unprofessional writer?

This is sort of like thinking that because I like watching Derek Jeter play baseball, I would also enjoy watching him stab a puppy to death.

Drugs it is.

Hence I am not happy, but outraged, by this:

Time for a brief comment on health care reform, now that Sen. Baucus has presented a bill to the Finance Committee (which, to be sure, I believe has already attracted over 500 proposed amendments). As is well known, the largest drug industry trade group, PhRMA, signed on to the whole idea of a large reform effort early, in exchange for a seat at the table (and a chance to make things go favorably). How's that working out so far?

As Steve Usdin at Biocentury writes, the answer is "fairly blatantly"...

[snip]

The tax put on medical devices by this bill has already been noted widely in the press, and I see that Sen. Kerry is already objecting to that provision - naturally enough, since Massachusetts has some big players in that area. The Senators from Guidant and Medtronics (also known as Indiana and Minnesota) are speaking up as well. The trade association for that industry (AdvaMed) apparently couldn't come to terms with Washington, so this tax is their reward - which, in a nutshell, is the sort of thing that keeps gradually turning me into a libertarian.

Profits are good when they result from providing a service people want.

That's not what you said before. You said Americans had to pay higher prices for drugs than Europeans because those profits financed innovation, which would save millions of lives in the future. The natural inference is that any higher American profits lead to more innovation.

When they are the result of capturing the government by cutting special deals, they're immoral and inefficient. And this is just the beginning . . .

Because special deals with corporations are a brand-new innovation, never tried before, and certainly not an issue when Bush cut a deal with pharma to pay full price for Medicare drugs.

The entire health insurance industry is immoral and inefficient, yet McArdle says we must keep it as it is or millions will die. She has no problem with that.

Tune in next week, when McArdle discovers that people are dying in Afghanistan and declares it's all Obama's fault.

In Money We Trust

When something goes terribly wrong the only smart thing to do is find out what happened and prevent the event from reoccurring. It is completely illogical and extremely dangerous to declare that nobody should try to find out the cause of disasters. It's like watching New Orleans drown but refusing to find out why the city flooded. A sane, honest person would want to know what happened so the city doesn't flood again. She would determine the cause of the flood, determine what needed to be repaired and how, and investigate how to prevent the event from happening again. But if you're Megan McArdle you would encourage people to move back into the old neighborhood and do nothing else, because finding out the reason is too hard, the flood couldn't have been prevented anyway, and nobody is responsible because everyone is responsible.

McArdle clings to an incredibly weak argument to make her point.

[F]inancial meltdowns don't offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system.

There were many reasons and no villains, and the bad practices that led to financial disaster were okay because everyone was doing it and everyone thought it would work.

[Matt Taibi] complains about CDO's on the grounds that Goldman hid the atrocious risks inside a fancy dan derivative package that no one could understand. But in fact, everyone was aware that CDO's were repackaging crap mortgages--that was the point. The idea was pure portfolio theory, broadly agreed upon by everyone involved. Everyone knew a lot of the mortgages might go bad, either by defaulting or prepaying. (This is a risk for bankers, who don't like the idea that if interest rates drop, their 7% mortgage might suddenly turn into a pile of non-interest-bearing cash which can only be invested at 5%.) But if you pool the risk, only some of the bonds will go bad, while others pay off. The result is a less risky, less volatile investment than any individual junk mortgage bond. And it would have worked, too, if it hadn't been for those crazy kids a collapse in the housing market of a scale not seen since the Great Depression.

Taibbi anticipated strawman arguments like McArdle's before she made them.

I’ve been shocked by how many grown adult people seem to have swallowed this argument, that the argument against Goldman’s behavior during the bubbles of recent decades is invalid because “everyone was doing it” — and other banks, like for instance Morgan Stanley, were “just as bad” as Goldman was.

Two things about that. One, it isn’t true, not really. By any reasonable measure Goldman is and has been the baddest guy on the block for a long time. When it comes to government influence, no other Wall Street company even comes close. And while maybe one might have made an argument that other players were more damaging to society before the crisis of last year, there’s simply no question now, after the bailouts and especially after the AIG fiasco, that Goldman now reigns supreme in the area of insider advantage. To pick any other bank to tell the story of the rapidly growing influence of Wall Street on politics and the blurring of public and private roles would be a glaring journalistic oversight, and surely even Goldman’s biggest supporters would admit this.

Two, even if it is true that “everyone else was doing it”: so what? Who cares? To me this response is highly telling. We published a piece accusing Goldman Sachs of systematically ripping off pensioners and other retail investors by sticking them with rafts of toxic mortgages it knew were losers, of looting taxpayer reserves to cover its bad bets made with AIG, of manipulating gas prices to massive detrimental effect, of helping to explode an internet bubble that caused over $5 trillion in wealth to disappear, and numerous other crimes — and the response isn’t “You’re wrong,” or “We didn’t do that shit, not us,” but “Well, Morgan did the same stuff,” and “Why aren’t you writing about Morgan?”

Why didn’t we write about Morgan? Because we didn’t. Because it’s your turn, you assholes.

Barry Ritholz read McArdle's claim that no one/everyone was to blame with disbelief.

I don’t really get Megan McArdle when she makes a statement such as the one above. It was in an article critiquing Matt Taibbi and defending Goldman Sachs.

Um, Megan, I am going to have to beg to differ with you. There were many, many identifiable villains who through their own action and inaction, helped create the crisis. There were people who remained slavishly devoted to an outmoded and disproven ideology, which led them to decisions that were indefendable. Some people engaged in utter recklessness when it came to risk management, or such gross irresponsibility that they are not merely morally culpable, but legally also. Then there are those regulators who gave the corporate interests they supervised pretty much everything they asked for. And of course, the people simply trying to grab a free lunch contributed mightily to the collapse.

I have 322 well researched pages that shows as much.

Goldman Sachs was but one of the 5 biggest investment banks that requested from the SEC, and received, an exemption from the net cap rules. This allowed their leverage to balloon from 12-to-1 to as much as 40-to-1.

As a nation, we need to stop pretending this is “too complicated” and start holding the responsible parties accountable . . .

That is the last thing McArdle wants to do. She claims to not understand his point.

Ritholtz is not, in many of these cases, describing villainy. He is describing "being wrong", which is not a crime, thank God. Villainy involves people who know, or should have known, that what they were doing was likely to lead to the awful results.

I mean, you can quibble and say "You should have known[...]", and indeed you should have, but if, for whatever reason, your senses deluded you, you're not a villain. No, even if you were thinking about the presentation you had due at work--or how angry you were at your husband for having a fling with his secreatary--rather than concentrating on your driving.

When something is common enough, I think it definitionally isn't villanous. It may be a practice that should be fixed--we should all be more careful when starting our cars, I'm sure. But most of us have, at some point in our lives, accidentally stepped on the gas instead of the brake. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, this is not a huge problem, or even a problem at all--we run into the curbstone, or roar out of the driveway a little too fast. We don't punish people merely because, through a fluke of circumstance, the one time THEY did it happened to be fatal. Or at least, we shouldn't.

Remember that McArdle is habitually wrong. She was wrong on Bush (twice), wrong on Iraq, wrong on almost every aspect leading up to the financial crises, wrong on the bank bailout, and wrong on health care innovation. She can't even understand an article on securitization. She's even wrong on cooking. The last thing she can afford is for people who are wrong to be held accountable for their actions. She'd be managing a Payless shoe store in Trenton if that were the case.

But why is she so very wrong so very often? Because she doesn't think for herself. She depends on consensus to give her her opinions, just like she depends on other blogs to tell her what to write about or what to think. Like all authoritarian followers she's afraid to think for herself and goes along with what she's told or what her peers think. Authoritarian followers were not permitted to form their own opinions; they were forced to agree with the opinions of their authority, so they are unaccustomed to examining an argument and coming to a conclusion. That conclusion might contradict what they are told and authoritarians can't let that happen, throwing everything they think they know into question and forcing them into the terrifying position of having to think for themselves for maybe the first time. The fact that she is being paid to not think is just gravy.

For some reason know only to McArdle and her god, she has chosen the financial industry as her authority. They are the parent who cannot fail her and must be supported at all costs, no matter how abusive they are. The people of Wall Street and DC who nearly created a Great Depression Part 2 (and who still might) must be absolved of all blame, or else the entire imaginary world in McArdle's head will be threatened.

There are two basic narratives of what happened. The first is that bankers had bad incentives: they took massive risks because the profits were so good in the up years that it was worth the risk of the bad, or because they could pass the risks onto some other sucker, or they thought Uncle Sugar would bail them out. The other narrative is that bankers had bad information: they didn't understand the risks they were taking.

I've always preferred narrative B, because Narrative A doesn't make much sense. The CEOs of big banks lost vast sums of money, and their jobs, most of their social status, and so forth. They held onto the worst tranches of their securities, which implies they didn't know how badly they were going to blow up. Etc.

I find it vastly more plausible, if not so comforting, to believe that systems can occasionally produce bad results even if the incentives basically point in the right direction. The FICO score revolution was valuable, but we took it too far. The money sloshing around US markets disguised the problems, because people who got into trouble tapped their home equity, or in a pinch, sold the house at a tidy profit. Everyone from borrowers to regulators was getting the same bad signal, that their behavior was much less risky than it actually was.

That doesn't mean that nothing can be done. Maybe we decide we want a less complex financial system. But it won't be because there's some villain manipulating everything into ruin; rather, we may decide that there are certain kinds of risks we can trust ourselves to handle.

I'm not sure that this would work, and I'm skeptical that it's a good idea. But the more time we waste trying to figure out who did us wrong, the less quickly we will arrive at an actual solution.

Not everyone has McArdle's neurotic need to support the banks.

A failure to prosecute the "villains" responsible for the financial crisis that brought the United States to its knees will leave the country without the moral compass needed to avert future crises, a Wall Street luminary said.

Pioneer hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt is angry that the bailout of America is eroding the nation's capitalist ethos while those whose deeds crippled the U.S. economy suffer scant opprobrium, their names still untarnished.

"Something really went wrong here. We're about to enter a period where our budget deficit will dwarf anything we've seen before," Steinhardt told the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit in New York.

"What we really needed a long time ago was a recognition that there were villains apace. The evils of the financial system should have been recognized long before this," said Steinhardt, who no longer manages billions of dollars but whose counsel is sought on Wall Street and among select politicians.

Steinhardt, who is a bit of a villain himself, lists Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, the American public, and many others. He has no problem naming names and calling for accountability.

"The question is, What's going to come of this, if there are going to be no villains?" he said.

"Is Hank Greenberg a villain?" Steinhardt said, referring to the former chief executive of insurer American International Group, recipient of a $152 billion federal bailout after it suffered massive losses mainly on complex securities tied to mortgages that had declined in value.

He rattled off other names: James "Jimmy" Cayne, former CEO and chairman of defunct investment bank Bear Stearns Cos, whose unsustainable leverage in two failed hedge funds sparked the crisis in summer 2007.

And Richard Fuld, ex CEO of failed investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., whom Steinhardt said he saw last week in a restaurant "happy as a hero, blowing kisses."

Finally, he asked, referring to the senior counselor of Citigroup and a former Treasury secretary under Clinton. "Is Bob Rubin a villain? Still at Citibank? Is he a villain? You can't name a villain? Is this a villain-less debacle?"

Although a friend of Clinton, Steinhardt knocked Barack Obama's pick of ex-Clinton officials for key positions in his administration. The choices reveal a deep lack of substance on the president-elect's part, he said.

"We have a new president who I find to be an absolute tabula rasa in terms of his knowledge of anything," he said, referring to Obama as a blank slate.

"Pay attention to what Obama says and you will find he hardly ever says anything of consequence."

Steinhardt also railed against Congress, where the quality of intellect "is not exactly awing."

"It seems to me that the intellectual level that we are surrounded with both in government and in the industry is exceptionally low at the moment, it makes me angry."

Not everybody ignores reality, however, not even in The Atlantic.

Here's the synopsis: Financial innovation produced a vast network of complicated asset-backed securities traded among what insiders call "shadow banks," or unregulated banks. Shadow banks looking to park cash where it would hold value
and earn interest created a short-term securities market -- much like a checking
account. But unlike a regular FDIC-insured checking accounts, these deposits
would not be guaranteed by the government. So investors borrowing from this
shadow depository system had to put up collateral. And they chose ... their
asset backed securities.

Why is that dangerous? Because in the shadow banking industry, these deposits, backed by sub-prime mortgages instead of the FDIC, acted as money. Banks relied on it for transactions. "Subprime morgage debt had entered the money supply." But then the housing bubble burst. Depositors dumped their assets to raise cash and tried to withdraw their money,raiding the shadow depository market, and the money supply crashed.

McArdle is still claiming that financial innovations weren't a problem. She is wrong, as she is wrong about so many things. Here McArdle either deliberately out of dishonesty or accidently out of stupidity thinks she's found support for her claim that sliced and diced mortgage securities did not contribute to the economic crises. McArdle also wrote an irrelevent article claiming banker pay had nothing to do with the crises, claiming bankers' pay is so high because they must take so many risks with huge amounts of money. She does not mention how they ran to the government when their bets went bad, invalidating her theory.

McArdle has written so many tediouus words defending the indefensible. She has danced around pretending to be impartial, criticizing insane mouthpieces like Glenn Beck for balance while supporting the financial elite. It's just an insane waste of words, of time, of money. We are drowing and McArdle is shoving our heads under water, telling is that this is how it has to be, for our own good. And it works. Sensible people still find it nearly impossible to believe that our elite are perfectly willing to watch us suffer and slowly die, as long as they get rich in the process. The truth is too painful to accept, so they choose to believe the lies instead.

Burying the Lede

Megan McArdle says:

Advertising has plummeted for most publications (although, of course, she noted modestly, the Atlantic actually recently enjoyed its best ad month ever).

What McArdle doesn't say:

Coming off a difficult first half that saw ad pages slide 24.6 percent compared to the same period last year, The Atlantic said its July-August "Ideas” issue, on newsstands now, pulled in the most ad revenue of any issue in the magazine’s history.

The Atlantic has always lost money.

Atlantic Media is a private company and profitable, thanks to the National Journal, a political publication with a Capitol Hill readership, which commands subscription fees of $1,600 a year. The Atlantic, with a circulation around 400,000, is known for its lengthy original reports that run to thousands of words. It has lost $12 million in its worst years under Bradley but should lose less than $5 million this year [2007], he said.

The economy is much worse now than in 2007, which no doubt is why ad revenues are down almost 25%. McArdle might want to rethink her immodesty.

Moderation and Civility

Our lords and masters, our political/financial elite, had a serious dilemma last year. They had successfully manipulated markets and blown bubbles, raking in billions. Consequently the middle class lost a big chunk of their investments, land wealth and pensions and the lower class lost jobs. When that money was gone the elite had the Fed to print up more money to be paid back by future generations, like a bad boyfriend who steals your wallet and runs up your credit cards before he leaves you. But all good things come to an end, and the elite knew that even American rubes can get suspicious, angry and dangerous. So they began to plan. Peter Suderman, in Reason in 2008:

[I]t’s crucial for the right to defend itself against accusations of wholesale capture by the corporate-lobbying complex (and release itself if and where that capture exists). Part of that might mean, as [David] Frum seems to imply, severing some existing corporate ties. Part of that might mean tactical redirection of the anti-corporate sentiment that has come as a natural result of the recent string of bailouts. It will definitely mean highlighting stories like this one, which showcase the ways that, far from reducing corporate influence on government, a Democratic Washington has in many ways been a boon to the lobbying world. My good friend Tim Carney, newly of the DC Examiner, does this more consistently than just about anyone. I continue to foresee (and hope!) that his ideas, and hopefully his work, become a major strain of thinking on the right.

The tea-bagging protests, funded by Suderman's former organization FreedomWorks (which is funded by corporations), whipped up fury over government actions. Others are doing the same against ACORN, the census, whatever will strike a cord in the stupid and paranoid Republican base. The monsters who incite violence ignore possible repercussions because they can; Democrats are afraid to even touch stories like the lynching of a census worker, hanged with the word "fed" scrawled across his chest. They don't want to be premature, they're terrified to be wrong, they don't want to make a fuss and look silly. Republicans would be calling for martial law if it happened to them, but they only care about winning, while Democrats want to be fair and measured and balanced and thoughtful and wise. Republicans have declared open season on liberals, carrying guns at town hall meetings, hanging politicians in effigy, and railroading them into jail. The liberals let them. After all, they don't want to be premature.

At the conservative paranoia site Infowars.com, someone posts a You Tube video titled "Census taker caught with a GPS device." From the comments:

anthony Reply:
i had that guy at my door, he asked a few questions if it was a single residence, but yes he did have a friggen gps, i saw it, it was not a ups notebook, it was a scrolling map, so much for the old paper trail with just names and numbers, i dont care anymore, they can have this body, do wutever you want you nwo scumbags, either way i win u lose and Jesus rocks

Dante Reply:
next time dont be pussies standing in the doorway …get in this fuckers face with that camera get the real footage its …first amendment freedom of the press…this guys pressing on your door with a GPS tracker…so if there gonna get you there gonna get you …STAND UP!!!

Points out dumb asses Reply:
Hell yea!!!! Get in this dudes face! He’s on your property! Until these pathetic bastards take it from us, it is STILL OURS!!!!!! USA!!!

mattconner Reply:
exactly what i was going to say, fuck him and every one else when you are in your house it dosent matter if the queen of the netherlands is at your door you can film her or who ever the hell else is with her, and what does this census worm think he is doing? the entire planet is already gps mapped! WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK GOOGLE MAPS IS? THIS PUKE IS LITERALY PAINTING THE TARGET FOR THE ANTI PATRIOT AIRSTRIKES AGAINST THE AMERIKAN PEOPLE! i wish one of these earth worshiping corbonophobics would come to my door when im home and ask me if i dare question his lordships” polasaays”

Ill see you son of a bitches in the trenches

Nick Reply:
Don’t you dare LET THEM HAVE your body! In a country with habeas corpus, “you may keep the body!!!!”

One who knows Reply:
I had the same GPS toting fool show up at my driveway and I requested to see his identification. It was elementary to say the least a silly white badge with his signature on the back. Nothing official whatsoever. I asked him to leave my property. He replied I have permission to enter your property and take GPS readings. I got right in his face and told him I request respectively one more time to leave my property immediately. He jumped back in his truck and left.

Only a fool would allow the New World Order to come up and take GPS readings at your front door. There is nothing good to come from big Brothers constant meddling into our lives!

Beware, and carry a big stick… preferably .308 Winchester full metal jacket

Spook45 Reply:
HERE HERE!! I have to resinate that point as well. I dont think anyone would have had anything to say if OBAHHHHMA hadnt taken the Census away from the people who have always done it and given to his private little Gestapo(Acorn) the problem here is that it falls right in line with all of his other dirty little power grab antics and it quite frankly scares the crap out of people who have any sense at all. IF IT AINT BROKE DONT FIX IT. The census was fine where it was and with whom it was and it didnt need to be tampered with unless there was some alternative agenda

endTHEwar Reply:
it’s not the worker that you are standing up to, it’s what they represent and the threat they pose to our liberty.

did the british tax collector deserve to be tarred and feathered in Boston, 1774? probably not, but it sure sent a signal to other tax collectors and to the royal crown.

JJ Alaska Reply:
First off NO the census is NOT done the same as 1790, you have been lied too, only a head count was taken and only a head count is allowed to be taken.

Secondly, the questionaire, that is not the job of the census, it is not legal unless it has ONE AND ONLY ONE question , how many ADULTS occupy this residence, PERIOD THAT IS IT.

You census workers may be just collecting a pay check, but that does not justify or forgive anyone working for them , that knowingly and willing aids the enemy at the cost of the safety and security of fellow americans.

Just doing my job , it no different an excuse then just following orders, and that NEVER justifies a wrong. As some of the Nazi’s attempted that arguement and still thankfully hanged high for there crimes.

oldnamvet Reply:
I am a old man but I pretty much know that if your home is in a GPS system,they could target you from the air very easy,with a missle or whatever.By the way that retard working for the govt did sound and talk like a dipshit retard.I think I would invite him in and ask to see his drivers liscense,so I could look him up at a later time for treason or hangen.

Why would these morons think that ACORN is taking down names to bomb Americans?

[Michelle]Bachmann [(R-MN) ]explained that her fears over the Census were in large part due to the fact that her Number-One Enemy, ACORN, could possibly be involved. (The group might help recruit some of the 1.4 million people needed to go door-to-door to count every American.) She insinuated that former senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) had lost his reelection bid because of “fraudulent votes” perpetrated by ACORN:

BACHMANN: This is what ACORN will do. They will get multiple fraudulent voter registration forms, stuff the registrar’s office with them, in hopes that maybe not all fraudulent registrations will find people at the polls voting. But there may be some people who get through. And sometimes you don’t often need many in order to sway an election one way or another. I come from Minnesota. We’re still in a recount with our U.S. Senate race between Sen. Norm Coleman and the challenger Al Franken. Sen. Coleman won the race on election day, but that was challenged repeatedly, over and over, with what we feel may be fraudulent vote [sic], and we’re very concerned about what comes forward.

Hardly anybody is condemning this murder. He was found hanging from a tree--lynched--with the word "FED" written on his chest, yet everyone is stroking their chin and saying that we don't know if it was murder, we don't know if it was because he was a census taker, we need to wait and see. (And are we really sure he's dead? Yes, the man is no longer actually moving and the body has decomposed, but let's wait to be sure!) What are people waiting for? Are the afraid that the dead man was killed by someone who hated the feds generally, and not specifically? These people see people employed by the government every day--teachers, mail carriers, cops, and many, many more. They weren't killed, a census taker was. He wasn't shot or stabbed, he was lynched. He wasn't hidden in the hills, he was left hanging. What facts are people waiting for?

No worries, it'll soon be forgotten. No doubt someone will write a stiff letter to the editor criticizing the alleged death, and David Broder will list all the times Democrats were incivil to Republicans to show balance. And more people will die, because the left is afraid to fight back. The left is dealing with cowards and fools who could be easily intimidated (they are authoritarians) yet they are too afraid to type out words on a computer. They might be wrong, and that would be embarrassing. And what is murder, compared to embarrassment?

UPDATE: Kevin Drum calls for civility.

ACORN has filed a lawsuit against James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, the two undercover filmmakers who taped ACORN workers providing advice about how to smuggle underage sex workers into the country from El Salvador...

Points for chutzpah, I guess, but this is a bad idea on so many levels it hurts just to think about it. All they're doing is extending the news cycle on this whole debacle, making fools of themselves with transparently petty arguments, and just generally showing less common sense than your average mafia don caught on a 60 Minutes sting. At this point, ACORN needs to take their lumps, finish their internal investigation, and clean up their act. In the meantime, the least they can do is avoid handing the Glenn Beck crowd free additional ammunition. Fair or not, shooting the messenger isn't helping their cause.

That's quite right. You wouldn't want anyone on the right to be discourage from such actions, to have to hire lawyers and spend money to defend themselves or suffer any consequences at all from their trumped-up hysteria. The left will just make fools of themselves and wind up Glenn Beck. We should be afraid to take on Glenn Beck and just ignore him, like we did during two or three decades of Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is fading away at last and we don't want to do anything to discourage Beck from taking his place. Best to just admit whatever we are accused of and slink away, to make more room for the right's next targets.

That's splendid advice, Drum.

Less Tall Megan

Heavy workload the past day or two, so here are some shorters, with a longer to follow later.

Shorter Mrs. Megan McArdle: I had more money when I was single.

Stupider Megan McArdle: Since CEOs never make bad decisions, 'twas unions that killed the Beast GM.

More Trollish Megan McArdle, verbatim: "It's not as if most people first heard of ACORN when Breitbart started to go after them; they're on the news radar because they are a massive nationwide organization that takes millions of tax dollars every year."

Less Thoughtful Megan McArdle: Here are Felix Salmon's thoughts. I have none of my own.

Step Right Up

The Times is at it again; reporting on Middle America as if it were an especially interesting and enterprising flea in a circus sideshow.

[The Rev. Daniel] Henderson is a peppy, unassuming man in his early 50s, a Jerry Falwell-trained Baptist minister. After serving for many years as the spiritual leader of a megachurch in suburban Minneapolis, he left the pulpit and founded Strategic Renewal, a nonprofit organization that holds “prayer summits” and how-to-worship seminars around the country. (Henderson was also a contributor to the magazine Pray!, which recently went out of business.) “The fact is, most pastors never learn how to really pray,” he explained. “They get to the seminary, and people just assume they know how to pray. But that’s not true. Prayer is a lot more than reciting words. It requires mastering both theory and technique.” [my bolding]

In the afternoon, in a classroom of the tabernacle’s annex, Henderson delivered a workshop on technique to an audience of pastors and seminary students. “Some people think it is better and more meaningful to pray alone, but that’s false,” he told his students. “You improve by praying with others who can mentor you, people who are more expert than you.” According to Henderson, there are rules of effective praying: “Let God begin the conversation. Keep your prayers brief and clear. Repeat simple Scripture-based phrases. Pray standing up to fight torpor. And pray directly facing others, eye to eye, in a loud, clear voice.”

It's not that Henderson didn't ask God to keep his magazine running, it's just that God said no.*


(*from Taxi)

Waving To Ann Althouse

Ann Althouse asks a question:

Why not create a business out of absolutely nothing but bullshit?
Labels: commerce, New Age

posted by Ann Althouse at 9:24 PM

You already have, Ann.