Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Lieberman and Obama, and the Shark that They Jumped

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This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!

It appears that the excessive wankerage of Joseph Lieberman on healthcare has even gotten the Villagers, specifically nepotism affirmative action hire Luke Russert (video at link), and wannabe villager Ezra Klein to admit that perhaps, just perhaps, Joseph Lieberman is not acting out of moral conviction, but instead is acting out of a need for revenge.

When you have guys like this calling Joe Lieberman small and petty, and, well basically evil, Holy Joe has done more than jump a shark, he’s jumped the shark, specifically, he’s jumping C. Megalodon*.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Obama and His Stupid Minions™ are getting a clue on this, or that they understand that Joe just wants to turn the knife, and will keep pulling the football away, because his goal is to punish liberals for not recognizing his brilliance and moral superiority over the past 9 years.

Harry Reid, no doubt wanting to avoid Chris Dodd’s fate, where Dodd was hung out to dry by the administration for doing Geithner’s bidding and putting in a loophole on banker salaries, is now leaking like a seive, with sources who are clearly from his office saying that, Rahm Emanuel personally pressured Reid give in to Lieberman’s extortion. (See also here and here here)

As a result of this, 81% Of Dememocrats want Lieberman’s chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee pulled, which to my mind, would be a good thing, because the Senate Democrats would have to start learning to live with 50+ the Vice President to pass a bill, and people like Lieberman (and Lincoln and Baucus) would be told to go pound sand.

If you want any more evidence of bad faith, Lieberman admits that he’s flipped on the Medicare option because liberals like it:

And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.

(emphasis mine)

You see, it’s all about pissing off liberals. It does not matter if hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of lack of insurance, Lieberman wants to punish liberals.

Joe Lieberman is a venal sociopath.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). So in jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Economics Update

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H/t Calculated Risk


H/t Calculated Risk


The 2006 spike is just before the new bankruptcy law
h/t Calculated Risk,

Well, we are in for a bumpy ride, with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Empire State Manufacturing Survey falling 21 points in November. (top pic)

It’s still positive, barely, meaning that there is expansion, but it is a rather precipitous drop.

We also saw US industrial capacity utilization rise in November, (2nd pic down) so it appears that there is an upswing going on, albeit a slow one.

Even so, we are saw both homebuilder sentiment falling (3rd pic down), credit card chargeoffs rising (bottom pic), and the Architecture Billings Index falling in November on the other side of the ticket.

In energy, oil rose for its first time in 10 days, and in currency, the dollar was up, hitting an October high.

Well, This is One Way to Beat the System

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If you order large amounts of coinage via credit card, the US Mint sends it to you free of charge, which means that you can turn around and deposit the money in the bank, and, if you have a credit card with reward miles, you still get those miles, for buying money, which you use to pay off the bill:

Enthusiasts of frequent-flier mileage have all kinds of crazy strategies for racking up credits, but few have been as quick and easy as turning coins into miles.

At least several hundred mile-junkies discovered that a free shipping offer on presidential and Native American $1 coins, sold at face value by the U.S. Mint, amounted to printing free frequent-flier miles. Mileage lovers ordered more than $1 million in coins until the Mint started identifying them and cutting them off.

Coin buyers charged the purchases, sold in boxes of 250 coins, to a credit card that offers frequent-flier mile awards, then took the shipments straight to the bank. They then used the coins they deposited to pay their credit-card bills. Their only cost: the car trip to make the deposit.

Neat scam, and as always, the only problem is that I discover it too damn late.

The Senate Healthcare Bill Is Worse Than You Thought

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If you follow the news, you are no doubt aware that the Senate proposed a medicare buy-in for people between 55 and 65 as an alternative to the public option.

As I noted at the time, it was very restrictive, the people had to be without insurance already, and they had to be near poverty.

Well, it just gets worse: It turns out that this is not an buy-in to actual medicare, because the program, which could likely cover fewer than 1½ million nation wide, would not be able to use the rates that Medicare has negotiated, instead, it would have to negotiate it on their own, and with those numbers, they won’t get anything close to the cost savings that Medicare has generated.

So the fob the program off on the poor, meaning that it will suck, and the strip it of the 40+ years of cost containment, and they call it “Medicare”.

Harry Reid, tell Senators Baucus, Lieberman, and Lincoln to go Cheney themselves, and pass it with the budget.

An Insight into the Mind of Ayn Rand

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Mystery/thriller writer Michael Prescott has looked through the journals of Ayn Rand, and he finds her musing on one William Edward Hickman, who said, “What is good for me is right,” which seems to pretty classical Randian Objectivism.

She is enthused about this person, and his philosophy, describing it as, “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard.”

While Mr. Hickman is fairly obscure these days, unless you are a lawyer, in which case it is one of the earliest attempts at an insanity defense, he was well known during his day, basically 1927 and 1928, because he kidnapped a 12 year old girl, ransomed her, and dismembered her.

And Ayn Rand calls what he did a, “Real man’s philosophy.”

If there were any doubt as to her being evil, it is ended. If there were any doubt as to her sanity, those doubts are reinforced.

I will leave you with the last two ‘graphs, but please read the rest, but be warned, the specifics of the murder are grisly:

By the appraisal of any normal mind, there can be little doubt that William Edward Hickman was a vicious psychopath of the worst order. That Ayn Rand saw something heroic, brilliant, and romantic in this despicable creature is perhaps the single worst indictment of her that I have come across. It is enough to make me question not only her judgment, but her sanity.

At this point in my life, I did not think it was possible to significantly lower my estimate of Ayn Rand, or to regard her as even more of a psychological and moral mess than I had already taken her to be.

I stand corrected.

Wanker of the Day

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Tim Fernholz.

He goes goes after Matt Taibbi on his latest article, which I called a jem, and Taibbi responds, basically blowing him out of the water, and acknowledging one minor error, confusing diplomat James Rubin, and Robert Rubin’s son Jamie Rubin, though only by calling the latter a diplomat, Jamie Rubin’s role in assembling the Obama financial team is correctly depicted.

If you want the short version, I would suggest that you review Felix Salmon’s take on this tête-à-tête, and Salmon’s take is the same as Taibbi’s: that Fernholz’s criticisms are largely conjured out of hysteria:

In other words, it’s worth cross-checking everything that Fernholz says against what Taibbi actually writes, because often Taibbi simply doesn’t say what Fernholz implies that he says.

All the schadenfreude over Fernholz’s attack on Taibbi is particularly weird since they seem to actually agree with each other. Here’s how Fernholz concludes….

….

This is quite astonishing. Fernholz is basically saying that Taibbi is right, and that not only is he right but that he will now and henceforth utterly overshadow anyone else who’s criticizing the Obama administration from the left. At the same time, however, despite Taibbi’s astonishing ability to encapsulate and personify the entire group of people who criticize the administration, he’s not even going to manage to “make a dent”, because he’s not going about his job in an evenhanded J-school manner.

Major wankerdom.

Matt Taibbi is clearly polemical writer, but he gets his facts right, and he does describe the truly sad state of affairs that is the Rubin/Summers/Geithner economic axis upon which the Obama administration spins.

Economics Update

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Bad news from the Euro Zone, with Eurozone employment falling by 0.5% in the 3rd quarter, and Euro zone industrial output fell by 0.6% in October, and by 11.1% year over year.(!)

We are also looking at a spike in food prices over the next year, leading to an increase in inflation that all the economists and the economic journalists ignore, because, after all, it’s not core, because it’s just food.

In currency, Abu Dhabi has agreed to bail out Dubai, which has made people feel more secure, so they are selling dollars, which pushes the currency down.

In energy, crude oil fell for the 9th straight day largely on demand concerns.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney Fly to Uruguay, Request Asylum

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No, it hasn’t happened yet, but we have a start.

You see, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive have found some 22 million missing White House emails from the Bush era.

Yes, I know, it still has to go through the National Archives, where it will take years* to catalogue then and screen for classified material:

Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, according to two groups that are settling lawsuits they filed over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.

The two groups made the announcement as they settled lawsuits that they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.

But the public might not see any of the e-mails for quite some time because they will now go through the National Archives normal process for releasing presidential and agency records.

Of course, even if major revelations are present, that Barack Obama and Eric Holder will their do their level best to ensure that the rule of law is not enforced.

*My guess is that this will be finished a little bit after the 2012 elections.

Bair Says More Bank Failures in 2010 than in 2009

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Statement about Bank Failures at 2:00

By way of context, remember that we’ve had 133 failures so far this year.

It’s nice that she’s honest about the situation, but all those Wall Street pukes in the Obama administration, must really, really, hate her, because they make it much harder to return to business (obscene pay and bonuses for failure) as usual in the finance industry:

Bank failures will continue to accelerate into next year despite “some encouraging signs” that things are turning around for the battered industry, FDIC Chair Sheila Bair told CNBC.

There are a lot of people in the Obama administration who want to declare success, and walk away from the “real change” that both the finance industry, and the economy, deeply need.

A Real Innovation

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I went to the dentist, and got my teeth cleaned.

At some point in the not too distant past, they upgraded their office, not a surprise, since the office the floor above flooded theirs, and they need to do reparis about a year a go.

One of the upgrades is that the new dental chairs are massaging dental chairs, much like the ones that you find at Sharper Image® store in the mall.

Sweet.

Did Prosperity Gospel Housing Crash?

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Hanna Rosin has a fascinating article about the increasingly popular Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that virtue is rewarded with wealth in this world, may have been at the core of the housing bubble and associated crash:

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

It’s something that I’ve never thought about, but I do tend to see the correlation between someone assuming that their own personal virtue will somehow trump the house price to income ratio, and engaging in reckless behavior, and as Rosin further notes:

Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Certainly, they fit hand in glove with the housing boom and bust, as does the explicitly atheist philosophies of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, which would tend to imply at least a supporting role.

Of course, this attitude has its genesis at the beginning of European colonization of this country.

The Pilgrims, as good Calvinists, believed that predestination implied financial success, and this idea has carried forward 4 centuries since.

As a Jew, I see the focus on rewards in heaven in most mainstream Christian denominations to be a bit unseemly, Judaism downplays the afterlife, focusing on the mission of Tikkun Olam (Mending the world), but prosperity gospel has always seemed to me to be, a perversion of faith as well as being insincere: After all, what is there to religion if you get something for nothing.

I would note that Rev. Rick Warren, with whom I agree on very little is of largely the same opinion, saying that, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?”

All in all, it’s an interesting read, and gives a view of a theology that I find profoundly disturbing.

Call Me a Traditionalist…..

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But when the helicopter carrying ships in the Japanese grow large enough that they could easily launch fixed wing aircraft, as is the case with the JASDF’s plans for a new “helicopter destroyer,” which, at 248 M (813 ft) and a displacement of 19½ thousand tons, it’s an aircraft carrier.

By comparison, the Invincible Class CVLs that the UK deployed Harriers, normal detachment was 9, from during he Falklands campaign displaces about 17 thousand tons, and was 210m (689 ft) long.

The juxtaposition of the Japanese and aircraft carriers makes me vaguely uneasy.