Have some fun

Did you listen to the podcast mentioned in the previous post?

If not, do it.

Then you can watch this.

Was The Bailout Bill A Good Idea?

“‘And the more I report it, the more scared I have been,’ Davidson tells This American Life host Ira Glass as part of a one-hour special report on the last week of financial turmoil.”

I strongly urge you to take 12 minutes and listen to the exchange between Ira Glass and Adam Davidson about the bailout. It’s a down-to-earth review of what the bill does, what it should have done instead perhaps, and its importance.

Listen online or iTunes Podcast.

The last six minutes of the 18 minute podcast are interesting too, but the first 12 minutes are essential.

Do yourself the favor of listening. 12 minutes.

Worst President Ever

George Walker Bush is not a stupid or a bad man. But in his conduct as president, he behaved stupidly and badly. He was constrained by neither the standards of conduct common to the average professional nor the Constitution. This was not ignorance but a willful rejection on Bush’s part, in the service of streamlining White House decision-making, eliminating complexity, and shutting out dissenting voices. This insular mind-set was and is dangerous. Rigorous thinking and hard-won expertise are both very good things, and our government for the past eight years has routinely debased and mocked these virtues.

President Bush was unmoved by any arguments that challenged his assumptions. Debate was silenced, expertise was punished, and diversity of opinion was anathema, so much so that his political opponents–other earnest Americans who want the best for their country–were, to him and his men, the moral equivalent of the enemy. It is important to note just how different such conduct has been from the conduct of other presidents from both parties.

From a Ron Suskind piece in Esquire. He explains.

Live from New York, It’s Tina Fey

VP Debate Open: Palin / Biden [video]

Best line of the day, so far

“At Sarah Palin’s old church in Wasilla, they spoke in tongues. Maybe that’s where she picked it up.”

Maureen Dowd

A new runner

Five-year-old Sweetie Aidan ran in his first fun run Saturday, a half-miler. Older brother Mack ran a mile.

That’s Aidan. Click image for larger version.

The Depression before The Depression

Scott Reynolds Nelson, a professor of history at the College of William and Mary, finds a precedent for the current financial crisis a little further back in time.

As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.

. . .

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls “the real Great Depression.” She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

Nelson has the details. Fascinating. Scary.

One month to go

It ain’t over ’til it’s over, but Friday’s Research 2000 nationwide tracking poll for Daily Kos had Obama up 13.

FiveThirtyEight.com projects the electoral vote at 333-205.

Sábado, 4 octubre 2008

It’s the birthday

… of gothic author Anne Rice, 67. She is said to have sold 100 million books.

… of Susan Sarandon. The five-time nominee for best actress (she won for Dead Man Walking) is 62 today.

… of Alicia Silverstone, probably not as clueless at 32.

Charlton Heston would have been 84 today. Heston won the best actor Oscar for Ben-Hur (1959), his only nomination.

It’s the birthday of Buster Keaton, born on this date in 1895.

Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton’s work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films. An acrobatically skillful and psychologically insightful actor, Keaton made dozens of short films and fourteen major silent features, attesting to one of the most talented and innovative artists of his time. …

It was this “stone face,” however, that came to represent a sense of optimism and everlasting inquisitiveness.

In films such as THE NAVIGATOR (1924), THE GENERAL (1926), AND THE CAMERAMAN (1928), Keaton portrayed characters whose physical abilities seemed completely contingent on their surroundings. Considered one of the greatest acrobatic actors, Keaton could step on or off a moving train with the smoothness of getting out of bed. Often at odds with the physical world, his ability to naively adapt brought a melancholy sweetness to the films.

American Masters | PBS

Frederic Remington was born on October 4th in 1861.

With his dynamic representations of cowboys and cavalrymen, bronco busters and braves, 19th-century artist Frederic Remington created a mythic image of the American West that continues to inspire America today. His technical ability to reproduce the physical beauty of the Western landscape made him a sought-after illustrator, but it was his insight into the heroic nature of American settlers that made him great. This painter, sculptor, author, and illustrator, who was so often identified with the American West, surprisingly spent most of his life in the East. More than anything, in fact, it was Remington’s connection with the eastern fantasy of the West, and not a true knowledge of its history and people, that his admirers responded to.

American Masters | PBS

Photo of sculpture from Amon Carter Museum.

And it’s the birthday of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 19th President of the United States. Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on this date in 1822.

As the Library of Congress tells it:

Rutherford B. Hayes became…president in 1877 after a bitterly-contested election against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Tilden won the popular vote, but disputed electoral ballots from four states prompted Congress to create a special electoral commission to decide the election’s result. The fifteen-man commission of congressmen and Supreme Court justices, eight of whom were Republicans, voted along party lines deciding the election in Hayes’s favor.

Question

Why doesn’t McCain wear a flag lapel pin?

Worth repeating

“Happiness among American men and women reaches its estimated minimum at approximately ages 49 and 45 respectively.”

National Bureau of Economic Research

First posted here one year ago. Original link via Paul Krugman.

By the way, I’m feeling less gloomy since I burned my gloom in the Zozobra in Santa Fe a month ago. Really! Of course, it could be the recent visit with 5/6ths of The Sweeties® and the upturn in the polls for Obama, but I actually think it’s the Zozobra too.

Using McCain math

Using the same methodology the McCain campaign has used to claim Obama has voted 94 times for tax increases, The Washington Monthly reports that the Obama campaign finds McCain likes taxes even more.

The results were interesting, to put it mildly. According to McCain, Obama voted 94 tax increases since 2005. Using the same methodology, McCain voted for 105 tax increases since 2005. The Republican ticket has some trouble with math, but the last time I checked, 105 is a bigger number than 94.

What’s more, taking this one step further, McCain, using his own standard, has voted for 477 tax increases over the course his lengthy congressional career.

Best line of the day, so far

“McCain sprung his vice-presidential selection on us at the last minute, possibly under the impression that the country felt things had gotten too boring lately, and would appreciate the excitement of having a minimally experienced political unknown serving as backup to a 72-year-old cancer survivor.”

Gail Collins

Who he is

I’ve noticed throughout this campaign, by the way, that there are two kinds of Obama supporters: those who have read “Dreams From My Father” and those who haven’t. The ones who have read it tend to be impatient with certain of the stock observations made by nonreaders of all political persuasions—comments like “We don’t know all that much about him” or “I’m not sure who he is, really.” Who he is is right there on the page. Or on the CD: I’ve also noticed that those who have absorbed “Dreams” via the audiobook version, read by the author (who reproduces his characters’ accents), are the most fervent of all.

Hendrik Hertzberg

Debate moderators

Talk about going to the same well.

2008: Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw, Bob Schieffer, Gwen Ifill (VP)

2004: Jim Lehrer, Charles Gibson, Bob Schieffer, Gwen Ifill (VP)

2000: Jim Lehrer (3), Bernard Shaw (VP)

1996: Jim Lehrer (2 and VP)

1992: Jim Lehrer (2), Carole Simpson, Hal Bruno (VP)

1988: Jim Lehrer, Bernard Shaw, Judy Woodruff & Panel (VP)

The three white guys are old. Jim Lehrer is 74. Tom Brokaw is 68. Bob Schieffer is 71.

Gwen Ifill is 53.

Who Caused the Economic Crisis?

The House easily passed the bailout rescue bill this afternoon. It seemed a good time to look at who contributed to this mess. FactCheck.org takes a stab at listing the co-conspirators.

• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

Thanks to Byron for the link.

Cool

But It’s not journalism, it’s infotainment

For several days, it was made increasingly apparent that the Republican Party has nominated for vice-president a person who is manifestly unqualified to teach middle-school history. (Hint: the default answer, always, is, “Dred Scott v. Sanford, Katie.” The Civil War was, like, a bad thing.) And yet, through the entire run-up to the debate, it was argued by serious people who analyze serious politics and make a serious living doing it that Sarah Palin could reveal herself to be non-dim by putting on the correct puppet show for the media in her debate against Joe Biden. Make no mistake. That’s what the punditocracy was arguing. Give us a reason, please, not to have to write what we all know to be true, what has been self-evidently true to the entire country since you walked off the podium in St. Paul. No rational person can possibly believe that she got smarter, or better informed, or more curious in the time that elapsed between when she talked with Ms. Couric and last night’s debate. What we were being asked to judge was purely how well she had refined her performance skills in the interim. . . . Journalists should not be in the business of perception-is-reality. It is our job to hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it.

Charles Pierce

Best line of the day, so far

“[B]ut would somebody like to explain what in the name of pole-vaulting Jesus Tom DeLay was doing on Hardball the other night? Was it Take A Crook To Work Day? Folks, this greasy little homunculus is under indictment.”

Charles Pierce

Does praying she’s back in Alaska soon count?

Whoever would like to make a commitment to pray for Sarah Palin can go to www.prayforsarahpalin.com and enter their zip code. A marker will automatically be placed on the prayer coverage map, which can be viewed live in Google maps. There are approximately 43,000 zip codes in the United States. Our goal is to have people praying for Sarah Palin in every zip code. I believe prayer changes things.

PrayForSarahPalin via MoJo Blog

The state of the nation

Black guy who just walked in: Excuse me, sir, have you been waiting for the train long?

White guy reading newspaper (with an Obama sticker on his bag): Sorry, I don’t have any spare change.

Black guy: What?

–1 Train

Overheard in New York

America

Does the palpable ignorance around the election make you want to learn more about this country’s history?

In its December 2004 issue, American Heritage published an extensive and valuable bibliography of American history.

So here it is, certainly the most challenging editorial task we’ve ever attempted—and one of the most rewarding. We have drawn on the knowledge and enthusiasm of leading historians, writers, and critics to offer a compendium of the very best books about the American experience. Divided into both chronological and subject categories ranging from the rise of the Republic to sports, from the years of World War II to the African-American journey, each section presents the writer’s choice of the 10 best books in a particular field, along with lucid, lively explanations of what makes them great. The result, we believe, is both a valuable reference work and an anthology of highly personal views of the making of our country and our culture that is immensely readable in its own right.

— American Heritage: America Unabridged.

The list is worth consulting.

By the way, Gore Vidal’s novel Lincoln makes the list. As noted below, Vidal is 83 today.

October 3rd

Gore Vidal is 83 today.

Steve Reich is 72. Let this paragraph from Alex Ross in The New Yorker explain Reich’s compostitions:

In this sense, “Different Trains,” for recorded voices and string quartet, may be Reich’s most staggering achievement, even if “Music for 18” gives the purest pleasure. He wrote the piece in 1988, after recalling cross-country train trips that he had taken as a child. “As a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period, I would have had to ride very different trains,” he has said. Recordings of his nanny reminiscing about their journeys and of an elderly man named Lawrence Davis recalling his career as a Pullman porter are juxtaposed with the testimonies of three Holocaust survivors. These voices give a picture of the dividedness of twentieth-century experience, of the irreconcilability of American idyll and European horror—and something in Mr. Davis’s weary voice also reminds us that America was never an idyll for all. The hidden melodies of the spoken material generate string writing that is rich in fragmentary modal tunes and gently pulsing rhythms.

The NPR 100 included Reich’s “Drumming” among its “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.” Here’s that report. (RealPlayer)

Chubby Checker is 67. His version of “The Twist” was number one in both 1960 and 1962.

My daddy is sleepin’ and mama ain’t around
Yeah daddy is sleepin’ and
mama ain’t around
We’re gonna twisty twisty twisty
‘Til we turn the house down

My good senator, Jeff Bingaman, is 65 today.

Roy is 64.

In their three-plus decades in Las Vegas, Siegfried & Roy have performed for more than 25 million people. Through the years, they have seen many changes in the city’s entertainment scene, some of which they were personally responsible for. The illusionists opened the door to family entertainment, setting a standard in stage extravaganzas that cannot be duplicated anywhere in the world.

Lindsey Buckingham is 59. For years I thought Lindsey was Stevie and Stevie was Lindsey.

Keb’ Mo’ is 57.

Dave Winfield is 57.

A true five-tool athlete who never spent a day in the minor leagues, Dave Winfield played 22 seasons, earning 12 All-Star Game selections. At six-feet, six-inches, he was an imposing figure and a durable strongman with the rare ability to combine power and consistency. In tours of duty with six major league teams, Winfield batted .283, hit 465 home runs, and amassed 3,110 hits. He was a seven-time Gold Glove winner and helped lead the Toronto Blue Jays to their first World Championship in 1992.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Dennis Eckersley is 54.

Dennis Eckersley blazed a unique path to Hall of Fame success. During the first half of his 24-year big league career, Eck won over 150 games primarily as a starter, including a no-hitter in 1977. Over his final 12 years, he saved nearly 400 games, leading his hometown Oakland A’s to four American League West titles and earning both Cy Young and MVP honors in 1992. The only pitcher with 100 saves and 100 complete games, Eckersley dominated opposing batters during a six-year stretch from 1988 to 1993, in which he struck out 458 while walking just 51.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Al Sharpton is 54.

Donna Moss is 39. That’s Janel Moloney of The West Wing.

Not only is Gwen Stefani not a “Hollaback Girl,” at 39 one might say she’s not even a girl.

A few times I’ve been around that track
So it’s not just gonna happen like that
Cause I ain’t no hollaback girl
I ain’t no hollaback girl

(A hollaback girl is a girl who lets boys do whatever, then waits for them to call, to holler back. Originally it meant a cheerleader who echoed the lead cheerleader’s call. The song uses both meanings well.)

John Ross was born on October 3rd in 1790.

He spent his early life trying to design a new government for the Cherokees, based on the U.S. government, with a constitution and three separate but equal branches and democratically elected leaders. He respected the American justice system so much that when the state of Georgia tried to force Cherokees off their land, John Ross chose not to go to war, but instead took Georgia to court. It was the first time that an Indian tribe had ever sued the U.S. over treaty rights, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The case was decided in 1832, and Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in his opinion that the state of Georgia did not have jurisdiction over Cherokees and therefore could not force the Cherokees to leave their land. But President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the decision. He said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Six years later, 15,000 Cherokees were forced out of their homes at gunpoint by American soldiers, gathered together in camps and then forced to walk to the new “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi, an event that became known as The Trail of Tears. The camps had horrible hygienic conditions, and an epidemic of dysentery killed an estimated 8,000 Cherokees, including John Ross’s wife.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2007)

Emily Post was born on October 3rd in 1873, thank you very much.

She taught as the basis of all correct deportment that “no one should do anything that can either annoy or offend the sensibilities of others.” Thousands found their social problems solved by her simple counsels. Her name became synonymous with good manners.

Mrs. Post’s advice was varied. She gave suggestions about how to inculcate good manners in an active 7-year-old boy and she could and did answer complicated questions about the proper way to address titled persons of Europe.

But for the most part she advised the debutante, the confused suitor and the newly married couple who wished to establish themselves in good relations with the world about them. She always avoided giving lonelyhearts advice and never suggested ways to capture a husband or wife, although many young persons found courtship easier because of what she said.

The New York Times

Best line of the day, so far

“Since they [pundits] spend all of their time trying to explain to us what this imaginary stupid voter might think about things, you’d think it might be simpler to just hire a few of these very stupid people to be pundits. Oh, wait.”

Atrios

There are more important economic indicators than stock price gyrations

Another credit market indicator, the “TED spread,” rose to yet another record high of 3.68 percentage points. The higher the spread, the more likely banks are to avoid risk. The TED spread was only 1.04 points on Sept. 5.

The TED spread measures the difference between 3-month Libor and the yield on the 3-month Treasury, considered by many investors to be the safest investment. The spread is a key indicator of banks’ willingness to lend to one another.

CNN

Libor is the acronym for London interbank offered rate, another key indicator of interest rates.