“Sales of new homes fall to a 17-year low in August, government data show, raising further concern about conditions in the housing industry.”
Hello. Further concerns!?!? Housing?!?!
That makes as much sense as “The fact that President Kennedy was shot through the head in 1963 and would be 91 years old in 2008 raised further concerns that he was dead.”
“The banking system needs another $500 billion to survive beyond the $700 billion rescue plan being contemplated by Congress, said Pimco founder Bill Gross.
“Gross said on CNBC that the government bailout plan will help free up bank balance sheets so they can start lending again, but will provide only about $50 billion in real capital to the system.”
Fuck it. Just give it all to them. The dollar won’t be worth anything anyway.
Scared yet?
“They both peaked in the late 1960’s.”
NewMexiKen has already mentioned this news story from the National Enquirer, but I wanted to be sure and point it out again as an example of the kind of thing that has no place in American political journalism or on the better blogs. You won’t find that kind of scurrilous gossip mentioned here.
“[N]otwithstanding McCain’s puffed-up and vainglorious claims to have suspended his campaign to go to Washington and destroy the giant meteor hurtling toward earth save the economy.”
“Sister Mary Dominic, I didn’t get my arithmetic done last night because I had to suspend my homework to work on the financial bailout.”
Nah, she never would have bought it.
Do you?
It may be that this bailout is necessary to stabilize the economy — but someone’s going to have to be held accountable.
We need more stocks — not the financial instruments, but those things where people are clamped in place and exhibited on the public square.
I know I would never mention it here. It’s a disgrace.
Also, they must be pretty sure they could win a libel suit.
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson
Via Cheers and Jeers.
All I can believe is that they figured out that the old terrorism threat level scheme (aka crying wolf) wouldn’t work this time around — like it did in 2004. So they’ve installed a financial threat level to scare us with instead.
And while I think of it, how come with all the shit we go through to get on an airplane, the threat level on all flights is still orange? Shouldn’t the threat level on airplanes of all places be green by now?
“Interest rates on Treasury bills this morning: incredibly low on one-month, negative on three-month bills. This didn’t even happen in the Great Depression.
“Professionally, I’m fascinated. As a citizen, I’m terrified.”
“And today is Sept. 17. This is Constitution Day, or, as the Bush Administration calls it, Wednesday.”
Jay Leno
Bulls make money.
Bears make money.
Pigs get slaughtered.
… because it’s the birthday of the Constitution and Hank Williams. And also these folks.
Football hall-of-fame inductee George Blanda is 81 today. I’m surprised he doesn’t suit up. Blanda played his last game on January 4, 1976, the 1975 AFC Championship. He was 48.
Supreme Court Justice David Souter is 69.
Coach Phil Jackson is 63. Lots of good people born in 1945 (and we are not Baby Boomers, we are War Babies).
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is 57. That’s Cassandra Peterson.
Rita Rudner is 52.
Ken Kesey was born on September 17, 1935. The Writer’s Almanac had a great little essay last year that you should just go read. It begins:
Ken Kesey … was born on this day in La Junta, Colorado (1935). He was a champion wrestler in high school and voted most likely to succeed. He married his high school sweetheart and almost went to Hollywood to be an actor and then accepted a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford, where, as part of a VA experiment, for $75 a day, which was good money, he became one of the first Americans to be exposed to a new drug called LSD.
Maureen Connolly was born on this date in 1934. Connolly was the first woman to win the tennis grand slam (1953). She died of cancer at age 34.
The 15th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, was born 101 years ago today.
William Carlos Williams was born on this date in 1883. Williams was a physician and poet.
He thought that poetry shouldn’t be full of fancy allusions and abstract ideas, and that there should be “no ideas but in things.” His poems were inspired by the townspeople of Rutherford, especially his patients. A lot of his patients didn’t even know that their hardworking doctor — who delivered more than 2,000 babies — spent his nights and weekends writing poems. Those poems were published in books that include Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), and the epic five-volume poem Paterson (1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958) about Paterson, New Jersey, the nearest city to his hometown of Rutherford.
David Dunbar Buick was born on September 17th in 1854. Didn’t know Buick was someone’s name, did you?
Hiram Williams was born on this date 84 years ago. We know him as Hank.
Hank Williams is an inductee of both the Country Music and Rock and Roll halls of fame.
Hank Williams’s legend has long overtaken the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Almost singlehandedly, Williams set the agenda for contemporary country songcraft, but his appeal rests as much in the myth that even now surrounds his short life. His is the standard by which success is measured in country music on every level, even self-destruction.
The words and music of Hank Williams echo across the decades with a timelessness that transcends genre. He brought country music into the modern era, and his influence spilled over into the folk and rock arenas as well. Artists ranging from Gram Parsons and John Fogerty (who recorded an entire album of Williams’ songs after leaving Creedence Clearwater Revival) to the Georgia Satellites and Uncle Tupelo have adapted elements of Williams’ persona, especially the aura of emotional forthrightness and bruised idealism communicated in his songs. Some of Williams’ more upbeat country and blues-flavored numbers, on the other hand, anticipated the playful abandon of rockabilly.
Hank Williams died in the back seat of his Cadillac. He was found and declared dead on New Year’s Day 1953. He was 29.
“Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September 17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history. So intense and sustained was the violence, a man recalled, that for a moment in his mind’s eye the very landscape around him turned red.”
Stephen W. Sears
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
The New York Times coverage from 1862 is online.
Antietam gave Lincoln the military victory he needed to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd. It stated that slaves in states or parts of states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared free. The objective of the war had changed.
America’s bloodiest day:
| Killed: | Union 2,000 | Confederate 1,550 | Total Killed: 3,650 |
| Wounded: | Union 9,550 | Confederate 7,750 | Total Wounded: 17,300 |
| Missing/Captured: | Union 750 | Confederate 1,020 | Total Missing: 1,770 |
| Total: | Union 12,400 | Confederate 10,320 | Total Casualties: 22,720 |
As a rule of thumb, about 20% of the wounded died of their wounds and 30% of the missing had been killed (in the days before dog-tags to identify the dead). Accordingly, an estimate of the total dead from the one-day battle: 7,640.
Source: National Park Service
The best single volume on Antietam is Stephen Sears’s Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. Sears wrote a good article on the battle in 1989: Antietam: The Terrible Price of Freedom.
221 years ago today the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met for the last time to sign the document and send it to the 13 states for ratification. In Gouverneur Morris’s immortal preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
“The point is, I was chairman of the commerce committee. Every part of America’s economy, I oversighted. I have a long record, certainly far more extensive of being involved in our economy than Senator Obama does.”
Senator John McCain today.
Holy liquidation, Batman, does he even know what he’s saying any more?
Photos at Huffington Post.
Go ahead and look. You know you want to.
According to information found at The New York Times, the total value of all the shares of every stock dropped $4 trillion from October 9, 2007, to September 12, 2008, a loss of 20.9%.
The total value of financial sector stock shares dropped from $1.86 trillion to $980 billion, or a loss of 47.3%.
How’d you do?
“If the security of our financial system had been Senator McCain’s number one issue, would he have chosen a spunky mom from Jersey City because, from her window, she could see Wall Street?”
Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.
“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”
Al Gore, call your office.
Blackberrys by the way are a product of Research in Motion, a Canadian company. They’re having an election in Canada Senator McCain. Try your luck up there. And take Governor Palin with you — you can see Canada from Alaska, so she must be an expert on Canada.
For the record, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. The whole story was bogus.
Take a little mortgage business quiz. Match the allegation and the firm.
Allegation
1. Handed out copies of the movie Boiler Room as a training tape
2. Partnered to sell its “PayOption Arms” with a brokerage owned by a five-time felon, whose convictions included gun-related charges
3. Forbade loan officers to check borrower income on certain loans
4. Ran an “art department” in its Tampa office, where documents were altered
5. Settled allegations of institutionalized marketing deception that covered two million customers
6. Developed “FastQual,” a program designed to approve borrowers in twelve seconds
7. Incentivized brokers and loan officers through “yield spread premiums” and other compensation schemes to put borrowers into more expensive loans
8. Tapped two kegs of beer at weekly staff meetings
Institution
A. Citigroup
B. Countrywide
C. Ameriquest
D. IndyMac
E. Merit Financial
F. New Century
G. All of the above
From an excellent profile of the mortgage crisis at Columbia Journalism Review. The answers are in the first comment.
B.B. King is 83 today. Many more B.B. Many more.
King doesn’t play chords or slide; instead, he bends individual strings till the notes seem to cry. His style reflects his upbringing in the Mississippi Delta and coming of age in Memphis. Seminal early influences included such bluesmen as T-Bone Walker (whose “Stormy Monday,” King has said, is “what really started me to play the blues”), Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and Bukka White. A cousin of King’s, White schooled the fledgling guitarist in the idiom when he moved to Memphis. King also admired jazz guitarists Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. Horns have played a big part in King’s music, and he’s successfully combined jazz and blues in a big-band context.
“I’ve always felt that there’s nothing wrong with listening to and trying to learn more,” King has said. “You just can’t stay in the same groove all the time.” This willingness to explore and grow explains King’s popularity across five decades in a wide variety of venues, from funky juke joints to posh Las Vegas lounges.
Elsewhere, Betty Joan Perske is 84. As Lauren Bacall she was nominated for best actress in a supporting role for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces. Bacall was 20 when she married Humphrey Bogart (he was 45) and just 32 when he died. She was married to Jason Robards from 1961-1969.
Columbo, Peter Falk, is 81.
George Chakiris is 76. You know, Bernardo.
Elgin Baylor is 74.
Had Elgin Baylor been born 25 years later, his acrobatic moves would have been captured on video, his name emblazoned on sneakers, and his face plastered on cereal boxes. But he played before the days of widespread television exposure, so among the only records of his prowess that remain are the words of those who saw one of the greatest ever to play.
Robin Yount is 53.
Robin Yount was a productive hitter who excelled in the field at two of baseball’s most challenging positions – shortstop and center field. Playing his entire 20-year career with the Milwaukee Brewers, he collected more hits in the 1980s than any other player and finished with an impressive career total of 3,142. An every day major leaguer at age 18, Yount earned MVP awards at two positions and his 1982 MVP campaign carried the Brewers to the World Series.
Mickey Rourke is 52.
Jennifer Tilly is 50. Tilly received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for Bullets Over Broadway. Better yet she was the voice of Celia, Mike’s love interest, in Monsters, Inc.
Marc Anthony is 40.
Amy Poehler is 37.