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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread

Open Thread

by Tim F|  February 17, 200910:21 pm| 31 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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Happy Valentine’s Day.

***Update***

I just saw Tim Geithner’s now famous press conference for the first time. Knowing nothing else about the man or his plans (apparently me and him both), my reaction is that he sounds like Mclovin and we are doomed. Will history prove that he’s really Tracy Enid Flick? I hope so. I guess.

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31Comments

  1. 1.

    gbear

    February 17, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    Please forgive me, for I cannot stop myself from posting a link to this story on an open thread:

    Ohio man accused of holding woman captive in cuffs and diaper, reading Bible to her

    It was in the top ten on the Mpls StarTrib for a while this afternoon. Happy Valentines Day.

  2. 2.

    Andy K

    February 17, 2009 at 11:12 pm

    for the hopeless romantics

  3. 3.

    kommrade reproductive vigor

    February 17, 2009 at 11:16 pm

    Ohio man accused of holding woman captive in cuffs and diaper, reading Bible to her

    It would be completely unoriginal to make a Vitter the Shitter joke, so I’ll just wait quietly while Cornfederate Yanker completes another post written to the tune of "X would never happen if everyone carried a gun."

    OK, I must note this from the comments:

    Interesting…..

    I’ve paid good money to be tied up, gagged, forced to wear adult diapers and have the Bible read to me. I wonder if Troy has any plans when he gets out of jail?

  4. 4.

    Stuck

    February 17, 2009 at 11:29 pm

    . Knowing nothing else about the man or his plans (apparently me and him both),

    Word has it, the reason he didn’t know what he was talking about was that he changed his mind shortly before the presser, and forgot to tell himself.

  5. 5.

    R. Porrofatto

    February 17, 2009 at 11:43 pm

    Thought the Frontline documentary was a bit tame for the subject matter. And it would be nice if, in the process of using the word "insurance" a dozen times to explain what a credit default swap is, that someone would point out that the only reason the banker/casino boys didn’t call it "insurance" was to avoid it being regulated.

  6. 6.

    Incertus

    February 17, 2009 at 11:44 pm

    Just wanted to pass the word–this is the new project I’m involved with. Think of it as a Huffington Post peopled with professional writers and focused on pop culture, literature, music and film, among other things. And when I mean other things, I mean a story about getting waxed for Valentine’s day that had me crying at one point.

    I’m the poetry editor, which means I’m doing reviews and getting other people to write them–not the most exciting part of the place, but it’s what I know–but there’s a lot of other interesting stuff going on as well.

  7. 7.

    gbear

    February 17, 2009 at 11:44 pm

    @kommrade reproductive vigor:

    "X would never happen if everyone carried a gun."

    …or handcuff keys.

  8. 8.

    Rosali

    February 17, 2009 at 11:59 pm

    @R. Porrofatto: The Frontline piece was a good primer for how we got to where we are now. Partisans may disagree on where we ought to go but we ought to at least acknowledge the certifiable facts on what led to the current conditions.

  9. 9.

    Church Lady

    February 18, 2009 at 12:13 am

    @Incertus – I read the waxing story. I was laughing until I cried. Not sure if the tears were from the laughter or sympathy. Funny stuff.

  10. 10.

    KCinDC

    February 18, 2009 at 12:23 am

    Please, no more Joe the Plumber photos at the top and side. We surrender!

  11. 11.

    Incertus

    February 18, 2009 at 12:56 am

    @KCinDC: I just click on them. I figure it’s an extra fraction of a penny in ad revenue to Balloon Juice, and a fraction of a penny out of the pocket of whoever’s paying for the stupid ad, which is great considering there’s not a chance in hell I’d buy the product.

  12. 12.

    opium4themasses

    February 18, 2009 at 1:05 am

    @gbear: When I read the title of the story I thought the man was wearing the diaper. It just didn’t seem as funny when I found out he put the diaper on her.

  13. 13.

    Mnemosyne

    February 18, 2009 at 1:19 am

    @R. Porrofatto:

    If you followed the bank bailout obsessively — and I did — there really wasn’t a whole lot that was new. Unfortunately, I suspect a lot in the program was news to people who get most of their news from cable and so didn’t really get to hear any of the underlying background or causes at the time.

  14. 14.

    Zuzu's Petals

    February 18, 2009 at 1:25 am

    Seeing that clip from "The Crying Game" after all these years, I’m surprised at how obvious it seems that Dil is a tran.

  15. 15.

    wilfred

    February 18, 2009 at 1:38 am

    Re: Timmy:

    If we can agree that "confidence" is still the key word in the financial slash political crisis that seems to be getting started for real these days, what are we supposed to think when Timothy Geithner’s own private fanclub magazine, the Washington Post, reveals that the newfangled Treasury Secretary and car mini czar had already spent 19 months (!) trying to find a way to get toxic assets out of US banks, before he turned on a dime and decided to present a plan with more holes than ideas a week ago?
    19 months before you figure out that something doesn’t work. And now there’s still nothing on the table that does. What is this, a late night stand-up act?

    From:

    http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

    Good blog these days.

  16. 16.

    Xenos

    February 18, 2009 at 4:21 am

    Geithner could work on plans for a lot more than 19 months if he is only looking for policy choices that a) could work, and b) don’t involve receivership for all the big banks.

    I like the Josh Marshall theory that Geithner was brought in for his IMF experience at forcing structural reforms on truculent oligarchies. But if that is really what he is preparing to do he is doing an awfully good job of hiding his intentions

  17. 17.

    saucy sauce

    February 18, 2009 at 6:41 am

    Geithner’s as smart as they come. It makes sense to me that the news conference debacle was the result of a) last-minute changes and b) the lack of undersecretaries et al. to do the leg work. I don’t know if the TARP will work, but I do think that if Obama and Geithner can’t make it work, no one else could.

    Let’s wait at least a month or two before deciding that we’re all doomed. This post is close to the "OBAMA’S WORST WEEK EVAR??" territory, though the Tracy Enid Flick reference walks back from that precipice.

  18. 18.

    tofubo

    February 18, 2009 at 7:28 am

    he’s not tracy enid flick, he’s michael binkley’s brother

    http://tofubo.blogspot.com/2009/02/separated-at-birth-binkley-on-left.html

  19. 19.

    electrophoresis

    February 18, 2009 at 7:52 am

    Sorry, the claim "Geithner’s as smart as they come" doesn’t cut it. Larry Summers routinely gets described as "mind-bendingly smart" yet he’s the ignorant incompetent fool who engineered the shock therapy privatization that wrecked Russia’s economy, slammed down the Russian male’s life expectancy to below 50 years, created literally hundreds of millions of poor people without a hope in the world, and dumped essentially the whole assets of the country into the hands of 7 creepy oligarchs.

    "Smart" doesn’t mean spit. The people who got us into Viet Nam were the best and the brightest — and I do not mean that in an ironic way. Smart just lets you screw up much more monumentally, on a vastly more gigantic scale and with a much worse fallout, than "average intelligence" or "dumb as a box of rocks."

    Remember Long Term Capital Management? Almost took down the entire world economy when it went bankrupt in 1997? Run by two Nobel laureates in economics, Merton and Scholes? They were smarter than any ten of us put together, and what did that get them…?

  20. 20.

    wilfred

    February 18, 2009 at 8:19 am

    Sorry, the claim "Geithner’s as smart as they come" doesn’t cut it.

    Reminds me of Halberstam’s "The Best and the Brightest", a description he intended as irony but taken as serious by the described, who then acted suitably remorseful – witness macnamara et al.

    I’m still not sure if our collective FIRE people, the BATBs of the 80’s -00’s, are just flat out stupid motherfuckers who ran the country into the ground or whipsmart pricks who got rich and passed the bill to the public.

  21. 21.

    Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse

    February 18, 2009 at 8:34 am

    Jenga cat understands economics

  22. 22.

    joe from Lowell

    February 18, 2009 at 8:59 am

    No, uh uh, not buying it.

    We’ve had eight years of "smart doesn’t matter." We almost had "smart doesn’t matter" a heartbeat away from the presidency.

    Smart matters.

  23. 23.

    electrophoresis

    February 18, 2009 at 9:05 am

    Joel From Lowell — you’re exactly right, smart does matter. What I’m saying is that smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.

  24. 24.

    cleek

    February 18, 2009 at 9:33 am

    Whoring: i’m currently doing a Name That Tune contest over at my place. if you think you’re au courant with the latest sounds of alt-rock, give it a try.

    there will be a prize.

  25. 25.

    markus o' farkus

    February 18, 2009 at 10:10 am

    slammed down the Russian male’s life expectancy to below 50 years

    Well, below 60 years anyway. Still absolutely, stunningly low.

  26. 26.

    chopper

    February 18, 2009 at 10:21 am

    @joe from Lowell:

    competence matters. i don’t bring my busted car to a nobel-prize winning physicist. i bring it to the high-school dropout who can fix the shit outta my car.

    in some cases smart comes with competence. but the former without the latter is quite dangerous.

  27. 27.

    electrophoresis

    February 18, 2009 at 10:32 am

    Wisdom is really the issue. Our culture worships intelligence and swoons over a high IQ, but we never bother to concern ourselves with a WQ — Wisdom Quotient.

    Smart means being able to solve a problem. Wise means knowing which problem to solve.

  28. 28.

    Elie

    February 18, 2009 at 10:45 am

    #21 — I’m with Joe — smart matters

    The hard part is not just the intellect, but the ability of leadership at the top (Hopefully Obama) to insert the political and social sensitivity to moderate the brutality of a given policy choice on the population. We could have a "fix" of sorts right now and let the whole damned thing collapse. The externalities of that choice would be too horrible and therefore cannot be a choice.

    So yeah smart matters, but along with smart must come principled and courageous leadership at the top to weigh in and sometimes moderate some of the decisions.

    Additionally, sometimes there are no good options that don’t involve suffering. From some of the comments above, do some of you really think that one can always make big decisions (at least for this kind of scope) and always have a result that doesnt result in some really bad stuff for people?

    In this huge case, the fuck-up has already happened. The choices are not probably great and we have lost some degrees of freedom (or perhaps can gain some) with time. Its not a perfect process esp given the unprecedented situation. Let us hope that luck is present as well. I never underestimate the importance of that,

  29. 29.

    ricky

    February 18, 2009 at 11:51 am

    I

    like the Josh Marshall theory that Geithner was brought in for his IMF experience at forcing structural reforms on truculent oligarchies.

    Teh Timmah…Transgender/Transparenct/Truculent

    This is one weird thread.

  30. 30.

    MikeL

    February 18, 2009 at 4:02 pm

    Michelle Malkin is still keeping us entertained.

  31. 31.

    Jim in Chicago

    February 18, 2009 at 6:37 pm

    When even economists at the American Enterprise Institute and Alan Greenspan are calling for nationalization of the insolvent banks, you’d think Obama and Geithner would have enough political cover to do what’s needed.

    We have 2 successful models for how to deal with this situation: Sweeden in the early 1990s and our own Resolution Trust Corporation in the S&L Crisis. Instead, we seem determined to follow the one very UNsuccessful recent model we have for dealing with insolvent banks: Japan in the 1990s.

    I JUST DON’T GET IT!

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