bailout, shmailout

So, this week's prize for best manipulation of the political machine goes to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Goodness knows the last word is far, far off in the entire Wall Street debacle, but I'm here to talk about my personal favorite snapshot of the moment. All the geniuses we've sent to Washington to serve in our nation's Congress have apparently not figured out one of the basic rules of legislative sausage-making: don't call a vote if you don't think you can win.

Yesterday the $700 billion bailout bill was called for a vote, and while we're all shocked--SHOCKED!!!--that the vote failed to pass, what is more shocking is who did NOT vote for it.

The President and Vice President reportedly worked the phones furiously, attempting to persuade Republican legislators to vote for the bill. When all was said and done, Speaker Pelosi delivered the votes she promised. However, the Republicans failed to deliver, and 2/3 of the House Republicans voted against the bill.

As a side note, the President's approval rating is 27%, which only reinforces why the bill lost despite the frantic politicking.

Now, Congress is currently controlled by the Democrats, though narrowly, so this could be called their loss. But this match still goes to the Speaker. She brought the votes she promised.

I make no predictions about how this fiasco will end, but I am proud to see that John Boehner, a mighty, mighty jerk, got beat by a girl.

PS: this is a much more succinct description of my question about the whole nasty mess.

Athena

Ares Postscript: Constitutional scholar and Ares & Athena favorite Larry Sabato says in his experience Rasmussen tends to have the most accurately reflected polling data. Rasmussen puts congressional approval ratings at 9%! Holy Margin of Error, Batman.

Marmot Monday

Another Name for Atlanta

I think Atlanta is a Latin word that means "metropolis full of f****** morons". Why, you ask? Gasoline. For those not local, Hurricane Ike disrupted gasoline supplies to the southeast because of refinery shutdowns. Mind you, the effects of the hurricane on supplies took a few days to make themselves known. Then, quite suddenly, the media noticed there was a supply disruption and gleefully reported on it every chance they got. Using tried and true phrases like "worry about" and "fears of..." they created a feedback loop. Fear about shortages are now making the shortages worse, which allows for a wider display of shortages by the media. (I'm looking at you AJC/WSB/WXIA/Fox5.) Now panicked people are sucking stations dry. My local QT usually gets a tanker delivery every day or two. Saturday they had 5 and were empty by 3 pm. There are confirmed reports of people convoying behind gasoline tanker trucks then mobbing the destination. Deep thinkers are even dialing 911 to ask where there is gas. Anybody seen my copy of The Road Warrior?

Ares

Rafael, Someone You Should Know

A little bit of injustice has settled in our midst. Not the grand "fightin the man" kind of injustice, but rather a miscarriage of honor. For those uninitiated, Rafael Peralta, USMC, threw himself on a grenade during the battle for Falluja back in 2004. Other service members have since been awarded the Medal of Honor for the same actions since. A final ruling was issued last week and the recommendation for the Medal of Honor was downgraded. Some are saying it's because Rafael was an illegal immigrant, others are saying the medal was downgraded because he was already wounded. What nobody questions is that Rafael loved his adopted country and the Corps with a fullness most of us cannot fathom. The true issue here is that Rafael loved the men he was with so much that he couldn't bear the thought of them being hurt when he could do something about it. So he took very deliberate action that resulted in his own death, and allowed every one of his team mates to survive. If you've ever served in a capacity where you place your life in other people's hands and they place theirs in yours its the kind of commitment that brings hardened, grown men to tears. The least we can do is accord such commitment a place of honor, which is where you come in. Sign the petition. It costs nothing and you won't get on somebody's mailing list. This is one of those times it's easy to do the right thing.

God speed Sergeant. "Day is done, gone the sun...."

Ares

Fall

Welcome to Autumn. I can't find gas for my car, the stock market is melting down, there's a clown's theater of an election going on, and all I can think is "Damn the weather sure is nice". Here's to that first robin of Autumn.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday

Why We Fight

Unfunded

So this week brings word of yet more pension fund failures. This installment is brought to you by Cobb Our-S***-Doesn't-Stink County, Georgia, and the state of Nevada. (Okay, Nevada hasn't tanked yet but there's nothing to check its demise.) Let's be clear, these are not failures of the market. These are failures of the people that manage these funds. There's a four word term I want everyone to practice repeating: Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Get familiar because they're going to write your checks one day. For some reason public sector fund failure doesn't bother me as much a private sector one. After all, there's only so much you can do with government financing. But when a big fat company like United Airlines simply doesn't make its fund payments, causing it to fail, and then goes running to bankruptcy and passes off it's fund to PBGC, that's criminal with malice and aforethought. Bonus round: The United CEO got $37 million in stock and bonuses upon the company's emergence from bankruptcy.

PBGC's increasing load piggybacks nicely with the US Government going into the mortgage business. (Aside note: My understanding, and I could be wrong, of the Freddie/Fannie failure is that it wasn't their bad loans but their inability to continue packaging and reselling their debts. Some guy named Ponzi first came up with that idea.) Dovetailing with this theme congress is setting up to see who can give the biggest handout to the domestic auto industry. Because we really need subsidized Tahoes and F-250's. Behold, the era of small government is upon us. To those that argue for the privatization of social security I say what's the point? Athena, where was it you read a few years ago where someone described the US Government as the world's largest insurance company with guns?

The terrain is changing beneath our feet. Without much in the way of public consent and little in the way of discourse the fundamentals we've counted as solid are being renegotiated. Thirty years from now, when the academics and pundits sit down to write histories of the days we're living now, we are going to be excoriated for hubris. In the mean time, mom better get to work on a Plan B.

Ares

Feelin a Little Fred

Fall must be on the way because I'm starting to dig into existentialism again. It gets as regular as the leaves turning with me. The pause that finally comes with the break in the weather allows a pullback and some meta inspection. The only possible explanation for digging into Nietzsche in early September is that I'm trying to will a change in the weather.

Anymore I'm finding a bit of fascination with the concept of the Ubermensch. The whole idea got hijacked by Adolf and twisted around by a bazillion amateur thinkers thereafter. Fred wanted humanity to redefine itself upward outside the constricts of the church and without resorting to nihilism. The industrial revolution, and the resulting shrinking of the world that occurred with the telegraph/telephone and steam engine, drove a lot of people out of eons of spiritual comfort zones and into a low grade mania. Fred saw where this was heading, nihilism and war, and tried to call a flag on the play. He called the first 50 years of Europe's 20^th century from the cheap seats. But he was just a philosopher, and a dense one at that. They paid as much attention to philosophers then as they do now.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Not sure, but I think all of this is my own personal flight from idiocy. A little too much time among my fellow man, and a viewing or two of Idiocracy, and I start digging into the deep thinkers so I can tell myself I'm not like “them”. Athena and I have a rhetorical question we've been asking each other for years: What's the prize for being smart? Okay, maybe her and I aren't that smart, but there's some blatant self-awareness at work. What's the reward? Anymore I see some virtue in being a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. The further you seem to get from vice, habit, routine, and entertainment the more intractably complex things appear. Fred could have used a beer and some Cartoon Network. Might not have thunk himself to death. (Or visited the hooker that gave him the clap that eventually killed him. In the context of that I always thought it would have been deliciously ironic to put All to Human on his gravestone.) Taking a bit of my own advice I think I'll crack a Sam & see if Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is on.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday

Marmot Monday

Couch

I know this picture has made the rounds, but I still laugh every time I see it. The good news is that the army has new camouflage. The bad news is that it only works if we invade grandma's house.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Living the Cliche

So I finally had a quintessential cliche moment. Thursday I was on the treadmill, three sweaty miles into my five mile run. I was panting like a trout in bass boat and sweating like a fat man in Phoenix when she gets on the treadmill next to mine. We've all seen the type: Betty I'm-just-here-looking-for-a-boyfriend. (I know, this type also exists in the male of the species.) They're easy to spot, with their $200 workout fashion ware and hair done, spending more time looking around the room than at the treadmill readout. This particular Betty had applied about 3 liters of her cologne prior to entering the sweat deck. Her eau d'Phosgene made the air shimmer for ten feet around her. My eyes watered like I'd been tear gassed. I coughed like I'd swallowed a chicken bone. A spike of molten vomit made it as far north as the spot where my tonsils used to be. Compounding the damage was my breathing at double the normal rate due to the aerobic activity. I actually longed for the smell of a Chinese restaurant dumpster in the Georgia sun. The treadmill has a fan, which I quickly engaged. This simply introduced the mustard gas into my respiratory tract at twice the rate. If my alveoli hadn't been enduring the equivalent of a Dutch Oven I'd have offered a few choice words. Instead, I'm forced to resort to this forum. So Betty, consider yourself ridiculed and derided.

Ares

Marmot Monday

Nerd Test

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings...

Told you it was a nerd test. Like I said at the beginning of this blog, we're overeducated. If you don't know who Ozymandias is you can look here.

Ares

Enlarged Stupid

The last thing I want is for this space to be the home of the perpetually indignant. That said, I came across this piece in the Wall Street Journal and couldn't resist a trip to the soap box.

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.

In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

Wow. It's takes a special kind of suspension of reality and belief to convince yourself this won't backfire. Best case scenario: It ends up screwing your company into the ground. Worst case scenario: Crap like this brings down government intervention on a scale not previously envisioned by anyone. Or we could go big picture and look at this in a historical context. The last time corporate America treated it's employees with this kind of contempt was the first quarter of the twentieth century. How did that work out for them?

I finished The Fourth Turning a few weeks ago. Its a bit of a diffuse read, but the very short version of their thesis is that American history moves in waves. About every 80 to 100 years it goes really sideways and gets stretched to the breaking point. Do the math: Revolution & Continental Congress, Civil War, Great Depression, 2000 to ..... One of the big reasons the authors attribute to the above timespan is that everyone that was alive during the previous rupture is dead, so no one remembers how much it sucked. Scary thing about the book is it was written in 1997 and some of their short term predictions have pretty much come to pass. Things like this WSJ fiddling-while-Rome-burns article looks like another log on the coming fire.

Ares

Another Signpost

Local teenagers from the Hey Al Dubat area of Fallujah, Iraq, hang out during the afternoon near a Kentucky Fried Chicken July 16. Since the opening nearly seven months ago, the business has flourished and attracts many customers in the nearby area. (Official Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Chris T. Mann)

Just in case you needed another indicator that it's just about over but the shouting, there's now a KFC in Fallujah of all places. You know, the Fallujah where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was sawing off heads a few years ago. The Fallujah of Operation Phantom Fury infamy. The Fallujah where they executed, burned and strung up 4 contractors from a bridge, then danced in the streets. Bing West talks about Fallujah's reputation within Iraq in No True Glory. It was a nasty place even by Iraqi standards; their version of New Jersey. A lot of Saddam's thugs were drawn from there. And now they've got original or extra crispy with teenagers hanging around in front. Screw the political benchmarks. When Iraq gets its first indoor mall, compete with teenagers hanging around all day, it's time to bring the boys home.

One final thought. The picture below is from inside the Fallujah KFC.

A friend of mine went to Detroit a few years back looking at medical schools. He told me while he was there he went to a KFC in a really bad, "Oh Shit" part of town. This particular KFC had Plexiglas pass-throughs at the counter because the neighborhood was so bad. So using the KFC metrics, Fallujah is now safer the Detroit was 10 years ago. I'm gonna start selling "US out of Detroit" bumperstickers and declare a quagmire. Then again, calling Detroit a quagmire is redundant.

Ares