"We will be told that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have finally gotten it right. The scope and size of the proposed program will arrest the decline in home prices, restore stability to the financial markets, enable banks to get back to the business of lending, and restore the confidence of the American consumer.
While the program certainly has each of these points as a goal, the amount of time to achieve each goal is unknowable, but an important factor. Moses was told he would lead the Jews to the Promised Land. He didn’t know it would take 40 years. And, in all due respect to Bernanke and Paulsen, Moses was working with God. They are working with Congress."
Warren Buffett has it right...make sure that you get a payback on the investment...in effect, garnish their wages...THIS is what we need to do to Wall Street...
Crucial investment information. Retirement Plans compared.. If you had purchased $1,000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. With Enron, you would have $16.50 left of the original $1000. With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left. If you had purchased $1,000.00 of Delta Air Lines stock you would have $49.00 left. If you had purchased United Airlines, you would have nothing left. But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for recycling, you would have $214.00. Based on the above, the best current investment is to drink heavily and recycle. This is called the 401-Keg Plan
Some money quotes, tho I do not understand the rules they're talking about here (bolding mine):
As we learn this morning via Julie Satow of the NY Sun, special exemptions from the SEC are in large part responsible for the huge build up in financial sector leverage over the past 4 years -- as well as the massive current unwind
Satow interviews the above quoted former SEC director, and he spits out the blunt truth: The current excess leverage now unwinding was the result of a purposeful SEC exemption given to five firms.
You read that right -- the events of the past year are not a mere accident, but are the results of a conscious and willful SEC decision to allow these firms to legally violate existing net capital rules that, in the past 30 years, had limited broker dealers debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1.
Instead, the 2004 exemption -- given only to 5 firms -- allowed them to lever up 30 and even 40 to 1.
Who were the five that received this special exemption? You won't be surprised to learn that they were Goldman, Merrill,Lehman,Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley.
As Mr. Pickard points out that "The proof is in the pudding — three of the five broker-dealers have blown up."
...last I checked...he could be up to even more flipflops on this whole financial meltdown/regulation/no regulation thingy...oh yeah, here's a few more...and more on it here...
Scroll to the bottom of the linked post, and you'll get to this:
“The specific bill that Barack Obama voted for calls for sex education beginning as low as the kindergarten,” claimed Romney. Romney then declared that he and McCain both believe that “the only sex education that’s appropriate in kindergarten is no sex education”
When it's clearly not. I no likey Romney, never have, never will.
I forget how I got to the link (click the title above, or see the YouTube vid below) but all it did was 100% validate what I had said about CNN recently, regarding their "echoes of Crossfire" approach to CNN newsreading:
and it became apparent that all CNN had were two talking heads, a liberal and a conservative, and each ran through their talking points about how this issue would play in the electorate...it just seems that CNN has yet to grow up and NOT have echoes of Crossfire each time they have some political thing to talk about...where does this get them? Hmm, now reading the wikipage on crossfire, I can see why they've not been able to shake the format - they've done it since 1982!!!
Now, Candy Crowley totally validates this by stating "I'm not going to be the one to tell you whether it's equal or not," that it's not up to her to catch the lying, but to report & have voters decide:
Crowley's performance last night was astonishing. Asked whether McCain's lies have been worse than Obama's, Crowley says she isn't going to make that call, adds that it's up to voters to sort it out, and -- best of all -- launches into a discussion of Obama's supposed falsehoods in order to argue that both sides do it...
To his credit, Mark Halperin stepped in and made just this point, noting quite accurately that the lies of the McCain campaign are far more central to his campaign than anything Obama has done.
Halperin isn't some whiny liberal blogger. He's the ultimate D.C. media insider. If he can't persuade both-sides-do-it holdouts like Crowley to inform their viewers, then no one can.
"I'm not going to be the one to tell you whether it's equal or not," Crowley said of the lying on both sides. Really? If CNN reporters don't think this is their role, whose job is it, then?
Yup, I wuz right...oh, and two other validation points here and here about another CNN episode which shows that I'm correct...
And really not in a good way...from the NewsCorp-ish (who had to sell to a former exec in 1994 to buy WFXT) Boston Herald:
If the only thing Tina Fey had done was use her looks and a fake beehive to create an uncanny impersonation of John McCain’s running mate, that might have been enough. But in the SNL opening sketch, hilarity was trumped by keen political satire. Listening to Fey’s “Sarah” tell us that global warming was only “God’s way of huggin’ us closer,” was a gut buster, because let’s face it, we could all imagine the real Sarah believing that - if not saying it during an unscripted moment, assuming such a moment ever occurs.
You know Tina hit a nerve when that humorless doyenne and McCain mouthpiece, former CEO Carly Fiorina, whined that Fey was being “dismissive” of Sarah by trying to suggest Hillary had more substance.
Duh! Well, it’s good to see that Carly’s quick on the uptake.
Even though a far more “maverick” version of John McCain once got pretty wild and crazy as an SNL host, I don’t think he’s welcoming the prospect of six or seven more weeks of Tina Fey spoofing his very favorite bubble-headed governor in the whole world.
Just put these memory hog fixes on the laptop, and now have to try them on the home machine...I also found this this morning being peddled by PCWorld which I may give a shot to also...firefox is a memory HOG, man.
This was a paraphrased statement from one of the GoOPer yum-yums from this episode of On-Point. Wifey will have more to say about this comment in this post, which infuriated her, and if I was listening would infuriate me. I see that more than one commenter also had a problem with the statement that was beyond the pale. You can listen to the program from the page (click the title above).
Hilarious! This really should go along with the Jed Report's movie of the Palin unveiling speech after the Dem convention, when he was clearly looking at her booty:
For those who live in the Boston area may watch the morning news, like I do, before jamming off to work to be sure about the weather and traffic...if you flip through Fox25 morning news, you are then familiar with Doug "VB" Goudie, who apparently worked for Howie Carr on his radio program - and later had his own radio talk show, called "The Pit With VB".
Well, as those intrepid watchers of Fox25 also know, he's a right-wing hack...and, apparently, started shit on the first day of his teevee gig, where it just works differently than radio...just look at his full-throated endorcement of Sarah Palin as McCain's VEEP as an example...there's not even a lefty "balance" (a'la CNN)
Well, from his Howie Carr days, for those Catholics out there I thought I'd put this out on the street...it may have been a throwaway line but it sure stinks in print:
Boston, MA – Complaining about a decision not to sell beer during a Good Friday baseball game at Fenway Park, Doug Goudie, producer of "The Howie Carr Show" on WRKO Radio, asked, "Why don’t they sell Catholic Eucharists instead, maybe for $3.49 each?" When Carr suggested, sarcastically, that the remark was disrespectful, Goudie replied, "I don’t have any respect for all of that." Carr then invited listeners to call in, and the rest of the show was dedicated to slurs and offensive jokes about the Blessed Sacrament.
Since we dumped cable a few years ago (with little kids and a job 100+miles roundtrip, just dont have the time to sit in front of the teevee anymore) I've forgotten how inane the conversations are on CNN...and how DUMBED DOWN the conversations are...anyways, I was listening to the CNN coverage of Hurricane Gustav on XM radio - the CNN TV broadcast is simulcast on XM122, and, let's face it, CNN is everywhere so if there's a crisis, they'll give you the raw feed quicker than anybody else...but while listening, they turned to their reporters at the RNC convention in St.Paul and asked specifically about the political impact on the convention - fair enough...they very quickly started talking about Sarah Palin and her 17-yr old daughter's pregnancy and it becaome apparent that all CNN had were two talking heads, a liberal and a conservative, and each ran through their talking points about how this issue would play in the electorate...it just seems that CNN has yet to grow up and NOT have echoes of Crossfire each time they have some political thing to talk about...where does this get them? Hmm, now reading the wikipage on crossfire, I can see why they've not been able to shake the format - they've done it since 1982!!!
I'm a liberal chemical engineer swimming in a sea of right-wingers. My cohorts and I (The Gumbinator, Lemon-Lyman and Johnny K-Street) will post about such things as "green" science and engineering, other engineering/IT and how they may relate to politics and economics, and economic issues such as tax policy and government transparency. Electoral stuff too. Of course, I'll bash the Bushies...
