700 Billion Worth of Prozac

I need a drink.

Because as a tax-payer I guess it's now my job to ward off the Great Depression.

Or as I call it, the deregula-pression.

Because this economic shit-storm is absolutely the result of deregulation.

See before the GOP got their greedy little hands on government there were a few teensy safeguards against this kind of thing.

They were called "regulations".

But the Republicans have adamantly insisted we must "reduce the size of government!"

Which is code for, "throw out all regulations on business, no matter how sensible or necessary!".

This ironically has led to a bigger government than we ever dreamed of in the form of a 700 billion dollar bail/buy-out.

Maybe this shows us that people who don't believe in government shouldn't be running the government.

Even more ironically this rampant, rapacious, unfettered capitalism has now become socialism of the worst kind.

Because we are socializing ownership of failing mortgage and insurance companies, banks and other financial institutions.

In other words we are socializing risks (for fat-cats) and privatizing profits.

So when everything is riding high it's, "Hey, get the government out of the way!" but when it all goes to shit it's, "Um, do you have 700 billion I could borrow?".

My answer to them is the same I used to give to the crack addicts outside my apartment in Hollywood every night.

"Fuck off and get a real job."

Folks it's hard to sum up all the factors that have lead us exactly to where we are today.

But I can try.

Here's my take and I'll try and keep it as simple as possible.

First the laws on credit were relaxed to a point where anybody could get a loan.

ANYBODY.

Interest rates were also kept artificially low (paging Mr. Greenspan) to ward off inflation.

This facilitated the handing out of risky loans to risky people.

Second the Glass-Steagall act of 1933 was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. The former prevented banks from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services all at once. The latter allowed them to consolidate into a single institution.

Basically it allowed them to take FDIC insured deposits and then speculate with that money.

Your money.

As of 1999 they could now take your hard-earned $ and not only hand out risky mortgages, they could also buy risky mortgage securities and then insure other risky mortgages, thus taking insurance premiums every month and hoping the piper never had to be paid.

Does that sound like three times the risk to you? Well it is.

All with your $.

Folks this is what we call deregulation. This is what we call a bad idea.

For this brilliant change in law you can thank Phil Gramm - McCain's chief economic advisor.

I'd blame Clinton too but he was facing a veto-proof majority in the Senate so what option did he have?

All of this eventually led to a housing boom in which the market was artificially inflated by speculators flipping houses for huge profits in an artificially short period of time.

This also led to lower-level mortgage salesmen and re-fi shysters getting people approved for mortgages they couldn't afford by telling them that surely they'd be able to re-fi when the time came because the market would obviously keep going up and up and up in an artificially short period of time and their house would be surely be worth more than when they bought it in an artificially short period of time.

The mortgage companies and banks then took these bad loans and did two things.

First they repackaged them as securities to sell on Wall Street (thus the downfall of Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, etc.).

Second they insured them with folks like AIG who kept on insuring them because they thought, "Hey, these premiums are free money because of course houses will keep going up in value in an artificially short period of time.

Since the debt to asset ratio of 15 to 1 had been removed (by more awesome deregulation!) this was all possible.

See you no longer had to have a reasonable amount of capital no matter how much debt you took on.

This model of profit-making was all predicated on one thing - PEOPLE WHO COULDN'T AFFORD THEIR MORTGAGE WOULD SOMEHOW BE ABLE TO AFFORD THEIR MORTGAGE.

If that sounds shifty to you that's because it is.

Essentially the banks, the re-fi people and such all gambled that the value of homes would keep going up forever thus allowing people to refinance every few years or whenever interest rates were raised.

Goodbye old model of buying a home you can afford and living in it for 30 years.

Hello buying a house out of your means in the hope you will be able to re-fi and re-fi and re-fi again!

Hello buying a house on an interest-only loan and selling it for a 100K profit in three months!

Obviously this had to come to an end.

It has.

Now they want 700 billion to bail them out.

I don't want to give it to them because, hey, this is the free market at work.

Also I'm in Vegas right now. If I put my life savings on one hand of blackjack and lose should I expect the government to help me?

Of course not. Because I'm gambling and that's all Wall Street really is.

Gambling with a nice suit on.

I don't know if denying a bail-out will lead to another depression or not.

All I know is my parents are probably going to move in with me.

Which means we'll all be living in a Honda Civic Hybrid.

Anybody got a Xanax?

Obama Wants to Teach 5 Year-Olds How to F**k

Hey, kids, "H" is for herpes!!!

So Obama, when he was in the state legislatiure in Illinois, voted in committee to teach age-appropriate sex-ed to kindergartners.

Which basically would have involved giving them lessons on what was inappropriate touching and how to avoid sexual predators.

Now the McCain campaign is running an ad that basically accuses Obama of wanting to teach little kids how to fuck.

Don't believe me? Watch this...


This is of course easily debunkable...

Debunking link! Read Here!

So much for the honorable straight talkin' flyboy Johnny McCain.

What we've got now is a pol who's sucking so hard on demon dick you're gonna need pliars to get his dentures off when he's done.

Which, going on the tenor of his campaign so far should be right around November 5 when he's (hopefully) giving his concession speech while simultaneously gargling Listerine in a vain attempt to get the taste of devil semen out of his old, lying mouth.

Family is Frustrating

I have a family problem.

Without naming names...

One of my female family members won't vote for Obama because, as she says "He's a muslim."

This is easily disprovable but she refuses to look into it.

A male family member is Catholic and pro-life so he won't vote for Obama either.

Of course he ignores the fact that the Pope is virulently against the Iraq war and the death penalty.

2 things John McCain is a cheerleader for.

So apparently my misguided relative thinks it's OK to kill babies as long as they're inside the bodies of living Iraqi women.

BTW - he also thinks that the Democrats sabotaged Sarah Palin's teleprompter during her speech at the RNC.

And no, he's not on crystal meth.

That I know of.

See it wouldn't bother me if my family folk opposed Obama based on even the tiniest grain of truth or perhaps a thoughtful dissent involving policy.

But they don't. They buy into the Hannity, Limbaugh, GOP lie machine without using the critical thinking skills I am so sure they possess.

These thoughts by my kin strike me as close-minded, ignorant and less than vaguely racist.

I can't be friends with people like that anymore, no matter how much DNA we share.

I can't hang out with people who put all their faith in Jesus and not in facts.

I just don't have anything in common with them other than we sort of look alike.

Bummer.

Country First?

John McCain might die.

He is 72 and a four time cancer survivor.

There is a real chance he could be incapacitated in some manner causing (gulp!) Sarah Palin to become acting President of the United States.

Or as the job is otherwise known - THE MOST POWERFUL PERSON IN THE FREE WORLD.

As I've been reading, listening, watching and learning about Governor Palin this prospect becomes increasingly frightening.

It is also becomes increasingly obvious that McCain made a nakedly political choice when he picked Palin to be his running mate.

Because Palin is a an early Christmas gift to the hard right, bible-thumping, rapture-believing section of the GOP.

They love that she thinks Iraq is a mission from God (what is she, a Blues Brother?) and that she wants a woman who is raped and becomes pregnant to be forced to carry her rapist's child in her belly for 9 months.

They don't care that she is clearly not up to speed on national or international issues. They don't care that in a crashing economy she doesn't realize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are public institutions. They just care that she is waaay into automatic weapons and rape-spawned fetuses.

So much for putting country first, John. This time country finished a few laps behind winning.

If McCain wanted to pick a woman he could have picked Kay Bailey Hutchison or Olympia Snow or Condoleeza Rice. All women who are much more qualified than Palin.

But he didn't.

I find it ironic that for the last 4 months McCain has been saying Obama is "not ready to lead" over and over and over.

But now he nominates a woman who has a resume thinner than Kate Moss.

So for the last 4 months McCain's campaign either didn't mean what they said or they were lying.

How can I tell the Palin pick wouldn't hold up to serious scrutiny you may ask?

Simple. Watch the way the McCain campaign is handling her.

They are in the process of managing Palin's rollout with the kind of thoughtfulness you wish they had put into the decision to go to war in Iraq.

She has been cut off from the kind of press conferences, Sunday morning talk-show appearances and other interviews that all candidates for Veep have been subjected to since the advent of Television.

She has agreed to only two interviews. Two! How many has Biden done? Hell Obama eveen went on the O'Reilly Factor! Do you think Palin or McCain will go on Countdown with Keith Olbermann any time soon?

Hell no.

Palin has been so shut off from any kind of spontaneous media contact you'd think she was a member of a jury in a high-profile murder case instead of a candidate for Vice President.

So why do it? Why would the McCain camp need to protect her from the media if she was truly qualified? Why would they keep her behind a curtain of silence and safety if she knew her stuff?

The answer is she has been sequestered because she knows jack-shit about national issues.

Think about it.

That's why the Charlie Gibson interview took place over a series of days in Palin's hometown.

Because they wanted to turn what should have been an in-depth discussion of policy into a "personality profile".

My God, what would happen if she had to go on Meet the Press or Face the Nation?

She would look like a fool. She came across as a fool half the time when Gibson lobbed her softballs.

Actually Gibson did better than I thought he would. I give him a B minus.

Highlights of the piece included her not knowing what the Bush Doctrine was and segueing the question about her national security credentials into a diatribe about how she knows energy.

Yeah, news flash. It's not hard to be an energy expert in Alaska since the oil is everywhere and also state-owned.

What that has to do with the Iraq war, Iranian nuclear ambitions or a resurgent Russia I'm not sure but it's the answer she gave.

Also she repeated the ridiculous line that she has foreign policy cred because "Alaska is close to Russia." In fact according to her you can "see Russian territory" from Alaska.

Awesome. I can see a bathroom from where I'm sitting right now. Does that make me a proctologist?

When she said that I simultaneously laughed, wept, then screamed "you stupid whore" at the top of my lungs and threw a bunch of shit at the TV.

So you can't say she's not an inspiring speaker!

Folks, it may be a travesty and a perversion of the democratic process, but for now the Gibson interview will have to stand as Palin's audition with the American people.

Because that's all we're going to get. One tiny interview with the woman who wants to be THE MOST POWERFUL PERSON IN THE FREE WORLD.

Oh, I forgot! She'll be talking soon with Sean Hannity. I'm sure that will be a tough set of questions.

Let's play a drinking game with the Hannity interview. Every time he mentions how she's been subjected to sexism or unfair treatment by the media you have to take a shot.

I imagine you'll be drunker than Winston Churchill before the interview is 5 minutes old.

You know, if she didn't want to be "subjected to unfair treatment" she could always GO ON A SUNDAY MORNING TALK SHOW or, Heaven forbid, TALK OFTEN AND OPENLY WITH THE MEDIA.

But that ain't gonna happen.

Because she isn't up to the task of talking openly to the media without looking like a completely unqualified and uninformed PTA mom who wants to be THE MOST POWERFUL PERSON IN THE FREE WORLD.

So much for country first, McCain.

As Obama said, I guess you'd "rather lose your integrity than lose an election."

Have You Ever Been Executive Experienced?

So the GOP keeps touting the fact that Sarah Palin has more "executive experience" than Barack Obama.

Of course they leave out the fact that she also has more executive experience than John McCain.

But what does executive experience mean? That you had employees?

Christ she was mayor of Wasilla, AK. A 7,000 person town and the governor for 20 months of the 4th smallest state in the union.

She is also under investigation for abuse of power and was almost recalled as mayor in a firing scandal.

Well I used to manage a sporting goods store. I had some employees under me and I never even got a write-up!

Can I be President now?

Fumbling the Hand-Off

Yaaaaay! We handed over the Anbar province!!!! According to the right-wing the war is almost over!

Right? Right?

Sort of.

Not really.

No.

From the Washington Post...

"...as Iraqis celebrated the milestone, uncertainty lingered about the future of a linchpin in the effort to secure Anbar and the rest of Iraq: the Awakening movement, a 100,000-person group of former Sunni insurgents who now cooperate with U.S. troops.

The Shiite-led government has recently stepped up a campaign to arrest leaders of the Awakening and dismantle parts of the program, whose members receive $300 a month from the U.S. military. Many fighters have abandoned their posts and fled their homes to avoid detention, stoking fears that some will rejoin the insurgency."

So we leave and the Shiite government starts arresting the people who fought al-Qaeda in Iraq for us.

Sounds like stable democracy to me!

From USA Today...

"...approximately 25,000 U.S. Marines stationed in Anbar will remain for now, but they will run fewer patrols and function largely in a supporting role for Iraqi security forces."

So we're handing it over. But we're still running patrols and keeping 25,000 troops there.

Is that really "handing it over"? 25,000 US troops is a lotta guns, bullets and boots in the area.

Doesn't sound like a hand-over in any sense of the word except symbolically saying, "Here ya go. Arrest our former allies without cause and we won't stop you. Do what you want! However if things get out of hand we have 25,000 fucking death-bringers ready to go at a moment's notice. So enjoy your sovereignty! For now!"

What Republican Really Think About Sarah Palin

The Vagina Card

A quote from McCain campaign spokeswoman Carly Fiorina (the FIRED CEO of Hewlett Packard)...

"Because of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the Presidency and the treatment she received, American women are more highly tuned than ever to recognize and decry sexism in all its forms. They will not tolerate sexist treatment of Governor Palin."

REALLY, BITCH?

This is not only a blatant (ineffective) pander to dissafected Hillary voters it is also a ridiculous distortion of what is going on.

The fact is the Obama campaign hasn't said anything all that horrible about Sarah Palin other than to lightly point out that she is VASTLY INEXPERIENCED.

Other than that they've been fairly hands off. The media hasn't been overly in attack-mode either although they're doing their usual light-news job with a new figure on the scene.
Honestly there are things the press could be going after with both barrells blazing right now and we'll see if they will in the coming days.

But as for now reporters are in a wait and see mode. There is no mention of gender at all as far as I've seen in ANY criticizm of Palin.

Also let me point out that the McCain camp doesn't have any qualms talking about Obama's experience vs. McCains's when it suits their purposes.

Did they do this because he was black?

Probably not.

Probably they thought it was a winning strategy. Or maybe they even think it's true.

So if Obama or the media go after Palin please don't pull the va-jay-jay card. People in public life get shots taken at them regardless of what is between their legs.

Christ, it's not like Obama said, "Fuck that bitch. She gonna be too emotional to run this bizness, bleeding all over the Oval Office rug once a month and shit.

Anyway there are plenty of Palin things to talk about that have nothing to do with her gender:

1. Troopergate
2. Almost recalled as mayor of her 7,000 person town.
3. Wants to teach creationism.
4. Doesn't believe climate change is man-made.
5. Thinks the Iraq war is a mission from God.
6. Is anti-choice in cases of rape or incest.
7. My 17 year-old whore daughter fucked a hockey-player dueschebag without a rubber-gate.

None of these have anything to do with whether she has an innie or an outie down there.

So Carly, shut the fuck up and go back to screwing up companies. You dumb girl.