brainiac conspiracy

A Small Favor to Ask

Dear Governor,

Would you do us a favor and kick Bobby Jindal's ass?

Thanks in advance. Your pal,

---Vitelius

No One Could Have Predicted This, Either

Keep moving, folks---nothing to look at here.

---Vitelius

Gotta-Read of the Day

It may seem silly to ask this again, but is the Obama Administration really going to take a flier on policies like these without holding anyone accountable for them?

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media, v10.1

Note to Eddy Hartenstein: There are better ways to cover national political news than shamelessly pandering to bottom-feeders. And you wonder why you're losing readers?

---Vitelius

Sauce for the Securities Broker

While I was out of town last week, I actually caught the latest round of nonsense on CNBC on the news one morning. If you don't want to watch the entire thing, I've included highlights below the box. The exchange is quite revealing, frankly, inasmuch as it shows the myopic lens through which our national business media views our market-based economy:

Rick Santelli: The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly don't want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check, and think that they ought to save it, and in terms of modifications... I'll tell you what, I have an idea. You know, the new administration's big on computers and technology-- How about this, President and new administration? Why don't you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?

Trader on floor: That's a novel idea. (Applause, cheering)

Joe Kernen: Hey, Rick... Oh, boy. They're like putty in your hands. Did you hear...?

Santelli: No they're not, Joe. They're not like putty in our hands. This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand.

(Booing) President Obama, are you listening?

Trader: How 'bout we all stop paying our mortgage? It's a moral hazard.

Kernen: It's like mob rule here. I'm getting scared. I'm glad I'm---

Carl Quintanilla: Get some bricks and bats---

Santelli: Don't get scared, Joe. They're already scaring you. You know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now, they're driving '54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.

Now, I won't prattle on at any great length about the rampant selfishness on display here, the seemingly lighthearted references to "mob rule" (as if the floor of a major commodities exchange was ever governed by anything else), Rick Santelli's one-dimensional analysis of modern Cuban history, or his comments (later in the video) of the "silent majority" and "good statistical cross-section" of Americans working the floor of the Chicago exchange---who appeared (at least from what I could see) as all-white, all-male, and all around the same age as Rick Santelli. And just for the heck of it, too, I'll play along with the CNBC guys: so hell yeah, screw those Americans who can't afford to make their inflated mortgage payments. Kick 'em out of their crappy little condos and and let's increase the ranks of the homeless by, oh, nine million people or so.

Works for me. So now that we're in agreement. let's extend the same line of logic and ask: How many of you want to pay for your neighbor's $45 trillion securities bill? Raise your hand.

Answer: Not me, that's for sure. Not this guy, either.

If Obama and Tim Geithner need any further reasons to justify nationalizing our insolvent lending institutions, forcing them to flush down all of their bad paper before re-selling whatever marketable assets are left over, they can simply replay Rick Santelli's self-fulfilling Tea Party prophecy over and over again. And yes, doing so would wipe out thousands of shareholders and creditors. And yes, the stock market would plummet on the news of such takeovers, and yes, a number of corporations would go under as a result, and tens of thousands of people would lose their jobs. But that is already happening anyway, even after a $350 billion infusion of taxpayer cash, all so bankrupt entities such as Goldman Sachs can keep extracting money out of their hopelessly leveraged clients and cheerleaders like Rick Santelli can keep reminding us about the inerrant wisdom of the free market. This "white collar populism" may weave a magic spell amongst the Wurzelbacherin for a while, but I think that gradually, as we contemplate the wreckage of Madoff, and Stanford, and now UBS, people are slowly coming to the realization that much of what passes for the financial services industry in this country these days is nothing more complicated than a legally sanctioned money-laundering operation that is intentionally designed to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars, via the extension of virtually unlimited credit and assorted derivatives, out of the mainstream economy and into the investment portfolios of a few thousand guys---Rick Santelli's "silent majority"---who work in the pits and who run the biggest banks.

So they issued too much credit for too many years, and now there's no more money to dredge out of the private sector. Boo fucking hoo.

It's well past time for a little Tough Love on The Street, Mr. President. Might I suggest a few spankings as well?

---Vitelius

Thursday Open Thread:Apocalypse Later Edition

Well well well, we finally got the last Republican vote we needed to pass a budget in the State Senate this morning. What did the Democratic leadership have to concede in order to get it? Oh, not much, really:

• Agree to additional tax breaks for horse-racing tracks;

• Agree to roll back a 12-cent increase in the state fuel tax;

• Agree to put a constitutional amendment on next year's ballot mandating a spending cap in years when the state runs a surplus;

• Agree to ease air pollution laws and restrictions on off-road vehicle use;

• Agree to forgo pay raises for legislators in deficit years;

• Agree to put another constitutional amendment on next year's ballot changing California election law to allow for open primaries. This sure has a lot to do with our budget deficit, and for what it's worth, the voters passed an open primary amendment in 1996. The state Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional four years later. But hey, when have such technicalities ever stopped Republican lawmakers, anyway?

• Agree to eliminate $1 million that had already been appropriated for the State Controller's office for new work stations. For this the GOP was willing to plunge the state into bankruptcy? Yep.

So what did we get? An increase in the sales tax (great news for us in the city of Los Angeles, where we're already paying 10.25%); an increase in the personal income tax; and these little tidbits, to top it all off;

Gives K-12 education $5 billion less than it was otherwise entitled to.

Eliminates two paid holidays for state workers, with the final number of furlough days per month through June 2010 still subject to negotiation.

Cuts UC and CSU by 10 percent.

Eliminates cost-of-living increases for recipients of CAL-Works and SSI-SSP.

Cuts the corrections department's medical budget by 10 percent.

Eliminates funding for local public transit agencies.

And we recalled Gray Davis for what reason again?

The estimable DDay at Calitics sums up the ramifications of all this insanity on the state in the short term:

Among the sweeteners thrown in the deal to attract that elusive third Republican vote are a $10,000 tax break for home buyers to re-inflate the bubble and set the state economy up for an even bigger crash; weakened anti-pollution laws that will cost the state additional public health and environmental cleanup spending in the long-term; a potential budget cap that will make it impossible for public schools and social services to meet demand; and much more. The tax changes, which are short-term except for a huge break to multinationals, tax things that we want to encourage in a downturn, work and consumption. What the federal government is offering to spur demand and get the economy moving again is exactly what the state government will be cutting to balance the budget. That's not an argument to kill it, but it's a reflection of reality.

So there will be at best a kind of zero-growth stasis, and at worst a further crumbling of the local economy, with shrunken revenues likely to require another round of this by summer. Ultimately, the media cannot help the Democratic Party solve this problem.  The bill is coming due for 30 years of anti-tax zealotry and the belief that we can provide whatever citizens need without paying for it. There isn't a light at the end of the tunnel. That some opinion leaders are coming around about 20 years to late doesn't wash the blood from their hands. And that the Democratic Party is finally thinking that they should maybe fight against the 2/3 requirement that has relegated them to a functional minority in Sacramento since is was instituted doesn't absolve them for 30 years of inattention.

Oh, and we're rationing water in L.A. for the first time in 20 years, too.

---Vitelius

Midweek Open Thread:Golden State Chapter 11 Edition

• It only gets better out here. The Republican Senate minority leader finally reached a deal with the Democrats in Sacramento on a budget deal in the wee hours last night. So we have a state budget today, right?

Wrong. The Senate GOP caucus held a meeting after midnight, and voted to dump the guy as minority leader in favor of another tax-cut troglodyte. So it's back to Square 1 on Day 91.

It's not that we don't have our act together out here. It's the fact that we're saddled with a "tyranny of the minority," a.k.a. a 34-percent veto, that can effectively halt any legislation involving taxes, and which has largely managed to do so for 30 years running.

Prop 13 required that the legislature also had to have a 2/3 vote to raise any tax, and that most local tax votes would have to meet the same standard. In 1996, Prop 218 closed some remaining "loopholes" to ensure that any tax vote in California had to be approved by a 2/3 majority of voters.

The reason this was included in Prop 13 was because, as you ought to know, Prop 13 wasn't really about property taxes. It was about destroying government. Property taxes were merely the cover, the way that Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann convinced the public to back their radical scheme. Even at that time conservatives understood their place on the political margins in California (the last time Republicans held a majority in either the Assembly or the Senate was 1970) and wanted to make sure that Californians would never be able to undo the damage that Prop 13 was about to unleash.

In short, it created a permanent conservative veto over California policy. It didn't matter how often Californians rejected conservative Republicans---and it was often---as long as they could hold on to at least 1/3 of the seats in either chamber, they would still have veto power over policy. It was California's version of the liberum veto that eventually caused Poland to self-destruct as an independent nation in the 1700s, as the 2/3 rule ensured conservatives would put their own ideology above the survival of the state. That is the entire point of the 2/3 rule.

The greedy racist bastard who birthed this abortion is surely chortling at us from the ninth circle of Hell Hereafter, but for those of us in the Here and Now, this minority nullification rule has been a yoke around our collective necks for decades, and virtually every level of state services---from parks to schools to health care to highways---has been detrimentally affected by it. How we're ever to unburden ourselves of Jarvis' Ghost, I couldn't say, though you can find a good discussion of possible lines of attack here.

This alternative, however, is a total non-starter. Anything that stacks the deck in Washington with two additional GOP Senators should be called out for the cynical ruse that it is.

• Speaking of cynical ruses, I'd sure like to see Obama call out Bobby Jindal's bluff. Don't want $4 billion? Fine, we'll send it to California instead.

• As someone whose day job finds him working in close quarters to some key folks in the automotive industry---and who as a result is likely more sympathetic to the plight of the Detroit automakers than most lefty bloggers---I hate to confess that I was a lot more sympathetic to the idea of doling out another big chunk of federal bailout money to GM and Chrysler before they unveiled their latest restructuring plans yesterday. Chrysler's, in particular, didn't even resemble a plan but a rather weak rehash of status quo product rollouts that have been years in the making already ("We're working on an electric car! We've got a new Grand Cherokee! We're killing the PT Cruiser!"). The fact the Cerberus Capital Management has opted to make no further investments in its own acquisition through this entire fiasco tells me all I need to know about the future of Chrysler: namely, it's time to sell off Jeep, the Dodge Ram, and the rights to the Chrysler minivan, get the investors whatever they can in return for them (in Jeep's case, it should be tidy sum), and be done with it. I wish I could be less sanguine about it, but at this point, Chrysler seems in many ways like a shell company that somehow lost its product planning, vehicle design, and brand management skills---its entire edge, in fact---during (or because of?) the Daimler Era. Guess we won't ask Dr. Z for help next time.

General Motors' proposal wasn't half-bad, but considering the amount of money they're asking for now, it needed to be more than half-good. And deciding to keep four-and-a-half brands in the company stable (Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, Buick, and the Pontiac G8 on somebody's platform, I guess) instead of eight struck me as a classic non-committal committal. In other words, vintage GM business strategy. Honda, Toyota and Nissan have all proven the ability in recent years to attract new generations of consumers, and grow new business from nearly every demographic, with only two brand levels. (Okay, make it two-plus-Scion in Toyota's case.) And Ford's health has improved noticeably since they shed themselves of their money-hemorrhaging imports and rededicated their marketing efforts to their three core domestic marques. I can see an easy business case for keeping Chevy and Cadillac around---someone will buy the branding rights for big money, if for no other reason---but Buick? Why? Tiger's endorsement deal is nearly up; he can finally move up from his Enclave to an RX450 or whatever the hell he wants now. And what, pray tell, is the ongoing love affair with GMC Truck, a division that has offered no brand-unique consumer product in decades? Are they really selling that many schoolbuses anymore? Is Buick moving that many fleet and rental vehicles? Can GM really afford to keep either of them around as loss leaders?

But no matter which way you look at it, there are going to be job losses---tens of thousands of them, I fear---among the Detroit Three in the coming years, federal largesse or no. There are no simple solutions to Detroit's problems, which why it's imperative that we keep the pressure on Obama to come back to the Congress later in the year with a Stimulus 2.0 package. We are almost surely going to need hundreds of billions of dollars more in federal jobs programs in the next couple of years, and the best place to start doling out the contracts would most likely be in Michigan. What's happening to Detroit right now, and what will be happening in the months ahead, is going to be the economic equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. Let's make sure Obama pledges to help rebuild that fair and industrious city. Like New Orleans, it's got too long a legacy of culture and commerce, of history and heritage going for it to simply doom it to extinction. In macro- and in microcosm, Detroit is as much an integral part of America as N'awleans is. Let's fight to keep them both alive.

---Vitelius

More Open Thread Goodness:Looming Bankruptcy Edition

• Ninety days past due, and we still have no budget. And all for the want of a single Republican vote in the Legislature:

Adams, a bearded 37-year-old who was elected in 2006 after working for San Bernardino County as its legislative liaison to Sacramento and Washington, has said he would provide the Assembly's third GOP vote.

"It's unconscionable that we let this state go over the cliff," Adams said in an interview. "My job is to get the best possible deal for Republicans."

Imagine that. The state is officially out of money, the Governor sent out 20,000 layoff notices today, and this high-minded guy, who's paid by the taxpayers to do his job, is trying to do the right thing . . . for his party. One could use any number of words to describe this sort of attitude, but one images that "patriotic" would not be one of them.

• Things are tough all over, apparently. But it couldn't have happened to a better guy regardless.

• As a follow-up to something I posted the other day, if you wanna find out how much stimulus dough your state is getting, it's available here via ProPublica. As it turns out, we Golden Staters are set to receive a cool billion in transit outlays alone---which really isn't a lot, given our needs, but it's a great deal more than any other state is getting for the same purpose.

• For the definition of a "mirage" in the 21st Century, click here. Good riddance to it and everything it stood for.

• GM to Obama: We need more money. A lot more money.

• GM to Toyota, Nissan, Honda et al: You win.

• More troops are en route to Afghanistan. What they'll actually do there, who knows? But a remark by Obama today provides a glimmer of hope that his foreign policy team has thought through this deployment very carefully, that he's not merely sending another 15,000 guys as a show of force to blow shit up and get shot at by the locals:

Ahead of his first foreign trip this week, Obama told a Canadian news organization that the United States will seek a more comprehensive, diplomatic approach to Afghanistan, where the U.S. has been engaged in war since 2001.

"I am absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means," the president said in a White House interview with Toronto-based Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Let's hope this wasn't intended for foreign consumption only.

• I don't often link to the Journal, but this article from today is definitely worth a read. Perhaps we need to start thinking of infrastructure projects as "sensor-ready," and break out the shovels later?

• The Baron's neighborhood (and I mean, like, six blocks away from here) is a treasure trove of priceless relics. Athens may have the Parthenon, and Cairo the pyramids, but we have Zed the Mammoth.

• Pace Juan Cole, UNICEF UK is raising funds for children's relief in Gaza. Please consider donating. I did.

---Vitelius

Presidents' Day Open Thread

• This is not helping anything that I can see.

• C-SPAN's historians are far too charitable to Dubya. And Reagan. And JFK, too, for that matter.

• Glad to see that Obama is ditching the Car Czar concept today. The problems bedeviling GM and Chrysler are too complex and multidimensional to ever be unraveled, let alone adjudicated, by one person.

• That federal stimulus money can't get to Sacramento soon enough. We are, after all, being led by great patriots such as this GOP solon who expressed his concerns thusly:

I don't like tax increases . . . let me just work on the tax issue. I'm working on that. I don't want my state to go off the cliff, OK? I don't want that.

So naturally he voted a short time later to send the state off a cliff.

• Speaking of stimuli, ProPublica has a cool chart breaking down the Obama package by category. It's definitely worth a few minutes of your time.

• I've said this before, and I'll say it again: for what it's worth, I think a homegrown Oklahoma City-style terror attack is a far more immediate threat to an Obama administration than an Al' Qaeda-style attack. Of course I'm hoping it never happens, but with people like these being granted unfettered media access to peddle what is nothing more than unwashed hate speech under the guise of the First Amendment, I suspect it is not a matter of if, but when, the next Tim McVeigh decides to take up arms against the sinister forces of godless deviant Marxism or whatever liberal scapegoats their chosen TV spokesmodels have conjured up for the day.

• Long Beach, California has a population of nearly half a million people, so you'd think the city would still be able to support at least one daily newspaper. But apparently not for long, judging by the looks of things.

• I sent someone a marriage proposal in the mail last week. Apparently, she didn't get it in time. Ah well, her loss.

• Your Gotta-Read of The Day is right here. If you can stomach it. If you can't, here's the conclusion:

Since we started this interview President Barack Obama has said the detention facility in Guantanmo Bay will be closed within a year. That's great, but what are WE as the United States of America, the people who kidnapped and tortured these people going to do for them? Just send them home like nothing happened? In the USA if you are sentenced to prison and later on you are found not to be guilty through DNA or what not you are given compensation. Are we going to give compensation to these individuals that were so wrongfully held for so many years? We should. We started this mess and it's time we attempt to help this people move on with their lives. The sad part of this all is the people who are responsible. Former President George Bush and Former Vice President Dick Cheney will never be held accountable for the decisions they made. It's the detainees and the guards like myself that will have to live every day with what they went through, saw, and did while there.

---Vitelius

Sunday Night (Smokin') Blue Notes

Because we've had no videos for awhile. And we can only honor our Presidents with pure American music.

---Vitelius

Gotta-Read of the Day: Straight Outta Compton

The good Doctor breaks down the Wall Street investment bubble to the grass roots at one of the Baron's favorite new econo-blogs.

---Vitelius

Sobering Thought of The Day

However much money is in the stimulus package for science education, I'll tell you right now: it isn't anywhere near enough. Have American Protestants always been this stupid?

---Vitelius

Why We Fight . . . or Why We Don't. Same Result Either Way

Thomas Ricks is as good a writer on military matters as you'll find anywhere, but I am trying to wrap my brain around his op-ed in the Post today. The way I see it, when we invaded Iraq, we unwittingly unleashed the forces of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing upon the populace, and strengthened Iran's influence in the region. According to Ricks, though, we can never leave Iraq because if we do, our departure will unwittingly unleash the forces of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing, and leave Iran more powerful in the region.

An an alternative, Ricks notes, maybe we'll get lucky and wind up with a military strongman government. And we all know how well that turned out last time.

Reading the Post every day makes my head hurt.

---Vitelius

Lowering the Bar, Yet Again

The Post today, on bipartisanship---or, more accurately, Obama's perceived lack of it:

As Obama urged passage of the plan, he and his still-incomplete team demonstrated a single-mindedness that was familiar from the campaign trail. That intensity may have contributed to missteps in other areas, as the president's White House stumbled repeatedly in the vetting of his Cabinet and staff nominees. And high-minded promises of bipartisanship evaporated as Republicans accused the president and his Democratic allies in Congress of the same heavy-handed tactics that Obama, in his campaign, had often demanded be changed.

Compare and contrast to Obama's predecessor, who reached out to the opposing party in deep and meaningful ways during the earliest days of his Presidency. How?

Unlike Obama, by this point Bush had not yet held a prime-time news conference. Like Obama, Bush made an early gesture to encourage bipartisanship: inviting members of the Kennedy family to the White House to see the movie Thirteen Days.

Got that? Obama inserts $350 billion in tax cuts in his stimulus bill to mollify Republicans. Bush invites the Kennedys to watch a movie at the White House. Same difference, right?

I have finally reached the DeLong Stage of Journalistic Grief: the editors of the Post need to be sent into the cornfield, and the sooner, the better for the mental health of the commonweal. These people will do anything---and I mean anything---to avoid confronting their complicity in the collective nightmare that the rest of us were forced to endure, and which Obama will spend most of his term of office trying to clean up, for the last eight years.

---Vitelius

Why Does the GOP Hate America Europe?

It is an old argument, but it reared its hoary old head again this week.

It's anticipated if all of these new spending items that we're in the process of considering go through, that government spending in this country as a percentage of gross domestic product in 2010 could well be just under 40 percent; just under 40 percent if we do all of these -- take all of these measures that we're talking about.

This paints a picture of the Europeanization of America. And I know there are many people on the other side who think the French and the Germans and the Italians have got it right, but by maintaining a percentage of GDP and government spending of roughly 20 percent, we continue to have a vibrant private sector.

That shed 600,000 jobs last month. That's some kinda vibrant, dude.

But this begs the bigger question: What is it about Europe that gets Republican political figures so bent up in knots? Could it be the lousy physical shape that Europeans are in due to the laziness that their welfare state encourages? Could it be their crappy health-care system that rations medical care so people can't get a doctor or a hospital bed? Or all the extra money their bureaucracy-laden health-care system consumes versus our much more competitive private HMOs? Perhaps it's the Godless secular values of the welfare state that encourage divorce, broken homes and sexually transmitted diseases. Or their inefficient public school systems that coddle immigrants, encourage illiteracy, and serve as breeding grounds for violent crime. Or the high-tax, high-spending governments that make the cost of goods and services increasingly unaffordable to the average European. Or the lack of productivity that is endemic to the modern European welfare state. Or . . .

Boy, facts really are stubborn things. So why the heck does the GOP hate Europe?

Mitch McConnell can keep his old Kentucky home. Me, when I win the lottery, I'm on a one-way ticket to Paris or Rome. And I'm not coming back until all of the crazy people have been run out of Washington.

---Vitelius

The Folly of Bipartisanship

Once upon a time in America, political men of sober mien and modest temper sought accommodation and understanding with the restive forces of the Old Confederacy. One of them, however, had no illusions about their ultimate agenda:

Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling - that sentiment - by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel? What would that other channel probably be? Would the number of John Browns be lessened or enlarged by the operation?

But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.

That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This, plainly stated, is your language.

They will rule or ruin in all events. Okay, slavery is gone, and the party affiliations have swapped around, but how much else really has changed since then? A note to be slipped quietly into the Presidential suggestion box on the occasion of Honest Abe's bicentennial.

---Vitelius

Thursday Open Thread

• So we have a stimulus bill after all. It is apparently less lame than the Senate version.

• How so? Well, it looks like we got some additional funding for Amtrak and mass transit back in the bill, and a bit less money for new highway construction.

• Can't say I'm too sorry to see this fella go. Especially after he told the national newsmedia that he had no practical use for Obama's brand of bipartisanship. And right before Obama was set to deliver a speech on Lincoln's birthday, no less. The man's got some kind of class, eh?

• It may be premature, but this strikes me as a positive development. If anything, it sends a message to whatever coalition ends up running the Israeli government that the Obama administration fully intends to pursue diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority no matter what the next government of Israel decides to do. Soft power, indeed.

• If Obama keeps dragging his feet on a Truth & Reconciliation Commission, Pat Leahy should go ahead and launch is own. There's more fodder for investigation with each passing day.

• Someone should also shove this under Obama's nose. The Gallup headline is thoroughly misleading. There may not be a majority "mandate" for a criminal investigation of Bush-era crimes, but when 71% of respondents want some kind of investigation into DoJ politicization, 63% favor investigations into illegal wiretapping, and 62% want torture allegations looked at, that tells me that there is no serious political price to speak of to be paid for holding some hearings. Senator Leahy, your serve.

• Nadya Suleman may be a world-class idiot, but this kind of behavior is beyond the pale. People, get a grip.

• I did not know until today that Abe Lincoln and Charles Darwin shared the same birthday. In the exact same year. I'm surprised to see that Congressional Republicans aren't walking around in sackcloth and ashes today.

---Vitelius

Midweek Open Thread

In no particular order:

• Our good senator Boxer has been reportedly working with global-warming denier James Imhofe to divert stimulus money away from rail transit and towards more highway construction. Drop her a note and ask her to stop. People like Imhofe need to be quarantined, not coddled, since he'll never vote for a Democratic stimulus package for any reason, and while we badly need road repairs and maintenance, new construction will only contribute to California's continuing gridlock, sprawl, and pollution woes. Let Imhofe pave over his own state if he wants.

• This just in: Republicans in Sacramento are every bit as corrupt as their Washington brethren. Who'da thunk it?

• The obstruction of Hilda Solis' nomination as Labor Secretary has reached absurd levels of venality. Sign the petition and let Health, Education & Labor Committee Chairman Kennedy know we need her at Labor now.

• Signs of The Times Dept: The White House is live-blogging the Stimulus Townhall Tour.

• Support Our Troops---just don't feed them a balanced diet.

• Good to hear Obama promoting this element of the stimulus bill at yesterday's townhall:

It's imagining new transportation systems. I'd like to see high speed rail where it can be constructed. I would like for us to invest in mass transit because potentially that's energy efficient. And I think people are a lot more open now to thinking regionally.

The days where we're just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that's not a smart way to design communities. So we should be using this money to help spur this sort of innovative thinking when it comes to transportation.

That will make a big difference.

Have a word with Senator Boxer about this, too, Mr. President.

• It's hard to believe, but the Times Op-Ed page reached a new nadir today with this stimulus proposal: To make America competitive again, import Indian guest workers and bail out Silicon Valley. Oh, and when you pull a quote from the Rumsfeld Lexicon to buttress your argument, you know you're treading on thin ice.

• Who says old dogs can't learn new tricks?

• The Left Coast may look like paradise to folks in the Midwest, but in case you hadn't heard, we are so screwed.

---Vitelius

The Presser & The Bailout: Win Some, Lose Some

Amazing, isn’t it? How any two people can have such widely diverging views on a press conference. Here's today's example.

Michael Lind thinks Obama nearly put the audience to sleep in the first five minutes with a tired hash of generic stump-speech clichés before rebounding during the Q&A period. I thought the whole point of the press conference was in actuality the five-minute opening in which Obama smartly preempted any questions from the media to explain his case for the stimulus straight to the viewers. And I thought he made his case brilliantly and effectively.

Yes, the “hardworking people of Elkhart” theme which Obama used to open his remarks exemplifies the kind of shopworn emotional appeal that we political junkies recognize immediately for a manipulative "Kodak Moment" technique that it is. But when it comes to connecting with the public at large, the fact is, that shit works. Every president since Reagan has relied on this approach--—“personalizing” the nation’s struggles in the anecdotal narrative of a besieged community or even an individual citizen----and it has worked for all of them.

Obama also knows that when it comes to television, what happens in the first five minutes is a lot more important to the typical viewer than what happens in the remaining 55 as viewers start to tire of cookie-cutter questions and recycled policy points and start switching channels. He’s also aware, as any good salesman knows, that when it comes to closing a deal, it’s typically done in the first 10 minutes of the presentation. The longer your sales pitch meanders on, the more likely it is to get bogged down in particulars, and your client is liable to start asking annoying questions, which is why Obama bypassed the bobbleheads and went directly to the national audience right away, before reporters could start chipping away at his argument.

The remainder of the presser was pretty decent for a first effort. Obama was obviously weighing his words very carefully, particularly on foreign policy questions, and he occasionally he tripped over himself trying to explain, in simple terms, hopelessly complex issues such as the origins of the banking-system meltdown. But he soldiered through the hour fairly well, I thought---and most crucially, he established his message firmly in the first five minutes---four million jobs, four million jobs, and doing nothing is not an option---and stayed on it relentlessly for the entire hour.

Tim Geithner, on the other hand, did not live up to advance billing today, and the reason, in part, stems from the content of the stimulus package he apparently persuaded Obama to embrace over the objections of Axelrod and others in the President's inner circle. The concept of a public/private partnership between the Fed and prospective financiers to buy up bad assets strikes me as a kind of faith-based---dare I say "bipartisan"?---approach to market reform that seems to be dedicated to minimizing losses to shareholders and bondholders and propping up stock values while limiting the liability to taxpayers. There's no guarantee, though, that any private-equity investment will ride to the rescue here, and it's hard to see how the taxpayers don't get saddled with trillions of dollars in worthless assets unless Treasury or the Fed insists that the troubled banks write down most if not all of their crap assets, which would save the government billions but which would wipe out shareholder value and leave the bondholders with shaved heads. And apparently, Geithner isn't ready to pull that trigger.

That's unfortunate, because somewhere out there are a lot of recently drawn-down assets (i.e., bank funds) that could help defray these costs and which are completely unaccounted for. Watch this video (courtesy of John Cole) to see what I mean:

Caller hysterics aside, there's an obvious mystery here that is still waiting to be solved: Namely, that half a trillion dollars that was drawn out of the banking system over the span of "an hour or two" in a single day, and the billions more that have vanished into the ether since then. Where is all this money now? Who drew it out? What are they doing with it? Surely the Fed must have some idea. That much money fleeing the financial system all at once has got to leave behind some kind of paper trail, doesn't it?

In the meantime, I suspect that Obama is figuring out quickly that bipartisanship, while great in concept, can make for some lousy policy decisions---like making hundreds of billions of tax cuts as a unilateral concession to Congressional Republicans who merely spat in his face anyway. Personally, I think he needs to spend a bit less time listening to Wall Street insiders like Geithner and Larry Summers, and more time consulting with a guy like this who's been right all along. His prescription may not make good politics (I can already hear the Dittoheads screaming Socialism! Socialism!), but what we need more than anything now is the right policy.

Nouriel Roubini: in the bad bank model the government may overpay for the bad assets as the true value of them is uncertain; even in the guarantee model there can be such implicit over-payment (or over-guarantee that is not properly priced). Thus, paradoxically nationalization may be a more market friendly solution: it creates the biggest hit for common and preferred shareholders of clearly insolvent institutions and – possibly – even the unsecured creditors in case the bank insolvency is too large; it provides a fair upside to the tax-payer; it can resolve the problem of government managing the bad assets by reselling most of the assets and liabilities of the bank to new private shareholders after a clean-up of the bank.

---Vitelius

Gotta-Read of the Day

I really, really, really wish I did not have to recommend Greenwald today, mostly because I wish the subject of his column hadn't happened. Thinking charitably, the only reason I can think why Obama and Holder have staked out this position is that they'll make a half-hearted and perfunctory defense of the program once the case comes to trial, and let the courts declare the rendition program unconstitutional for them. But that's a gamble either way if true, and it certainly doesn't show much character or backbone. Let's hope somebody grills him on it at the 5:00 presser.

Update: Unfortunately, nobody did. Not even the guy from Huffington Post.

---Vitelius