tdog

It’s been ten years since that date in September offered by assholes as a stand-in for the sort of mindset that represented a principled (albeit flawed) nation that wasn’t, at least affirmatively, richly deserving of the title “World’s Biggest Asshole Nation.” We’re that now, of course. Regular readers know that this blog, which sprang into existence itself a week after the events of 9-11, when I personally witnessed events from 100 yards North of the WTC, is almost wholly devoted to “September 10th Thinking.” My coverage of matters GTMO (that includes my dozens of exclusive interviews with lawyers, soldiers, detainees,...

I think at a personal level, I rather like Professor Krugman, and this piece, called “The Fatal Distraction,” kind of shows why: it’s witty, it is chockful of useful facts presented in appropriate context, and really advances the “left/right” thing in useful context. The only problem, of course, is that in seeing the world as a macro-economic nail in need of a Keynesian hammer, it makes something of a category error. I’m beginning to think that maybe FDR shouldn’t have bothered saving capitalism back in the day… Because, of course, capitalism was ultimately doomed by the simple limitations of nature....

We’ll note that Bloomberg is reporting that amidst the last financial crisis, Wall Street’s financial elite received over $1.2 trillion in sweetheart loans (ultimately backed by the taxpayer) via the Federal Reserve. That’s around the face amount of all of the “bad” loans then held, btw. Just part of the “back story” going into the current financial crisis– presaged by last week’s nearly thousand-point drop in the DJIA, and various announcements of probable insolvency among European banks that will presuably slam American banks as the “sovereign debt crisis” rolls along. Anyway, back to the $1.2 trillion thing. This, of course...

Once again, just about the only voice of reason coming out of Congress in the face of the present debt ceiling kerfuffle… a clearly manufactured kabuki crisis designed to create desperate conditions during which terrible legislation damaging to the nation can be passed… is Michele Bachmann, she noting that the debt ceiling crisis just isn’t a real crisis. Of course, her remedy is that she’s going to vote against any raising of the debt ceiling. To paraphrase Otter (or is it Boon)… Michele is right. Psychotic. But right. The kabuki rolls on. Hold on to your social security checks, folks…...

I would give some cognizance to former Senator Judd Gregg’s statement that a weekend (or two?) without Social Security checks going out will be necessary before the House Republicans yield on raising that old debt ceiling, not because of his old job (Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee) but because of his new one… senior advisor to Goldman Sachs. I agree with Gregg’s assessment– better than 50-50 there will not be a “debt ceiling deal” by August 2nd; we are up to July 21 now, with no particular end of this “crisis” apparent. He believes that a few days of...

S&P, it seems, has concluded there is risk of U.S. sovereign default even if the debt ceiling is raised by Congressional action. Of course, on the debt ceiling issue, most people, according to polls, blame the Republicans. What does any of this mean? Damned if I know. Precious metals… probably. Canned goods, bottled water, secure farm land, useful social relationships, bicycle parts… for sure. Ammunition? Maybe we’ve come that far. Let’s hope not. Anyway. We appear to have a political process that has become a suicide watch… and, because we have a media that is itself dominated by a criminal...

As the debt ceiling chicken game gets closer to the wire (four weeks from… today?), the Obama Administration now proposes significant reforms (read “cuts”) to Medicare and Social Security. And even Eric Cantor seems to have “gone crazy” by considering closing tax loopholes. Desperate times/measures? Rather than jump on the President for selling out once again, on this one, let’s acknowledge that his all-compromisy “third way” may be the only way to deal with the “third rail”… as critical as I have been of the President (largely but not exclusively because he sold me out– and many of his supporters–...

I see little if anything to quibble with in Ezra Klein’s WaPo piece where he suggests that the President’s decision to “go public” in his criticism of Republican Congressional leaders for their refusal to include tax increases (any tax increases at all) as part of their price to agree to expand “the debt ceiling,” which now seems to have some kind of a consensus deadline of early August before “really bad things happen,” means, ineluctably, that “the negotiations have failed.” Ezra notes that the hang-up seems to be the President’s demand for around $400 billion in tax increases (against the...

The most interesting part of this “process piece” by the Grey Lady concerning the political passage in New York of legislation recognizing same-sex marriage is not the fact [as I briefly discussed with Lindsay, who, amusingly is a member of the same CSA as I] that the one politician who really deserves credit for taking genuine political risk to advance the issue is David Paterson… and he isn’t even mentioned in the Times piece. Oh yes… the interesting thing… the article does mention that one of the key hedge fund managers who wrote one of the key checks to make...