Category: Wanker

Republicans Formally Come Out in Favor of Syphilis

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Mark Steyn supports Syphilis and other STDs because they might prevent people from having sex outside of wedlock:

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, is on TV explaining the (at this point the congregation shall fall to its knees and prostrate itself) “stimulus.” “How,” asks the lady from CBS, “does $335 million in STD prevention stimulate the economy?”

“I’ll tell you how,” says Speaker Pelosi. “I’m a big believer in prevention. And we have, er… there is a part of the bill on the House side that is about prevention. It’s about it being less expensive to the states to do these measures.”

Makes a lot of sense. If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer for loose women to go into bars and pick up feckless men, thus stimulating the critical beer and nuts and jukebox industries. To do this, we need trillion-dollar deficits, which our children and grandchildren will have to pay off, but, with sufficient investment in prevention measures, there won’t be any children or grandchildren, so there’s that problem solved.

I really cannot read this as anything but an endorsement of STDs, and this is not The Onion.

H/t Booman Tribune.

This is A Feature, Not a Bug: Papal Edition

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So, Pope Benedict has reversed the excommunication of a Holocaust Denier Bishop, Richard Williamson, in an attempt to make nice with the so called “Traditionalist Schism” in the church.

Just in case you are wondering, this is who this Pope is. It’s the same as his infamous Regensburg speech where he called Mohammad’s teachings, “evil and inhuman”, only this time he won’t have to backtrack, because there is only one Jewish state, and they aren’t going on Pogroms against Catholics over this.

And in case you are wondering who Bishop Williamson is, he is the guy who thought that the movie The Sound of Music was too anti Nazi.

The Best William Kristol New York Times OP/ED Ever

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Or at least the best 6 words in one of his columns, “This is William Kristol’s last column.”

The Times did not renew his contract.

Unsurprising, as his columns, hell, his first column, generated a fairly large number of corrections for misstatements of basic fact.

He will be moving to the Washington Poat, where he will be doing a monthly column, as opposed to his weekly column at the Times.

It’s a better fit for Kristol. Any paper that publishes Charles Krauthammer doesn’t worry about whether facts stated by their columnists has a basis in reality or truth.

Jeebus! Ben Stein is a Loser

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You know, as much as I hate Thomas Friedman’s fictitious cab drivers who says what he wants, Ben Stein’s use of real people close to him in order to make a point is worse.

He uses them to depict the “real America”, much as Friedman does, only they are at least as Stein depicts them, are simply malevolent human beings, and he does not understand that this.

Case in point is his high school friend, who seems to be engaging in a form of arms length prostitution:

NOT long ago, a woman in California called me for advice. She is divorced, with two children, and has a series of interlocking financial problems.

She lives in a lovely home in a stylish inland enclave. It has an interest-only mortgage of about $2.2 million that requires a payment of $12,000 a month, very roughly. It was last appraised at $2.7 million, but who knows if it’s now worth anything remotely close to that price.

The woman, whom I’ve known since she was a teenager, has no job or other remunerative employment. She has a former husband, an entrepreneur whose business has suffered recently. He pays her $20,000 a month, of which roughly half is alimony and half child support. The alimony is scheduled to stop this summer.

She has a wealthy beau who pays her credit card bills and other incidentals, but she is thinking of telling him she is through with him. She has no savings and has refinanced her home repeatedly, always adding to indebtedness and then putting the money into a shop she owns that has never come close to earning a dime. Now she is up all night worrying about money. “Terrified,” as she put it. She wanted me to tell her what to do.

He calls her a “sweet woman,” but she is anything but this.

She is a user of other people, and a stupid one, because, while she has achieved success with her use of other people, she has not planned in any way for her future.

She is a parasite, and a particularly nasty one.

So, Mr. Stein thinks that she is the “real America”, and is thus indicative of how we all have gone wrong….When she was getting nearly $¼ of a million a year for having had sex with, and born children for, a wealthy “entrepreneur.”

It’s a toxic mix of entitlement and evil, and he thinks that she is a sweet woman.

Of course, then he brings up his son:

…… And all of this is compounded again because my handsome son, age 21, a student, has just married a lovely young woman, 20. You may have seen on television the pudgy, aging face of their sole means of support.

…

To not be able to eat at any restaurant he feels like eating at is just not on his wavelength. Of course, that’s my fault. (I have learned that everything bad that happens anywhere is my fault.) And I hope to be able to leave him well enough provided for to ease his eventual transition into some form of self-sufficiency.

(emphasis mine)

So first, he knows a, “sweet woman,” who thinks nothing of relying on alimony to maintain an inflated lifestyle, and now he admits that he has raised a son with no concept of limits in terms of money because it is, “just not on his wavelength”.

The rich feel that they are entitled because for the past 28 years, America has said that wealth is an artifact of virtue, and these is the people that Ben Stein thinks is America.

Matt Taibbi is a National Treasure

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And his devastating take-down of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is one of many jewels that drip from his mouth.

A sample:

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.

Brilliant.

Barack Obama , Bite My Shiny Metal Ass

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So, Barack Obama was there to unveil Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine as the new head of the DNC for the press, but Howard Dean, the outgoing head of the DNC, was not invited, “at the request of Obama advisers.”

Dean took a lot of heat for his 50 state strategy, with people like James Carville and Rahm Emmanuel lambasting him for things like putting resources into the hands of local Democrats in places like Alaska, where Democrat Mark Begich defeated longtime Republican incumbent Ted Stevens in a tightly contested race this cycle.

We know who was right, and John Aravosis nails it when he says, “There is a real problem when Joe Lieberman is treated better than Howard Dean.”

The argument is that he was on travel, but, his his brother Jim notednoted, “If he had been asked to go to that event, he would have been there.”

While it’s true that Dean was noted by Obama glowing terms in his prepared statements, it was literally in the same sentence as Rahm Emmanuel.

It’s entirely true that Obama might not have been aware of what is going on with his staff, most likely Rahmbo, and Dean, but as Harry S Truman said, “The buck stops here.”

The Stupidest Thing Written …….. On December 19, 2008

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It might be a the stupidest thing ever written on other days, but the internet is a vast place, so the the suggestion that increasing broadband internet access will lead to fascism may not be the stupidest thing ever written, but it is the stupidest thing that I’ve read in a long time.

It appears that Andrew Keen (who else, seriously, just wiki him) is alarmed at the fact that part of Barack Obama’s stimulus package will be directed toward expanding broadband access across the United States, and it might be, “Inadvertently laying the foundations for a return to fascism, the political catastrophe of the 1930’s.“

You see, the according to Mr. Keen:

The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies—the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising—to spew their destructive, hate-filled message. What they excelled at was removing the the traditional middlemen like religion, media, and politics, and using these modern technologies of mass communications to speak with reassuring familiarity to the disorientated masses.

There are a couple of problems here:

  • They did not control these media until after they came to power.
  • The middlemen dominated the cinema, radio, newspapers, and advertising, then, as they do now, it was that they supported the fascists, because they thought that they might prevent the Bolsheviks from coming to power.

If you read the rest, I’m sure that you can find more.

What a Twofer from the WaPo Editorial Page

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So today, on the last day of the year, they give us Amity Shlaes and Ruth Marcus.

Let’s start with the skinny on Ms. Shlaes: she is simply the beneficiary of wingnut welfare. After graduating with a bachelors in English, she proceeds to spout the most predictable right wing economic theory imaginable, and following her marriage to the right wing founder the New York Sun, gets herself columns, and becomes a senior fellow at the CFR. As Matthew Yglesias notes:

I have a really, really, really hard time imagining the CFR doing something comparable for a liberal with so little in the way of relevant qualifications or track-record outside an ideological cocoon.

That being said, some of the beneficiaries are not outright stupid, and Amity Shlaes is either naturally or deliberately so.

Because in her WaPo OP/ED, she continues with riffing on her thesis, pulled from lord knows where, that the the 1937 recession was a result of rich people tucking their money back in their mattresses.

Not even Milton Friedman believed that. He blamed then Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles for tightening credit requirements.

The stupid, it burns us.

That being said, Amity Shlaes is in this instance not the columnist most deserving of opprobrium today, that honor belongs to Ruth Marcus, who does not merely set herself up as an advocate for stupidity and ignorance, but instead advocates for the aggressive protection of evil.

After getting what I am sure is hundreds of outraged emails for her last justification of letting the architects of a torturer regime go free, she thinks that she step up to the plate again 11 days later.

How, some readers asked, could future law-breaking be prevented if past misdeeds go unpunished?

First, criminal prosecution isn’t the only or necessarily the most effective mechanism for deterrence. To the extent that they weigh the potential penalties for their actions, government officials worry as much about dealing with career-ruining internal investigations or being hauled before congressional committees. Criminal prosecution and conviction requires such a high level of proof of conscious wrongdoing that the likelihood of those other punishments is much greater.

Second, the looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials. “The Terror Presidency,” former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith’s account of the legal battles within the administration over torture and wiretapping, is replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.

This is because there is already a culture of impunity among Republicans in Washington, DC, and it’s been there ever since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon before even an indictment was handed down.

These people knew that George W. Bush would pardon them, like he pardoned Libby, because he was protecting his own neck.

The cycle of impunity, which appears to extend only to Republicans, needs to stop.

Third, punishment is not the only way to prevent wrongdoing. If someone is caught breaking into your house, by all means, press charges. But you might also want to consider installing an alarm system or buying stronger locks. Responsible congressional oversight, an essential tool for checking executive branch excesses, was lacking for much of the Bush administration.

I’m sure that the guy with the electrodes attached to his genitals is happy that you are considering closing that barn door after the arsonist has set fire to the cow.

There was no good will here. There were no honest mistakes. Waterboarding is torture, and has been considered so for hundreds of years, what’s more, the people with experience in the field have been saying consistently that torture does not work.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were torturing not because there was a ticking bomb, there wasn’t, and not because they were desperate for information, because it wasn’t getting good intel, they were torturing because it made them feel like they were taking it to the terrorists.

They authorized torture because it made them feel good, and they continued it after they were shown that it did not work because it made them feel good, this is a classic definition of sadism, and absent some jail time, the sadism will be institutionalized.*
*No intention to condemn the S&M crowd. Where informed consent is present, the moral equation is different.

Robert J. Samuelson: F$#@ You White Man

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Some background here, I belong to a membership only* BBS called Stellar Parthenon.

On December 21, 2003, I posted a thread on SP, called We are Unbelievably Screwed, which has continued to this day, with more than 3500 posts.

5 Years before Robert J. Samuelson wrote “hoocoodanode”, I said:

  • US Society was entering into unsustainable debt.
  • Housing prices were at unsustainable levels.
  • That finance and housing were creating a phony economy.
  • A reckoning was at hand.

While I was wrong on some stuff:

  • Predicting that the dollar would fall off a cliff.
  • Assuming that this would cause a spike in interest rates which would destroy housing.

That being said, I have evidence that I was predicting the problems, and their basic causes, 5 years ago (actually I was doing this even earlier, but my posts on the Netslaves BBS went away when the website got shut down).

So now Mr. Samuelson, who rarely misses an opportunity to bash labor protections interfering with free trade, and to suggest that the only way our society will ever be prosperous is to gut the social safety net, particularly Medicare, Medicaid, and Social security, is wringing his hands and asking what went wrong, and why was everyone caught by surprise.

Well, I have 4 Words to Robert J Samuelson: F@#$ You White Man!!!!!

What is this “we” shit about anyway?

Roubini predicted this, Krugman predicted this, Dean Baker predicted this, and I predicted this!!!

I’m not an economist. I’m not a Wall Street type. I’m not a business writer.

I’m just an engineer with a background in design, and I recognized the problem.

Humbled By Our Ignorance

By Robert J. Samuelson
Monday, December 29, 2008; A15

It’s the end of an era. We [what do you mean we, f@#$ you white man] know that 2008, much like 1932 or 1980, marks a dividing line for the American economy and society. But what lies on the other side is hazy at best. The great lesson of the past year is how little we understand and can control the economy. This ignorance has bred today’s insecurity, which in turn is now a governing reality of the crisis.

Go back to the onset of the crisis in mid-2007. Who then thought that the federal government would rescue Citigroup or the insurance giant AIG; or that the Federal Reserve, striving to prevent a financial collapse, would pump out more than $1 trillion in new credit; or that Congress would allocate $700 billion to the Treasury for the same purpose; or that General Motors would flirt with bankruptcy?

Me, that’s who you pig felching soak the poor putrescence! The system was a lie, and it was created to extract savings from the poor and give them to the rich.

In 2008, much conventional wisdom crashed.

No, conventional stupidity crashed. People were willfully blind because it made them money, and it got them cushy gigs writing for the Washington Post or Newsweek.

It was once believed that the crisis of “subprime” mortgages — loans to weaker borrowers — would be limited, because these loans represent only 12 percent of all home mortgages. Even better, they were widely held, diluting losses to individual banks and investors.

And again, Alt-A and all the rest of the exotic mortgage products were headed for a crash, and the rent to own ratio was out of whack, while people like you and Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan (remember him?) were suggesting that people really should go with adjustable rate, negative equity mortgages from Mars.

Roubini predicted this, Krugman predicted this, Dean Baker predicted this, and I predicted this, you festering lump of pig droppings.

Wrong. Subprime mortgage losses (20 percent are delinquent) triggered a full-blown financial crisis. Confidence evaporated, because subprime loans were embedded in complex securities whose values and ownership were hard to determine. Similar doubts afflicted other bonds. Demand for all these securities shriveled. Lenders hoarded cash and favored safe U.S. Treasuries. Because investment banks and others relied on short-term debt (a.k.a. “leverage”), a loss of confidence and credit threatened failure. Lehman Brothers failed. The financial system had overborrowed and underestimated risk.

It was once believed that American consumers could borrow and spend more, because higher home values and stock prices substituted for annual savings. Consider: From 1985 to 2005, the personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent of disposable income to almost zero. But over the same years, households’ net worth (assets minus liabilities) quadrupled, from $14 trillion to $57 trillion.

Which, of course, means nothing, because for 90% of the population, that net worth went to other people.

That growth in net worth was mostly going to the top 1% in our society.

What you speak so glowingly of was nothing more than the efforts of the connected to extract the wealth of those who work for a living, and put it in their back pocket.

Wrong. In recent years, consumers increasingly overborrowed, especially against inflated home values.

Wrong….People borrowed because contemptible greed heads like you have spent the past thirty years waging an assault on wages and the social safety net.

People borrowed because they could not earn the money they needed, because of a war on labor and labor rights.

With the housing “bubble” now collapsed, net worth is falling. Homeowners’ equity in their homes — the share not borrowed — is at a record low of 45 percent, down from 59 percent in 2005. Consumers have responded by retrenching big-time. Retail sales have dropped for five straight months; vehicle sales are a third below 2006 levels.

It was once believed that the rest of the world would “decouple” from the United States. As Europe, Asia and Latin America expanded, their buying would cushion our recession. A better-balanced world would emerge, with smaller U.S. trade deficits and lower surpluses elsewhere.

Wrong. The crisis has gone global; economic growth in 2009 will be the lowest since at least 1980. Even China has slowed; steel output was down 12 percent in November from a year earlier. The crisis has spread through two channels: reduced money flows and reduced trade. Global financial markets are interconnected. Customer redemptions forced U.S. mutual funds and hedge funds to sell in emerging markets (such as Brazil or Korea), whose stocks have dropped about 60 percent from their peak. Credit has tightened, as money flowing into developing countries is expected to shrink 50 percent in 2009 from 2007 levels, estimates the World Bank. The bank expects trade, up 7.5 percent in 2007, to fall in 2009 for the first time since 1982.

So much that has happened was unexpected that the boom and bust’s origins are obscured. These lie in the side effects of declining inflation that started in the 1980s and, in the process of reducing interest rates, boosted stock prices and housing values.

Only the dropping inflation was a fiction created by the BLS with the acquiescence of Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan (remember him?), who has been calling for even more extreme massaging of the inflation numbers since at least 1980.

Recall that in 1981, when inflation was 9 percent, 30-year mortgages averaged 15 percent. As rates fell (mortgages were 10 percent by 1990, 7 percent by 2001), home prices rose. People could afford more. With lower interest rates, stocks became more valuable.

Homes did not become more affordable, people buy on monthly payment, not price, so falling interest rates just raised the price of the house, and falling interest rates did not make stocks more valuable, it chased people away from other, more secure, investments because their returns fell…It’s basic economics, but I guess that it’s beyond you.

All the bad habits of recent years — excessive borrowing by consumers and money managers, careless and reckless lending — grew in a climate when gains seemed ordained. Even after the “tech bubble” burst in 2000, stock prices at year-end 2002 were seven times their year-end 1981 level. Home prices increased steadily; in the 1990s, they rose 45 percent.

Prosperity, apparently forgiving of mistakes, bred the complacency that undid prosperity. On bad mortgages, losses could be recovered by selling the homes at higher values. Thus rationalized, bad loans were made. Some stocks might decline, but over time, most would rise. Risk seemed to recede, so investors and money managers undertook riskier strategies.

People undertook risky strategy because, like the people at Long Term Capital Management, because Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan (remember him?), was always there to bail them out, and they undertook riskier strategies.

So, you were arguing that that regulation was the problem, when it turned out all you were doing was handing our economy to sociopaths with capital.

What will emerge from these shattered illusions? Will the crash stir social unrest, abroad if not here? Will Americans become so thrifty that they hamper recovery? Will economic nationalism surge? How will capitalism be reshaped? Much depends on whether the frantic policies to combat the recession succeed. Probably they will, but there are no guarantees. Our ignorance [your ignorance, not mine, I spotted this, as die Mssrs Roubini, Krugman, Baker, Ritholtz, Tanta, etc.] is humbling.

(end of OP/Ed)

No sir, you are just stupid and venal, and because you cannot see … because you refuse to see that the policy of supporting the phony economy of Wall Street and basic shelter as a revenue stream was an illusion just as certain as the Dutch Tulip mania.

You did so because because you and yours benefited from the system, even as it hollowed our society and our nation.

*It’s membership only because it was started by refugees from the old Netslaves board when it was torn apart by right wing trolls.† SP is a chatty community with a decidedly liberal bent, with a refreshing absence of trolls, though there are still arguments, but there are good faith exchanges of opinion…Which is good…I like to argue.
†The trolls were never dealt with because the sysop, Splat ,was getting paid off by one of the worst trolls‡ who fed him consulting contracts.
‡F$#@ You Lauren Bandler, aka “Uncle Meat”.

Juan Williams: Calling Swarthy People Uppity Since…..

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OK, he didn’t use the word “uppity”, but considering his behavior, where he seems to make a living out of condemning things like Rap music (and getting the lyrics wrong in the process), his screeds against the Iraqi people on Billo’s show should come as no surprise.

But’s let’s read what he said (vid below):

WILLIAMS: But on a serious level, how many American lives have been sacrificed to the cause of liberating Iraq? How much money has been spent while they’re not spending their own profits from their oil? American money. So I just think it’s absolutely the act of an ingrate for them to behave in this way. Just unbelievable to me.

Them, huh….They should shut up and sing spirituals eat their falafel.

Yes, they are ingrates because they object to being invaded and conquered, which has created this reality:

  • More than four million Iraqis forced to flee either to another part of Iraq or abroad.
  • Four million Iraqis regularly cannot buy enough food.
  • 70 percent are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50 percent in 2003.
  • 28 percent of children are malnourished, compared to 19 percent before the 2003 invasion.
  • 92 percent of Iraqi children suffer learning problems, mostly due to the climate of fear.

And those numbers ignore the somewhere north of ½ million dead that are a result of the mess we made.

They should be grateful, because even though we took them prisoner and sold them as slaves across the oceans, their life is much better on the plantation …. they get purple fingers.

Could someone explain to me why Juan Williams isn’t excluded from polite society like David Duke?

The Google Kerfluffle

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So, we have The Wall Street Journal doing a story with a screaming headline about how Google is attempting to subvert network neutrality.

Note that the Journal‘s editorial page has long argued against network neutrality, and Google has long championed the idea that ISPs should act as common carriers.

Well, they note one of Google’s main allies, Larry Lessig, has shifted his position to match Google’s, which he shows (with footnotes) to be wrong.

Then Google explains that what it is doing is placing caching servers to better response time, not buying enhanced access to the last mile of wiring to the home.

It’s called “edge caching”, and Akamai has been doing since 1998.

While Google’s actions might be troubling to Akamai, they would likely see a huge new competitor in this market, this is nothing new.

Additionally, the article claims that Obama and his people are walking backwards from their commitment to network neutrality, a charge which they unequivocally deny.

We also have Wired.com calling bullsh$# too.

And finally, if you need any more convincing, isen.blog plucks this little jewel from the article:

One major cable operator in talks with Google says it has been reluctant so far to strike a deal because of concern it might violate Federal Communications Commission guidelines on network neutrality.

“If we did this, Washington would be on fire,” says one executive at the cable company who is familiar with the talks, referring to the likely reaction of regulators and lawmakers.

As David Isenberg so rightly notes, “Yeah, right, the cable guys want to preserve Network Neutrality, while Google wants to violate it. That **would** be a boy-bites-dog story, if it were true.” (emphasis original)

Additionally, he makes some good notes on the regulations on this:

Google’s FCC counsel, Rick Whitt explains that Google simply seeks to do edge caching, just like Akamai, Amazon, and several other companies. The idea of edge caching is to locate frequently used content closer to the people who access it. It makes accessing the cached content faster.

Importantly, since the cache must be connected to the Internet by a big, fat, stupid [emphasis mine] pipe, the company doing the caching can, in principle, buy pipes from any carrier. Indeed, if it is concerned with up-time, local congestion, or avoiding single points of failure, it will buy connections from several providers. [See my “Buy as Many Nines as you Need“]

Also, in principle, carriers can let any edge cache access its network. Indeed they have a duty to do so, under the Doctrine of Public Callings, the doctrine of common law that underlies common carriage and network neutrality that has been in effect for about 900 years now. [emphasis mine]

Net Neutrality only becomes an issue when a carrier picks and chooses which cache to supply pipes to.

The argument the WSJ seems to be making — and they don’t make it very well — is that when Google has an arrangement with carriers to provide a cache it advantages its access. However, it has always been the case that Google pay a carrier more for a fatter pipe to its content. Edge caching is another case of that, no matter in which building a caching platform might be located.

In other words, if Google does edge caching it buys access. It’s the same as when I, as a residential customer, pay $34.95 for one megabit DSL service or $49.95 for 3 megabit DSL.

The concern of Network Neutrality advocates is not with access but with delivery. The fear is that Internet connection providers would charge for expedited delivery of certain content to the end user, and in so doing would put themselves in the business of classifying which content gets enhanced delivery. Since they were charging for expedited delivery, they’d get more revenue for improving the enhanced delivery, so the only network upgrades would be for the enhanced service. Non-enhanced would fall further and further behind. Plus the power to decide what gets delivered might, indeed, be powerful, and power corrupts; just ask NARAL.

(NARAL was denied the ability to send text message alerts to people who had opted in to by Verizon wireless, because abortion rights are icky.)

Wanker of the Day: The Always Reliable Shailagh Murray

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Quoth the Murray

The Republicans are responding in a totally reasonable way — they are wildly overreacting and hoping the facts catch up with their hyperbole. There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road. I’m not saying it will turn out that way, but you have to push. The same way the Dems are pushing on Coleman in Minnesota right now.

Except, of course, the FBI is investigating Norm Coleman, and there are suspicious transfers both of money and items to him and his wife, and nothing about Coleman makes it past page A11.

As versus a statement from the US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in which he categorically states that no one from the Obama campaign is involved, most likely because it was someone from the Obama campaign who dropped a dime on Governor Impossible Hair.

She was alleged to have teared up at Ted Stevens’ valedictory speech to the Senate (though the never reliable Dana Milbank now puts it off to allergies, which Murray says she never had), so she’s gone native, as have far too many of the WaPo staff.

When all is said and done, Washington, DC is a small, one industry town, and everyone goes to the same parties (except, of course for the black majority of the population), and we get crony journalism.

Stupid Federal Reserve Tricks

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I have, on a number of occasions mentioned that the Fed has a habit eliminating statistics that might show them in a less than stellar light, so we have them dropping M3 from their reports, for example.

Well, we have another case of this now, with the Cleveland Federal Reserve ceasing the publication of their TIPS spread derived inflation expectations.

OK, so what is a, “TIPS spread derived inflation expectations?”

Well, the TIPS are, “Treasury Inflation Protected Securities”, basically bonds, with a twist, and the twist is that the principal is indexed to the consumer price index, so over the life of the instrument, you have interest and principal, your original investment returned to you.

They are set up so that the bond stars with an index of 1, and can never go below 1.

The spread derives inflation expectations are a measure of the difference in price between new 5 year TIPS and 5 year old 10 year tips.

Assuming that they pay the same interest, you would assume that they would be identical. In both cases you pay your money, and you get all your money back, plus interest, after 5 years, right?

Wrong.

This is wrong, because after 5 years, those 10 year bonds are at an index of 1.2 or so, while the new bonds are at an index of 1.0, which means that if you have deflation, the 10 year bonds can drop back to some number between 1.2 and 1.0, while the 5 year bond will, under those circumstances, stay at 1.0.

In the event of flat prices, or inflation, they are identical.

So, the 10 year bond with 5 years left is somewhat riskier, because you can lose up to 20% through deflation.

So the question is, what do people who buy these bonds think of this risk?

If they think the risk is small, then the price difference (spread) between the two bonds in the open market will be small, and if they think that the risk is large, the spread will be larger.

So, the market has increasingly been saying that they have high deflationary expectations, which translates to “Depression” for the rest of us, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland finds this inconvenient, so they will stop publishing the data.

Start by Firing Deborah Howell

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The Washington Post has a problem with reality.

While its news gathering operation is pretty good, its editorial outlook, which seems to be in a constant state of apology for having uncovered Watergate, seems to have no recognition of reality or truth

This is a problem, because truth, not balance, should be the goal of a journalistic enterprise.

Case in point, Ombudsman Deborah Howell, who is calling for political affirmative action in the news room:

Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.

She is calling for wingnut welfare (affirmative action), and this is wrong for a number of reasons:

  • She is implying that women and minorities were only hired because of affirmative action,
  • She is calling for the hiring of unqualified conservatives.
  • She is asking editors to vet new hires on their politics rather than their professionalism.

I have no clue what Ms. Howell does for a living, but it does not appear to be journalism.

Why David Frum is Crapping his Pants

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So, David Frum just wrote an article in the Washington Post throwing John McCain’s presidential bid overboard, suggesting that all Republican Party efforts should be directed towards the Congress, particularly the Senate, so as to prevent a filibuster proof majority.

He notes, correctly, that the RNC is the only place where the ‘Phants are raising good money, and that they are wasting it on his doomed campaign.

He’s concerned about how a “conservative free” management of the financial meltdown will be handled, and he wrings his hands over the, “fierce new anger among many liberal Democrats,” by which he means that their refrain is, “Thank you sir, can I have another.”

But then, he gets to the bit where he actually really gives a damn:

Unchecked, this angry new wing of the Democratic Party will seek to stifle opposition by changing the rules of the political game. Some will want to silence conservative talk radio by tightening regulation of the airwaves via the misleadingly named “fairness doctrine”; others may seek to police the activities of right-leaning think tanks by a stricter interpretation of what is tax-deductible and what is not.

(emphasis mine)

Between punditry on fox, and his think-tank gigs, he is afraid that he will actually have to work for a living.

I guess that trumps ideology for him.

I incorporated a 501(c)3 tax exempt org, it was, and is, a completely bogus registration, though it is technically legal and in accordance with all laws and regulations. (no names here, I don’t want do give them grief*) It puts on SF conventions, and running a SF convention should not get tax exempt status, with deductible contributions (In truth, it went 501(c)3 for the cheap mailing rates anyway).

Neither should the right wing pundit full employment welfare programs, like the AEI, where David Frum works. They are playthings of rich people who never had to work for their money, and want to manipulate public policy for their benefit.

They are not charities, they are lobbying organizations.

*And I don’t want to give them anything else. Any contact between me and this organization is very bad for me, which I suppose is more of a reflection on me than it is on them.