Great Interview

With the plumber who confronted Obama on his socialist policies (i.e. in Obama's words, "spreading the wealth around"). Good common sense stuff from a regular guy and small-scale entrepreneur trying not to be buried by government do-goodism.

A Legion Of Pickpockets

It just never ends:

Finance companies want US to buy bad auto loans

WASHINGTON, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Finance companies are preparing to seek authority from the U.S. Treasury Department to sell bad auto loans to the government as part of Washington's sweeping plan to restimulate credit markets and boost the flagging economy.

"The onus is now on us to make the case for our companies to be able to sell non-mortgage related assets to the government," Bill Himpler, executive vice president of the American Financial Services Association, said late on Tuesday.

The group represents a range of finance companies, including major auto affiliates like Ford Motor Credit Co, the financial services arm of Ford Motor Co (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), and GMAC LLC, controlled by Chrysler owner Cerberus Capital Management [CBS.UL].

General Motors Corp (GM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) has a 49 percent stake in GMAC.

The $700 billion rescue plan approved by Congress last month and now in the process of being implemented by the Bush administration enables the Treasury to buy up bad auto loans, if it deems that doing so is critical to the health of the U.S. economy.

"We're in the process of putting together our case ... that auto paper is key to financial market stability," Himpler said.

He said the association would try to "cast as wide a net as possible" to ensure that companies holding loans that consumers failed to pay back would be eligible to improve their books and extend credit to new borrowers.

Auto loans traditionally perform well but defaults are starting to pick up because of overall credit market turmoil, the financial services group said.

GMAC has begun giving car loans only to buyers with the best credit scores as the global financial crisis strains its access to capital.

Another priority of the association is to persuade the U.S. Federal Reserve to expand eligibility for short-term loans, called commercial paper, to auto financing companies. (Reporting by John Crawley; editing by Carol Bishopric)

Okay, den of thieves, how about this? How about every penny of profit you make from now into the infinite future you disperse to the taxpayers? You obviously don't believe in capitalism. You aren't willing to take any losses, so you aren't entitled to any profits. Fair?

Arugula Is Just The Tip Of The Iceberg

Great essay at Ace Of Spades entitled "Trailer Park Common Sense".

Republicans And Hate. They Go Together.

Well-done montage proves it.

Much Smarter And Vastly More Skilled Than 99% Of All GOP Politicians

H/T My wife.

It Looks More And More Likely That Ayers Ghostwrote Obama's Books

Probably he'll brag about it once Obama is safely in office.

Details.

Contempt Is All They've Got

Link:

I have a BA in journalism, and over time have kept in touch with a number of people who are still working in that profession. So when one of them emailed me the following about the atmosphere in today's newsrooms, I wasn't surprised at all. This person does offer some hints at the end on how to push for more fairness in your local coverage:

It's unbelievable here. I've been through a few election cycles and have gotten pretty used to the open sneering every time a Republican candidate appears on the television, but this year is unlike anything I've ever seen.

Anchors were openly cheering when the news came out that Sarah Palin's daughter was pregnant. Some of the comments were so over-the-top childish and nasty that I couldn't believe what I was hearing. They're obsessed with her. They hate her even more than they hated Bush. And they all talk openly about how "stupid" and "unqualified" she is. It's pretty much a hostile work environment for the few conservatives who work here.

I've pretty much been keeping my head down and concentrating on my work, but yesterday was the final straw for me when some snot-nosed, twenty-something liberal producer responded to a request to take a phone call from a viewer complaining about lack of election fraud coverage by saying, "Tell him it's because we hate Republicans."

I want you to post this story on your blog to get the word out. The average person doesn't understand how obnoxiously left wing, the average local newsroom staffer is. The nightly newscasts they're watching every night are being put together by producers who have nothing but disdain for the people watching.

The irony is that these people are for the most part, some of the most ignorant, unimpressive individuals that you'll ever meet. They know next to nothing. They have no expertise in any area. They just repeat shit they read on the wires. Most of them aren't even from the communities where they work. They migrate from station to station, climbing the ladder as they go.

But they do think they're both smarter than and superior to you. Especially those of you who live in rural areas.

It's time people register their dissatisfaction about these clowns. It won't change the coverage, but contacting them in the right way can be hugely disruptive to their operations.

Here's how to do it.

Support The Separation Of School And State

Asinine.

The Humor Of Hot Air

I like the front page graphic linking this post:

Good Question

But it assumes that leftism is not merely a way station on the route to direct worship of death itself. But in so doing, the question makes the assumption that much clearer.

Link:

Myself, I would prefer the world financial system was built on gold, rather than on the promises of Caesar to send out tax-gatherers that the whole world unto the seventh generation be taxed.

Hey, my left-leaning friends, I have a question for you to ponder. If the American Ponzi Scheme Social Security system, if not the world economy, is based on receipts to be gathered from generations yet unborn, and if (as Sen. Biden so says) it is a patriotic duty to pay taxes, then does it not follow that it is unpatriotic not to allow the unborn to be born?

In other words, if your whole political economy is based on putting a burden of debt on unborn generations, does not the existence of your political economy rest on the idea that the unborn generation shall and must come to be? If the Big Brother you worship and serve cannot remain solvent, indeed, cannot survive at all, unless the next generation outnumbers the current, is it not treason to Big Brother to remain infertile? Does it not then therefore become a prudent and proper matter for State control to ensure that women marry, marry young, bear often, have large families? Does not abortion, gay marriage, and even contraception become enemies of our savior, The State? Does not loyalty to the Brave New World promised by our Glorious Leader demand an orgy of fertility?

Something to ponder.

Everyone Fears Us. The Leftists. The GOP. Everyone.

Somehow it's turned us into a giant majority pack of loser chumps, too. But divide and conquer seems to be working pretty well.

Link:

If you take all the polls, add the percentages of respondents who call themselves conservative, and divide by the number of polls taken, that percentage is 60%. If you look at the polls over these years individually, the number of Americans in any particular poll who have called themselves conservatives has been as high as 63% in May 2008, and it has been as low as and see the highest percentage of people who call themselves conservative has been as low as 58% in December 2007, but 12 out of the 15 Battleground Polls had the percentage of conservatives at 59%, 60%, or 61%.

Conservatives, doubting how they could be majority, and liberals, certain that they are America, posted at blogs and comment sections many "problems" with my article. Some assumed that the Battleground Poll has an "agenda" - indeed it does. It has a high reputation for precision without any partisan leaning. That is the Battleground Poll agenda and that agenda reinforces, rather than weakens, my argument.

...

And why would Americans from different polling groups answer that question, and that question alone, so consistently? In every other area, public responses to questions jump all over the place. Responses are moved by events or by unpopular political leaders. The only response that never varies much is the question on political ideology. In statistical analysis, when a percentage that could vary never does, that means something.

But a couple of weeks ago I was having dinner with Daniel Pipes and a group of collegiate conservatives at the University of Tulsa. Professor Pipes asked me a question that is harder to answer: Why does it feel like we are so much less than sixty percent of the population? If three fifths of our countrymen are conservatives, why do we conservatives feel like a minority?

In answering that, we should consider the "Limbaugh Effect." Remember when Rush Limbaugh first began to be an unapologetic national voice for conservatives? What did callers say first? They thanked him for speaking for them. More than that, they thanked him for showing that they were not some "nutty right-wing loner," as the media, Hollywood, academia and other organs of information, entertainment, and communication had portrayed conservatives.

The Left long ago stopped trying to win arguments. The Left long ago adopted the Alinsky school of political warfare: Destroy your opponent. Portray conservatives as racist, homophobes, wife-battering moronic paranoids and that campaign of political annihilation is largely won. The political movement which sanctimoniously prides itself on rejecting stereotypes smeared sixty percent of America with a savage, humorless defamation. And, as long as no one raised the banner of conservatism for others to join, sixty percent of America sat quietly in their living rooms, wondering if anyone else really believed what they believed.

After Rush, people realized that they were not alone. No: We are not alone at all. We are the majority, really the overwhelming majority, in America. Consider other evidence. How does the Left win many of its policy battles? Through unelected federal judges who are appointed for life. How does the Right win many of its policy battles? By referenda and similar votes of the people.

When did McCain get a bump? When he picked an unapologetic conservative running mate. How is Obama winning this election now? By never calling himself a liberal at all, by never mentioning his true allies and mentors, and by pretending not to be a radical Leftist. Conservatives lose when they deny that they are conservatives: When they seek that two percent of America that calls itself moderate at the cost of that sixty percent of America that calls itself conservative. When was the last time an unapologetic conservative ran against a nice, old-fashioned liberal? Twenty-four years ago. The result? The conservative got about sixty percent of the vote.

...

Now all we need is candidate and president who understands this.

Great Anchoress Post

Here.

Insane Rage

Lefties projectin'. It's what they do.

True

Mark Shea:

Since the Courts Get to Decide who is Human...

...it only stands to reason that they also get to decide what marriage is.

At least till civilization breaks down.

Now entering the next major "What could it hurt?" phase of catastrophic social experimentation.

...

Democracy is another of those "almost sacred" traditions that I wrote about here. But it's not sacred and it's not eternal. It works just so long as you have a Christian or post-Christian culture that still holds by custom and convention what it no longer holds by creed: namely, things like the doctrine of original sin, natural law and the fear of God. As long as a culture has such things, even in lingering form, democracy functions as a restraining valve on original sin by keeping power from being concentrated in the hands of too few. That was, after all, the purpose of the Constitution: to set everybody at cross-purposes because nobody could be trusted.

However, when the culture narrative changes and we stop conceiving of freedom as "freedom to do what is right before God, no matter what Caesar may try to compel me to do" and instead start conceiving of freedom as "my personal power to do whatever the f*ck I want" (and f*ck is the precisely descriptive operative word here), democracy is doomed because we lose the basis for our dignity as human beings by defying the God who is only conceivable basis for saying that the individual matters more than the Hive. Once you have seen through every transcendental value as a mere subjective wish projection, once you have eliminated "I ought" from human vocabulary, what says "I want" remains. And the winner of the "I want" scramble for power is The Strongest. Period.

Republicans Have No Candidate

David Harsanyi:

This election has never been about John McCain — though his candidacy is sure to revive a debate about the worst presidential candidates of all time.

No, this is a referendum on Barack Obama. And many Republicans are exuding the confidence of a hopelessly quixotic sports fan — a person who watches his atrocious team struggle for three quarters with the false expectation that some miraculous comeback is imminent in the fourth.

It rarely is.

McCain has consistently remained inconsistent, vacillating between promises and populism. From his support of cap-and-trade to his actions during the bailout, McCain's positions seem entirely focused on winning the middle- of-the-road vote.

No modern Republican has ever won the presidency solely focused on the ambivalent squishy inattentive center. These people don't care enough to name their political party, much less pay attention.

But he's a maverick. One of McCain's central arguments has been his uncompromising valor in opposing the Bush administration.

Here's a newsbreak: Disagreeing with the Bush administration on a handful of issues (often the wrong ones, in McCain's case) doesn't make you a maverick, it makes you an average American. And, sadly, the second debate proved that McCain would be incapable of making his party's philosophical or political case even if he genuinely tried.

When Obama claims, as he did during the second debate, that raising taxes on the rich is the equivalent of giving them a "break," McCain, terrified of defending anyone in a Lexus, failed to make an assertive case that economic freedom helps everyone.

When Obama claimed he would lower income taxes for 95 percent of Americans even though nearly 40 percent of households don't pay a single cent in income taxes, McCain just smiled.

When Obama continued his absurd insistence that our financial mess was caused only by Bush-era "deregulation," McCain struggled to place the blame where it belongs: on government meddling.

And when Obama contended his economic plan would be a "net" cut in spending, McCain should have spit the water out of his mouth like a character on a TV sitcom — because that's exactly what the senior senator from Arizona is starring in.

Those Republicans anticipating a fourth-quarter comeback during the debate were instead hit with a wet fish. Did the putative Republican candidate just propose that the U.S. Treasury renegotiate millions of mortgages at a better price?

Was McCain simply unable to articulate a more complex position? It sounded a lot like a comprehensive nationalization of the mortgage industry. It sounded a lot like hundreds of billions of additional tax dollars.

Yep, he meant it. It's called the American Homeownership Resurgence. It will stabilize the economy. And Obama will stop global warming. And McCain will find bin Laden, even if he has to do it with his bare hands. And . . . well, at this pace, we're about two debates away from being promised free lemonade and snicker doodles...

Parody

Funny stuff.

Another Hard-Hitting Ad

Blind Ambition:

It's Hard To Disagree That Racsim Is The Major Factor In This Election

From a comment here:

david levavi:

There is racism aplenty at work in this campaign but it all works in Obama’s favor.

Consider the African American vote that tilts 90% plus for Obama. Not racist?

Then there is the absence of any mention of race in discussing the current financial crisis. At the heart of corruption was the notion that African Americans would be better integrated into the American mainstream and less restive if they had a stake in America. Home ownership without credit was the policy to accomplish that goal. And activist organs of the far Left like ACORN used the tried and true coercive methods of Jesse Jackson and like poverticians to force banks to give loans to poor, AKA, black folk. Barney Frank preemptively remarks on this, complaining that criticism of Fannie and Freddie are veiled racist attacks on poor Blacks.

Finally there is the Pathologically twisted white liberal vote to consider. I live in the most liberal district in the nation. Walk down the streets of the Upper West Side and you’d imagine the neighborhood is as mixed as can be. Plural to a fault. Black people and white people mix freely and amicably wherever you look.

But the impression is false. The superliberal Upper West Side is lily-white. The people of color on the street are the service classes who don’t live anywhere near the Upper West Side. They’re the doormen and the handymen and the store-cashiers and the child-care and elder-care employees who wipe the noses and the arses of the liberal residents and allow them to enjoy their liberal fantasies in comfort and luxury. If the same statistical measures were used to measure racism in housing on the Upper West Side as are used to measure racism in employment in businesses or enrollment in schools, the Upper West Side would be condemned for apartheid.

But Upper West Siders are voting overwhelmingly for Obama. They like Black people. See how pleasantly they smile at the cashier making change for them . Do they ever fail to say hello and exchange a friendly word with their doorman? Don’t they treat their babysitter and their housekeeper as practically a member of the family? Don’t they give up their seat on the bus for an elderly or pregnant Black woman? They just don’t happen to live with Black people or socialize with them.

In the movies and their TV screens Black and White Americans get along famously and that’s how Upper West Siders imagine themselves. Every white hero has a Black sidekick. Scientists, computer whizzes, physicians and executives of every kind are as often as not dark-skinned on screen. News programs, dramas, talk shows and commercials are full of Black people. What could be more healthy or soothing? Or less representative of everyday reality?

Moneyed, urban and suburban liberal whites voting for Obama are convinced hypocrites sold on their own delusions of altruism. They are voting for Obama to feel virtuous when they are anything but. Because they are in the sleazy habit of no-cost-to-themselves affirmative action. Because Obama is Black.

And that’s racism, plain cold and brutal. White liberal racism victimized Hillary Clinton. It is now victimizing John McCain.

A Philosophical Take On Financial Disaster

Link:

[O]ur institutions haven’t fessed up to their epistemic arrogance. They’re still “firing into the dark” while maintaining that they know what they’re doing. The very same people who led the global system into disaster are pretending to lead it into safety. Barney Frank, for example, is as honored as ever. Barack Obama was known to take calls from Franklin Raines on housing and mortgage policy matters. Raines “graduated from Harvard University, Harvard Law School; and Magdalen College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.” He was just the sort of guy who knew what he was doing.

Adding resources to a disaster is like reinforcing failure on the battlefield. It doesn’t help. That’s why “during World War 1, the more troops the generals fed into the machine guns the less confident the home publics were of victory.” Adding resources to a broken system only meant you killed more people. Things have to be done differently to make any headway. We’re not going to do that because we already know what we’re doing, right? In a few weeks, if the polls are to be believed, we are going to entrust the safety of everything to a new administration which believes the government knows best. Expect more “epistemic arrogance”, not less.

There was a time when people explicitly understood their ignorance. And they defended against uncertainty by relying on simpler, less interdependent systems for survival. In case snow blocked the roads they had hams, canned goods, dried beans and sacks of flour in the storeroom. In the event 911 didn’t answer they had a shotgun in back. Family was the insurance against unforeseen crisis. Nation was the refuge against enemies. Culture provided a standard operating procedure which everyone was expected to know.

We have abolished much of that because in our foolish pride, it became an article of faith that we no longer needed them. Canned food is now shunned for the preservatives that it contains. Bacon is bad because it has salt. Allah forbid that there’s a gun in the house. And who could be less ‘with it’ than a woman with five children and a husband who drives a snowmobile. Sarah Palin is hated by sophisticates because she is almost a cliched example of this kind of simplicity. Ha ha ha. Today really cool people live in big cities, dependent on power grids, power circles and power lunches. They imagine there’s no heaven, no countries, nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Today the truly cultured person is expected to know nothing of his own culture and smattering of everyone else’s. Because they’re certain in their epistemological arrogance they’ll never need any of the things they’ve safely abandoned. Who needs a family when you’ve got a retirement fund?

Lenin once described Communism as “socialism plus electricity”. The modern version of Nirvana is “socialism plus Google”. When will we learn? Never, I fear, while pride and the desire for power rule the human breast.

The CDS Problem

In my recent readings I've gleaned that the size of the CDS market (CDS = Credit Default Swap) is on the order of $60T, while the face amount of bonds being insured in this way is only on the order of $10T. So how did this happen? I guess the answer is that speculators and hedge funds started to treat these vehicles not as "insurance" against the bonds they held, but as profitable gambles should third party bonds fail.

In other words, it would be like taking out fire insurance for your neighbors house. Which must have undoubtedly had some strange effects on incentives in the system.