“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.
“John McCain this morning called for a commission modeled on the government’s in-depth investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attack to probe what prompted the financial crisis now gripping Wall St and sending shockwaves through the market.”
“But you can only get away with parroting McCain surrogate talking points for so long before people start laughing at you and asking you to become an Amway distributor.”