Jack Bogdanski (Lewis & Clark) & Bryan Camp (Texas Tech) have independently reviewed the tax issues raised by the release of Gov. Palin’s 2006 and 2007 tax returns and financial disclosure form, as well as the remarkable opinion letter issued from Washington D.C. tax lawyer Roger M. Olsen. Jack and Bryan conclude that there are serious errors in Gov. Palin’s returns as filed and that she and her husband owe tens of thousands of dollars in additional taxes.
Stocks
You may have noticed I haven’t been singing the praises of Apple and Google stocks lately. Apple is at $89 and Google at $363 at the moment.
Google was at $711 when I mentioned it last November.
Apple got to $202 last December.
I bought none of either.
Best line of the day, so far
“[W]ondering…what might be left of my 401k. I’m worried that it’s now a 301k.”
Stand and deliver
Today marks the anniversary of the first American train robbery. An east bound Ohio & Mississippi passenger train was boarded by the Reno brothers near Seymour, Indiana, on this date in 1866.
The Today in History page at the Library of Congress provides background about train robberies and early railroads including this excerpt from “The Early Days in Silver City” —
I happened to be riding that train. I had gone overland to Safford and Solemisvelle prospecting. I decided to come home Thanksgiving to be with my family at Silver City. I boarded the train at Wilcox. There was a large shipment of gold on the train. Just out of Steins Pass we could see a large bon-fire. One of the trainmen remarked, ‘Wonder what the big fire is, I hope we don’t run into any trouble.’ The bon-fire we discovered to our sorrow was on the R. R. Then as today curiosity got the best of some of us so we had to find out why the train came to an abrupt stop, and what the bon-fire was put on the track. We found ourselves looking into the barrel of guns.
Our capacity for self-government
From twelve time zones away, it looks as if the United States is in one of those moments where the capacity to get serious and face big problems is sorely tested.
In the short term, a worldwide financial panic and crisis. Just beyond that, the real economic and social problems that come when large numbers of people lose their jobs, their businesses, their investments, their homes, and even larger numbers become fearful about what might happen to them. And then, when we get a minute to think, profound global energy and environmental challenges, security concerns that range from loose nukes to terrorist organizations, plus a couple of ongoing wars and ever-rising medical costs. Just as starters. The United States is still incredibly rich, powerful, and productive. But the current situation is no joke, for America or the world.
In these circumstances, and with a presidential election four weeks away, is it conceivable that candidates will waste time arguing whether one of them has been in the same room with a guy who had been a violent extremist at a time before most of today’s U.S. citizens were even born? (William Ayres was a Weatherman in the late 1960s. Today’s median-aged American was born around 1972.) Of course, it’s not only conceivable: it’s the Republican plan for this final push — “turning the page” on economic concerns and getting to these “character” and “association” questions about Barack Obama.
Grow up. If John McCain has a better set of plans to deal with the immediate crisis, and the medium-term real-economy fallout, and the real global problems of the era — fine, let him win on those. But it is beneath the dignity he had as a Naval officer to wallow in this mindless BS. I will say nothing about the dignity of a candidate who repeatedly winks at the public, Hooters-waitress style. A great country acts great when it matters. This is a time when it matters — for politicians in the points they raise, for journalists in the subjects they write about and the questions they ask of candidates. And, yes, for voters.
29 days to go
FiveThirtyEight.com now projects the popular vote in 29 days to be Obama 51.5%, McCain 47%. The electoral vote projects to 340-198. Obama wins 87.4% of the projections.
Virginia, New Mexico and Colorado are no longer in play.
North Carolina is leaning Obama. Missouri and Indiana are leaning McCain. At the moment, these are the only contested states.
Obama and Biden’s favorables out poll their unfavorables. McCain and Palin’s unfavorables out poll their favorables.
Watch Palin. She’s given up on McCain and is in the running for 2012.
And, while I think of it, thank you Hillary Clinton. You may not have broken the glass ceiling yourself, but by 2012 I don’t think gender will be much of a factor.
DJIA 9864.
Embarracuda
“But what a desperate empty embarrassment the McCain campaign has become.”
Best factoid of the day, so far
“[I]nsurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.”
Tough schedule
Number 5 Texas plays #1 Oklahoma, #2 Missouri, #17 Oklahoma State and #7 Texas Tech in the next four weeks. I’m wondering if anyone has ever played four ranked teams in four weeks before (and three of them top 7 teams).
Rankings from USA Today poll. Texas also plays #15 Kansas later in the season.
Ten Reasons I Hate the Balloon Fiesta
NewMexiKen likes the Balloon Fiesta and thinks it truly an event worth attending from time-to-time. That said, I still find ‘Burque Babble’s annual “Ten Reasons I Hate the Balloon Fiesta” amusing and point on. Here’s the 2008 Edition.
The original 2005 Edition.
It rained hard all night and both last night’s and this morning’s Balloon Fiesta events were cancelled. (About a 1/2-inch at Balloon Fiesta Park, more like an inch-and-a-half here at Casa NewMexiKen a thousand feet higher.) It was a very wet football game last night, but we held on until the fourth quarter, when very few were left at University Stadium. The Lobos won 24-0 and are now 3-3.
FDIC
The limit on insured accounts under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was raised to $250,000 by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (which the President has signed). The increase is effective immediately but returns to $100,000 after December 31, 2009.
The increase applies to federal credit unions as well.
What Is Insured?
You are probably familiar with the traditional types of bank accounts – checking, savings, trust, certificates of deposit (CDs), and IRA retirement accounts – that are insured by the FDIC. Banks also may offer what is called a money market deposit account, which earns interest at a rate set by the bank and usually limits the customer to a certain number of transactions within a stated time period. All of these types of accounts generally are insured by the FDIC up to the legal limit of $250,000 and sometimes even more for special kinds of accounts or ownership categories.FDIC-Insured
- Checking Accounts (including money market deposit accounts)
- Savings Accounts (including passbook accounts)
- Certificates of Deposit
Not FDIC-Insured
- Investments in mutual funds (stock, bond or money market mutual funds), whether purchased from a bank, brokerage or dealer
- Annuities (underwritten by insurance companies, but sold at some banks)
- Stocks, bonds, Treasury securities or other investment products, whether purchased through a bank or a broker/dealer
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.