Headline: FDIC closes 9 banks in one day . . .Oct. 30, 2009 . . .

What you don't see behind the curtain is . . .

image from FBOP's home page

All banks were owned by FBOP Corp. of Chicago. The Chicago Tribune covered the situation comprehensively here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fbop-seize-oct30,0,502486.story

Excerpts: 1) Until recently, Kelly was viewed as a brilliant operator. But he had an abrupt reversal of fortune last year when the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exposed the holding company's large concentration of Fannie and Freddie preferred stock. The company unsuccessfully applied for about $500 million in federal TARP funds

2) The timing was awkward. The government shut down $4.7 billion-asset Park National on the same day that its community development arm, Park National Bank Initiatives, received $50 million from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at a ceremony in Chicago.

3) The Park National shutdown occurred after several Illinois congressmen, including Reps. Bobby Rush and Danny Davis and Sen. Roland Burris, called the FDIC asking it to delay closing the bank for at least a week, said Marilyn Katz, a bank spokeswoman.

4) "At 10 a.m. this morning they were praising them and giving them $50 million, and at 10 p.m. this evening they'll be putting the padlock on the door," Rush said Friday evening. "There is something wrong with this picture: Wall Street wins and Main Street loses."

This story is a clear (in its muddledness) example of how the intermixing of federal interventions and private enterprise conjures tragedy and travesty, when it doesn’t conjure conspiracy and crime.
==> Michael Kelly was seen as a canny operator. He erred in trusting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred stock. The man and his company are ruined because the feds drew their line on the other side of them.
==> The holding company was reported still profitable, but could not meet capital requirements after the quasi-government entities defaulted.
==> FBOP was denied TARP funds. Again, FBOP found itself on the wrong side of the Fed’s line.
==> Intervention by local politicians was insufficient. When you play in these games, you never know.
==> Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s right-hand didn’t know what his left-hand was doing.
==> This company (nine banks) and its sole proprietor, Mike Kelley, foundered in the cross-winds of Washington politics and policy. It did not fail from lending policy. In fact, it did not fail for lack of performing loans. This was and is just a nasty, stinking mess.
==> Under Obama, one immediately wonders whether Mike Kelly didn't put his political support in the wrong place.

More details here: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=31185

News for the Blues - Stuff I Couldn't Have Made Up

from Reuters: Kremlin Warns Against Wrecking Russia With Democracy  Who would have imagined this?

from Foreign Policy : Theory of International Politics and Zombies  Bureaucrats dialogue while the zombies prevail.

from the National Security Archive: Musicians Seek Secret U.S. Documents on Music-Related Human Rights Abuses at Guantanamo  Artists seek to learn the torture playlists; are they seeking royalties?  Will the guilt of their music having tormented detainees keep them up at (whenever they sleep)?

Marge Simpson is Playboy's November playmate of the month.  

Rush was Right

Obama's policies fail.  There was never any doubt that they would fail . . .and they have failed.  Rush had the courage of his convictions - of the validity of economics and politics as science.  We should all have the courage of his convictions, rather than permit him to be dismissed as "just an entertainer."  Such a dismissal demeans all humanity.


Wages tumble toward 18-year low  (USA Today)


7 Months After Stimulus 49 of 50 States Have Lost Jobs
(from the House Ways & Means Committee - 2,700,000 jobs lost vs Obama's promise of 3,460,000 to be created by the Stimulus = swing of - 6,160,000 jobs)


What will the electorate learn from this?


Watch how the media slowly turn on Obama, motivated by their very own pocket-book nerves.

Satire Becomes Impossible . . . No, No, Not Yet!

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Better now than later. Later it could have been construed as a political statement. Now it is patently absurd - a product of delusion.

Satire becomes impossible, again!

--------------------------------------------------------------------

UPDATE:
                     Obama wins Kentucky Derby!
                         ---------------------------
                     Obama wins Car of the Year!


The human spirit rises to the occasion and finds satire still possible !


SECOND UPDATE:

A. Barton Hinkle, if that's his real name,
 has a full article in the Tampa Tribune on this subject
 that will make you laugh. 

Did the success of American government policies cause the failure of California?

Will California become America's first failed state?
This very good question was recently asked by The Guardian (UK)>link<.

Indicators (Wikipedia) of a Failed State:

1. Demographic pressures
2. Massive movement of refugees and internally displaced peoples
3. Legacy of vengeance-seeking group grievance
4. Chronic and sustained human flight

5. Uneven economic development along group lines
6. Sharp and/or severe economic decline

7. Criminalization and/or delegitimisation of the state
8. Progressive deterioration of public services
9. Widespread violation of human rights
10. Security apparatus as ‘state within a state’
11. Rise of factionalised elites
12. Intervention of other states or external factors

Of course, the article envisioned a sovereign nation but most of these factors can be seen in California. They can be seen almost anywhere. What matters is the pernicious interaction of these factors and a lot of that is present in California. Illegal immigration, La Raza - the irredentist movement agitating that California is part of "Greater Mexico," gang violence and drug trafficking acquire more importance together with the economic and political problems of the host organism - the presumed "real life" of an American state. The flight of businesses and productive families from California is remarkable and unique in the history of the state.

How about the idea that this failure began 30-40 years ago - and was concealed by major global factors.

1. Illegal immigration providing cheap labor and lower effective tax rates(lower wage and no withholding taxes) for employers. What was the economic effect of upwards of ten million illegal immigrants sending remittances home? What did the availability of this labor do to the legitimate labor market?
2. Capital flight from Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Asian countries - providing exogenous demand for real estate (residential and commercial) and capital infusion.

How about the idea that the failure of California is partially explained by the success of American policies? What would that tell us?

1. To whatever extent illegal immigration has been reduced, has life in California been improved by it?
2. The demand from Asia for California real-estate is now not discernible. It is gone. Has economic and political stability in Asia caused the collapse of real estate in California (and elsewhere in the US)?
3. Changes in defense spending, reducing one of the major sources of work, investment and innovation in California. Silicon Valley's boom and bust and recovery notwithstanding, California has suffered from closing of military bases and movement of defense spending to other states.

Is American Politics REALLY Worse Than Ever ??? -- Part I

I have asked myself this question and now will attempt to answer it. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Is American politics worse than ever? Probably not. Buying votes with cash, coal or whiskey was a long-standing tradition. Crass corruption and trading of favors ("log rolling") were rife and unrepentant - think of the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877>link<.

What, if anything, is worse than ever about American politics?

• Civility - Nah! - There is far more civility in modern politics than there has been since the founding-fathers retired from politics. This is not all to the good. It reflects a pact among incumbents to protect each other - to their own profit and to the detriment of responsive, responsible government.
• Educational Context - Eh - High-school graduates used to have better education in English and history than college-graduates have today . . .however, a larger percentage of the population has these diminished skills now than at any time except 1940-1980 (when the percentage of high-school graduates crested while educational content declined).
• Literacy - Hmm - The complexity of public discourse is much simplified, compared to any previous period in American history.
• Media Behavior  - Simplify, then Exaggerate! has always been the motto of the "yellow" press. Print media have almost always been driven by profit-pressures of advertising, so that radio and, later, television, have only maintained the same set of behaviors - seeking readers/listeners/viewers by whatever means possible.
• Media Bias - Most metropolitan areas now have only one newspaper. The perspective of most reporting is therefore less challenged and more conformist.
• Media Technology - The internet as a news source, Facebook, Twitter and Lord-knows-what-comes-next make news more accessible, faster, cheaper and more varied. For some, this makes a wider range of views accessible while, for others, it permits a more narrow, more parochial view.
• Span of attention - A lifetime of news factoids and commercials has left nearly all of us with impaired powers of attention and critical analysis.
• Power of Special Interests - $$$ - As long as there has been government, there have been special interests attempting to influence that government. The larger and more powerful the government, the larger and more corrupting the efforts of special interests. Eisenhower warned of the "military-industrial complex" that had developed out of World War II. The subsidies and rules that protect Big Ag and Big Pharm have become part of the fabric of American life. Are special interests worse now than ever . . .or are their resurgence and detriment now more visible?

Some Conclusions:

It is tempting to opine that what is worse than ever about American politics actually the failure of our education system to produce citizens with a sufficient grasp of history, civics and rhetoric - leaving voters prey to all manner of legerdemain.

One might say that American politics is no worse than ever and that our crisis, if there is a crisis, is the lack of a coherent view of the future. Those who lived through the Cold War, the Kennedy & King assassinations, the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam War can tell the rest of us about lack of a coherent future. Closer to the truth is the abiding, patent, smarmy conspiracy of politicians to say one thing and do another, yielding lack of coherence the way the circus magician makes the elephant disappear before 20 guys in overalls push the empty box off the stage.

So some things are worse and some things are better and some things are just different. So what?

The answer to "So what?" is in Part II -

to be found at Memetics & Marketing, here

Presidential Legacies - Part II

The historical legacies are like a series of matryoska dolls, going back to the War for Independence. We have to begin somewhere. We’ll begin with Ronnie . . .and save the earlier administrations for a cold winter day when there’s nothing current to think about.

Ronald Reagan was nominated and elected as Governor of California, then the second most populous state (=beaucoup electoral votes), as the then-most-recent neurotic electoral reaction to Kennedy Assasination-Johnson/VietNamChaos-NixonScandal-Ford-CarterMalaise. Ronnie came and the political system seemed to stabilize. He brought a few trusted staff from California and winged the administrative process with whatever GOP talent was around. In his mind, he was President and then he was going home. That’s what he did. If readers can point to any action he took to develop or sustain his policies, or to build GOP leadership, beyond his last day in the White House, please inform us all with a comment.

Geo.H.W.Bush was a different story. He was born to the Washington game. He, his family and the family friends have been in this game since his grandfather's time. He and the folks behind him have been planning and developing talent and making use of every opportunity for more than a hundred years. That’s how H.W. could sit on Naval Observatory Hill for eight years and not go mad. >link here< He put his folks in the Reagan administration when he could and he had a regiment of his own people ready when he took his turn in the White House.

Being clever does not mean being smart. H.W. ran his administration a bit too transparently as his own. His slights and mistakes, large and small, accumulated. Ross Perot’s third party candidacy from the right cost H.W. re-election.

Bill Clinton took a Democratic Presidential nomination that no one else wanted, because the experienced Washington politicians “knew” that H.W. couldn’t be unseated in his re-election bid. Clinton was lucky and smart and canny and won. He didn’t know anything about Washington but he was a quick learner. Hillary was such a shrewish hick that on her first night in the White House she was throwing White House china at Bill – leaving the Secret Service with a novel dilemma of how to protect the POTUS. Good Old Hillary - when in doubt, be a bitch – but is it sexist to observe that men don’t throw china?

Bill was canny and clever and imagined being in power forever. Apart from some awful bits of his wife’s campaign for the Presidential nomination, actually, Bill remains a world power.

BabyBush was waiting. He was also lucky. As I wrote in an earlier post, he won the governorship of Texas through luck. >link< From there, Daddy and his friends just carried him along.

The magic words about the Baby Bush administration will have to remain unwritten here. Those words are for sale to some clever and discriminating candidate for the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination. I am not about to give them away here for free.

BabyBush and Cheney and Daddy’s team were very “adult” in preparation for BabyBush’s administration. Plans, personnel and appointments were in very good order from the first day of this administration.

Baby Bush and Cheney gave no thought to their legacy. They took no interest in promoting individuals or ideas to perpetuate GOP leadership. They took no interest in establishing an identity for the GOP in the mind of the electorate.

Bad, bad, bad. Both BabyBush and Cheney exploited their opportunities, packed their bags and left. The United States deserved better.

Ask yourself where we would be today, if BabyBush had put the Democrats on the defensive in 2007 with Tort Reform and interstate sales/portability of health insurance, instead of building his library. BabyBush's Bungling in the 2006 Congressional elections is discussed >here<.

Obama came in with magical thinking and with very little preparation. Today, ten months after his election, important positions are unfilled and embarrassing faux pas have littered the nomination & confirmation process. Obama’s personality and behavior is focused on himself. There is no evident thought to any legacy other than his personal glorification and power. Like Bill Clinton, he envisions being in power – one way or another – forever. >link<

Biden was likely an impetuous choice to balance Obama’s youth and inexperience. The media were hilarious in their denial of Biden’s record as a corporate lackey and his well-known gaffe-a-minute behavior. Biden was never intended to be a future Presidential candidate.

Try to imagine what, or who, comes after Obama. To ponder that is to realize how thoroughly Obama consumes the oxygen of the current political process.

The Anointed Won will give no thought to what comes after him, because it doesn't concern him! There is meager consolation that, if he wins a second term, there will be only wreckage for the Democrats to build upon and so, presumably a great opportunity for the GOP. The catch is that the GOP will have to both accept the far-left detritus as a starting point and make some clearly principled distinctions in order to remain a viable political movement. The world will be a far better place if The Anointed Won is weakened in 2010 and defeated in 2012.

The W Legacy . . .the Reagan Legacy and Presidential Legacies, in General

There is a story that, after the inauguration of John Kennedy on January 20, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, thanked the White Staff, got into their old station-wagon (stuffed with suitcases and souvenirs) and drove home to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I like the idea of the old general and his wife just driving home.

However, legacies are more complex. I'll give away my plot here:

• Reagan didn't plan for a successor; I don't think he cared, but Daddy Bush was there to pick up the opportunity.
• Clinton thought he would go on in power forever, in one form or another.
• Baby Bush didn't plan for a successor; he didn't care, either.
• Obama came into office thinking he, too, would go on forever; we'll see how he changes when he realizes he won't.

I like Baby Bush for the villain of this particular blog, but you'll have to read

down to find out how and why.

Ike left Richard Nixon in the wings, but between the stuffed ballot boxes in Illinois and Nixon deciding to lose, rather than make a fuss,there was JFK . . .and then the assassination and LBJ's disastrous application of legislative prowess to the executive branch . . .and then Nixon's return, disgrace and resignation, leaving Gerald Ford . . .and then the un-Republican Carter . . .and un-Carter Reagan and his VP, H.W. "Daddy" Bush . . .then the un-Bush Clinton elected because of Perot's third-party candidacy . . .and "Baby" Bush . . .and Obama.

I'm reminded of H.L. Mencken's statement: The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

However, all of this is a digression. Today I am contemplating legacy in terms of staff and leadership. In Biblical terms:

• Ike begat Dick and Dick begat Ford.
• JFK begat LBJ.
• Reagan begat Daddy Bush and Daddy Bush (with an interruption) begat Baby Bush.

The discontinuities here are Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Obama.

Legacies take several forms:

v The received legacy – talent that occupies the upper echelons of an administration

o The non-political appointments of the preceding administrations which are held over. Federal judicial appointments are the clearest example, but there are many.

o The pool of talent of the incoming party, from which political appointments will be made. For example, Dick Cheney was chief of staff for Ford, Secretary of Defense for H.W. (during the 1st Gulf War) before he was BabyBush's Vice President.

v The bequeathed legacy – what is left behind as an administration exits the Executive Branch

o The political talent that is permitted to develop and is bequeathed to future administrations.

o The non-political appointments which are made. Again, judicial appointments and inspectors-general are good examples.

o The identity that the administration and party leave in popular opinion when that administration departs. These days, this is called “branding.” BabyBush's bloated budgets and erratic leadership bequeathed no coherent branding. The Anointed Won's brand is "Change we can believe in," if you can continue to believe it.

o The issues that are dealt with – resolved or kicked far enough down the road that the subsequent administration does not have to confront them, if they choose not to. Examples of this type are difficult to recall.

o The issues that it fails to deal with, which are then passed on to the next administration. Iraq and Iran are two of many examples. Social Security is another.

. . . continued here. . .

The Untold Story of Geo.H.W.Bush and Ronald Reagan

While it is difficult not to guffaw at this story . . .and to dismiss it as gossip . . .what I am describing was a fundamental dynamic of 12 years of American history - the eight years of the Reagan Presidency and highly formative of the subsequent four years of H.W.'s Presidency. Surely, too, W's impressions of the presidency were affected by his father's experiences.

Geo. H.W.Bush was the son of a senator. He went to Phillips Exeter and Yale. He gave heroic service as a pilot in WWII. He campaigned for the GOP nomination in 1980 and lost to Ronald Reagan. Reagan invited him to be the vice-presidential nominee.

And, they never talked to one another again.

Geo. H.W.Bush was the first Vice President to occupy the new V.P. Residence on Naval Observatory Hill in Georgetown. For eight years, his one sworn duty was to call the White House to see if Ronnie were still breathing . . .and his duties were done.

I'm not a fan of H.W. He had a major role in The Bay of Pigs while he was at the CIA. I suspect that his talents were mostly mediocre and that he successes in life were rewards for reliability and family connections. However, as a pilot myself, I find his war record and his reluctance to exploit his war record for political gain to be impressive.

Regardless, my point here is:

H.W. wasn't ever invited to the White House for eight years, not even invited to the state dinner when Queen Elizabeth II visited the Reagan White House.

Imagine how you would feel, sitting up on that hill for eight years with nothing to do, as Vice President of the United States!

Also, imagine how it felt to be sitting at lunch with some Washington character and get the call that the President had just be shot . . .by the son of the man sitting across from you! Talk about wanting to bury an incident!

Reagan recovers and, still, eventually H.W. becomes President.

I think that a great deal of H.W.'s impetuousness during his single term as President stems from eight years of humiliation.

I also think that the press showed uncharacteristic gentility or altogether characteristic stupidity in failing to comment on Baby Bush's immediate appointment of Daddy's State Department press spokesperson, Margaret Tutwiler, to be ambassador to Morocco (and, later, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs). That's how that family deals with family secrets; all the more reason to respect and sympathize with Barbara Bush - to bear five children and support that man, to live with this sort of thing and have it abetted by her son.

I don’t think the Obama Administration took over GM. I think GM took over the Obama Administration.

SO YOU’VE GOT A BLOATED, UNTRUSTWORTHY PRODUCT THAT PEOPLE AREN’T BUYING AND DON’T LIKE — WHAT’S YOUR SOLUTION? Run more advertising saying that it’s great!

I don’t think the Obama Administration took over GM. I think GM took over the Obama Administration.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The above is from Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds - showing why he's the Big Daddy of mostly-political bloggers.

Support Democracy in Iran !!!

I do not know how to support Iranian democracy at this moment. I do know that we must - as a moral imperative, as well as a hope to avoid war soon and a nuclear confrontation sooner or later.

The anecdotal news from Iran is blood-curdling, hard to verify and likely true.

• Raped; then hanged. This article recounts a man's confession of "marrying" female protestors so that they could be executed, since the Koran forbids execution of a virgin.
• This article recounts the existence of special prisons to "break" political opposition, where the incidents in the above article took place.
  

The Obama administration should be doing a lot. The world press should be giving more attention to Iran.

Hillary Clinton should be making big noises here and there's nothing but Bubba bringing back babes from North Korea to a welcome choreographed by LA public-relations firms. The situation in Iran is reminiscent of Bubba's inaction in Bosnia while Muslim women were dying of dehydration tied to beds in Rape Motels.

The details are appalling but ineluctable, making these questions clear and obvious:

• Why all this silence?

• What does it cost us to protest these travesties?

• What does it cost our souls to fail to protest these travesties?

Economic Viet Nam

2009-2010 will see a turning point in American politics analogous to the public repudiation of the Viet Nam War. It will cross political lines and generational lines and racial lines. It's coming.

It's coming because people all over the United States know from their own personal experience that the economic news out of Washington has no correspondence to the truth, as they can see it every day of their lives. Moreover, their state and local governments confirm their own experience and deny the statements of the federal government.

The economic policies put in place by Barack Obama have not been focused on improving the living conditions of his constituents.

Obama's policies have been narrowly focused on improving the economic indicators.

The map is not the territory. That's how this situation has come to be.

Why has this situation come to be? It doesn't matter why. Whether the Obama Whitehouse has done this cynically, thinking that people can be convinced to deny what they see with their own lying eyes . . .or naively, thinking that conditions will be improved if only the indices can be brought back up . . .there's no denying that this has been done expertly.

Cash-for-Clunkers: Gross National Product is designed to be a measure of over-all wealth creation - new goods and services. New Car Sales are an increase to GNP and national wealth; used-car sales are a transfer of an old toy to a new owner and do not count. The destruction of several million working automobiles does not affect GNP. Increased prices of used cars and used car parts, due to the destruction of several million cars, are weighted by the volume of sales - so the rising prices are washed out by the destroyed cars taken off the market.

What's Wrong With This Picture? Millions of real people are affected by the higher price of used cars and used-car repair. Everyone is affected by the debt and interest payments on $3 billion in subsidies for new car purchases.

Stimulus/Porkulus Package: The money provided in this bill has been poorly accounted for and disbursements have been timed and focused to manipulate various economic indices and to reward political allies of President Obama.

What's Wrong With This Picture? The management of publicly-held stock companies have a duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value. After seeing how these appropriations are being disbursed and how GM/Chrysler dealerships with Republican affiliations were closed as part of the bankruptcies of these companies, no further lessons are necessary. No commercial interests will oppose Barack Obama.

When Obama stands before the cameras has says x, he believes it . . .while virtually all of his viewers know that what he says is the not the truth.

Soon, this is what you will see:

• politicians becoming frantic, desperate tap-dancing-magicians - attempting to be all things to all people until they can figure out what will keep them in office
• the public, as voters, becoming angry and nihilistic
• the public, as consumers, continuing to be too scared to support an economic recovery.

UPDATE: A few days after this posting, the Washington Post picked up on it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081100988.html?hpid=topnews

Icky Old Stuff - How Younger Voters Tune Out ObamaCare

What do voters under 40 make of the fracas over ObamaCare?

Does anyone over-40 remember what they thought of Social Security when they were younger? No, they don't. They never thought about it. Never. Social Security and Old Age were things that would never happen to them. Young folks still think that Old Age will never happen to them.

If anyone were driving the run-away bus that is the Republican Party, someone would be sparing some effort to educate younger voters. Younger voters have more to lose. Younger voters can be swayed by this issue, if they understand it. In a 50.1% electoral world, one would be wise to remain mindful of younger voters:

• Old age will happen to them.
• The younger they are, the more broken will be the system that they inherit.
• Young voters have more to lose, not less - financially and politically.
  
• Freedom and liberty issues will fall more heavily upon the young - required this and forbidden that. They will not be spared the life-style mandates that are embodied in the 1,300 pages of law.

But . . .nobody is driving the run-away bus.

Fake Statistics for a Spectacular Recovery - Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Aug 1, 2009 - headline:
U.S. Recession Worst Since Great Depression, Revised Data Show courtesy of Drudge and Bloomberg.

Behind the curtain and nearly un-reported was this boring July 31 news release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Dept. of Commerce:

NATIONAL INCOME AND PRODUCT ACCOUNTS

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT:  SECOND QUARTER 2009 (ADVANCE ESTIMATE)

COMPREHENSIVE REVISION:  1929 THROUGH FIRST QUARTER 2009

REVISED - All the economic data from the last 80 years has been revised; that's why the Recession was/is worse than previous reported (components re-weighted, in geekspeak). Gee, why? No answer. Gee, why now? No answer.

Permit me to make a cynical conjecture:

• All the data have been revised and their components re-weighted so that the likely path of this 2009-2012 recovery will appear more dramatic for the election purposes of the Democratic Party.
• The Bush-bits will be shown as worse than before and the Obama-bits will then resemble nothing so much as the Obamassiah himself - transcendent.
  
• The first step was to make the recession look worse.

Now the only thing that can go wrong is for the recovery to take an unexpected course . . . which is not all that unlikely.

The tip for this blog item came from economic analysis by Steven Hansen: http://seekingalpha.com/article/153061-the-great-recession-continues . Thanks to him.

Iran and Israel . . .Hot Air and Physics

Israel is facing the promise of annihilation from the ruling government of Iran.

Two Israeli governments have permitted themselves to be dithered (if that verb can be used in the passive voice) for at least two years by two US governments = nothing that anyone, anywhere, should be proud of.

The election protests in Iran have met with appalling repression and have given vain hope that military force will be unnecessary. More likely to be the case is that military force will make Iranian government reform more possible and more likely in the disorganization that will follow the Israeli strike.

At the moment, the timing comes down to physics:

• when Iranian bomb deployment becomes inevitable
• heat and humidity that affect the fuel/bomb/missile loads of the Israeli aircraft.

This has been an immense ugliness since Jimmy Carter failed to support the Shah and failed to support the frail democratic government that replaced the Shah - shades of Kerensky and Lenin's October Revolution that has made democracy impossible in Russia ever since.

There was a bizarre disinterest from both of W's Secretaries of State - Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice - in supporting pro-American demonstrations in Iran. Colin Powell replied to a question about his lack of interest thusly, "I don't think we should involve ourselves in a family dispute in Iran." Much, much better to let them develop nuclear weapons, rape and murder democratic demonstrators and put Israel in the inevitable position of contesting its annihilation.

All a matter of hot air and physics.

Cash for Clunkers . . . Will they do better with your appendix?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Update - July 31 - AP reports that Cash For Clunkers program suspended because the number of rebates unprocessed in the system is unknown. USA Today spins the same story that the program is suspended until the $1 billion appropriation can be increased to $4 billion.
---------------------------------------------------

Original Post -

The federal Cash For Clunkers program began July 1, but the regulations weren't ready for another three weeks. The program ends when the $1 billion is gone, so it's first come/first served. But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hasn't paid out any money yet because they can't get their "on-line" system to work.

Dealers are fronting the money in order to not lose sales. In the Twin Cities, not one dealer has been paid by the government. Not one. Dealers can't be sure when they'll be paid or if they'll be paid. What a great country!

Gee, aren't you glad it isn't your appendix that's waiting.

Congressman John Conyers. . . James Madison . . . and for some strange reason . . . . . .The Treasure of Sierra Madre .

July 29, 2009 - Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan)*: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill. What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

February 27, 1788 - James Madison (later, fourth President of the United States) in Federalist Paper #62: "It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule which is little known, and less fixed?"


Dobbs: 'If you're the police where are your badges?'
Gold Hat: 'Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!'

*from Wikipedia entry for John Conyers:

He is married to Monica Conyers, who is former President Pro-Tempore of the Detroit City Council and the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation into political corruption in the city, and who has pled guilty to conspiring to commit bribery.

I thank www.amusedcynic.com for this contrast of Conyers and Madison.