I am laughing after reading this. What else can you do?
Your Daily Affirmation that we’re all screwed
Exhibit A, today’s jobs report:
Private-sector employers shed 693,000 jobs in December, a private employment service said on Wednesday in a report that was far worse than expected and pointed to more ugly news from the government’s jobs data due later this week.
The drop, much bigger than the revised 476,000 private sector jobs lost in November, is consistent with about a 670,000 fall in December non-farm payrolls, said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, which jointly develops the private sector employment report with ADP Employer Services.
Exhibit B, outsourcing accounting fraud:
Satyam Computer Services, a leading Indian outsourcing company that serves more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies, significantly inflated its earnings and assets for years, the chairman and co-founder said Wednesday, roiling Indian stock markets and throwing the industry into turmoil.
The chairman, Ramalinga Raju, resigned after revealing that he had systematically falsified accounts as the company expanded from a handful of employees into a back office giant with a work force of 53,000 and operations in 66 countries.
I still say that as long as we remember that the recession’s all in our heads, that it was all caused by deadbeat minority homeowners, and that FDR’s New Deal policies were an abysmal failure, we’re going to ride out the Obama Depression just fine.
Update: @Punchy (from Lew Rockwell):
If you keep up with LRC, you probably already know that a major role of the FDIC is to give the public a false sense of confidence. Typically the FDIC keeps a little over fifty billion dollars in its Deposit Insurance Fund to cover the deposits of account holders in the event of bank failure. According to the data published on September 30, 2008, there is just under $8.8 trillion deposited in US banks. The fact that the FDIC has squat for cash to cover bank failures isn’t really news. So long as there are only three or four bank failures each year, the FDIC is able to cover the losses, and life goes on.
In 2008, however, there were more than three or four bank failures. There were twenty-five in total. As a result, the Deposit Insurance Fund has been drawn down to about $35 billion, of which approximately $20 billion is liquid. That’s still okay so long as there aren’t many more bank failures, but each quarter the numbers are looking more and more dreadful. Last we heard from the FDIC, there were 117 banks on its secret “troubled” list, which matches pretty well with my list of banks with incredibly high Texas ratios. If we add up the deposits for those troubled banks, we get a value of $76 billion. So, the FDIC has $20 billion to cover 76 billion dollars of deposits in banks that are on the brink of collapse. Things are looking pretty bleak for the FDIC.
Take things from Rockwell with a grain of salt but I’ve heard the same rumors elsewhere.
Your Daily Affirmation that we’re all screwedPost + Comments (163)
I Got Nuttin’
I have started four posts and deleted each one because it was pointless or stupid. For me to recognize I am about to say something stupid should give you an idea about the quality of those posts. So here is a pet pic until I can pull my act together:
It’s Calvinball season
Comparing Calvinball — a game wherein the permanent rule is that you may not play the Calvinball the same way twice and the primary rule is that the rules are subject to be changed, amended, or deleted by any player(s) involved — to contemporary politics has become something of a tradition at Balloon Juice.
Calvinball season is in full swing: there has been much gnashing of teeth over the fact that Leon Panetta is not a career intelligence person, but the career intel rule seems to have been invented over the past few days. Matt Y notes:
this idea that the CIA Director needs to be a career intelligence professional seems to have been pulled out of thin air. Porter Goss wasn’t a career intel guy. Neither was George Tenet. Neither was John Deutsch. Neither was James Woolsey. Nor William Webster. Nor George H.W. Bush.
And while we’re at it, shame on Ben Smith who writes of DiFi’s opposition to Panetta:
That seems to reflect the view inside the CIA, and suggests a tough confirmation hearing.
I like Ben Smith, but I seriously doubt he has many sources inside the CIA. David Ignatius, who does (even if he’s a jackass in many ways), writes that the pick is viewed positively at Langley (as the kids like to say).
Another new rule: people who have been on television should not serve in the cabinet. This is courtesy of Jay Newton-Small.
Gupta is an accomplished surgeon, Emory University medical professor and award-winning journalist, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the tsunami in Sri Lanka. He’s also not totally unpolitical, having served as a White House fellow in 1997 and as an advisor to Hillary Clinton.
But picking a television personality — and here I mean no disrespect, the guy is clearly a multi-tasking genius — leaves the door open for a just a tiny bit of mockery. Judge Judy for the Supreme Court? Rachel Ray for White House chef? Flava Flav to head the the DEA! And, hey, Law & Order was one of Fred Thompson’s top credentials in his presidential run.
That’s right, picking a professor of neurosurgery as Surgeon General is like picking a guy who wears a Viking helmet around in public as head of the DEA. And, for Christ’s sake, when it comes to the White House chef, is there any well-known chef who doesn’t appear regularly on tv at this point? I’ve seen Thomas Keller and Eric Ripert on morning shows: does that mean they wouldn’t be qualified to be White House chefs?
Update: A doctor friend of mine just told me she considers this pick a slap in the face to the medical community.
Update update: Whenever I use the phrase “slap in the face”, I am snarking.
Whip Me, Beat Me, Call Me Trash
I couldn’t sleep, having foolishly had a cup of coffee after dinner, so I was lying in bed flipping between the midnight Hardball re-run and whatever disaster show was on the History channel, when at the end of the hour, Pat Buchanan, Susan Page from USA Today, and Matthews discussed this little gem of a poll:
A majority of Americans say Roland Burris should be blocked from taking a U.S. Senate seat he was appointed to by embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds. Most say the state should hold a special election to fill the vacancy.
***In the national poll, interest in the dispute was high — six in 10 are following it closely — and support for Burris was scant. By nearly 2-1, 51% to 27%, those surveyed say the Senate should block him from taking his seat. A similar majority, 52%, say Illinois should hold a special election as soon as possible to fill the office.
You all see where this is going, don’t you? It is right there in front of you, but if you can’t figure out how this is going to play out, let me fill you in with what I see happening. First off, Burris will be seated. He is clean, he has no intention of going anywhere, and Blagojevich still has the right to act as Governor. Hell, Buchanan was practically giddy on Hardball pointing out that Bill Clinton was impeached, but no one tried to stop him from appointing ambassadors and fulfilling his duties. Reid gave up the game on MTP when he said he was willing to negotiate, which should clue in everyone that he knows he is working from a position of weakness. Burris, for his part, isn’t interested in negotiations, because he knows he has the law on his side. Sen. Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Rules Committee, just stated that she thinks he should be seated, and pretty soon the walls will come crashing down on Reid and company.
Harry Reid has now, according to this poll, through his obstinance and idiocy, helped create popular support for Burris to not be seated. Since Burris will be seated anyway, these people will be pissed, Reid will look like a clown for being rolled over and put in his place by Blagojevich, and Republicans, with an assist from the Democrats who ran around calling Burris tainted for several weeks, will now claim Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans.
It really is impressive how Reid and company got themselves into this mess. Their ability to inflict maximum pain on themselves for no gain is really unparalleled. You couldn’t game out a worse scenario for the Democrats, short of Blagojevich appointing himself to the seat or Obama on tape trying to sell the seat with Blago for money to spend on hookers and blow. If you could be sued for political malpractice, I would be leading a class action suit against the Democratic leadership right now.
I swear that you have to be part masochist to be a Democrat.
Why I hate Slate
For years now, I’ve had a running argument with my sister about Slate. She likes the stuff about advertisements and manners (Dear Ad Watch Guy and Dear Prudence, or whatever the hell they call those features) and feels that redeems Hitch, Kaus, and the occasional foray into white supremacism. But my gripe with Slate isn’t the excessive drinking, the bestiality, or sheet-wearing that some of the contributors engage in, it’s the facile contrarianism that permeates the place; I can’t find it on the google, but I’m pretty sure they had an article titled “Why genocide is good for property values” a few years back.
I was pleased to see today that Wonkette agrees — their take-down of Eliot Spitzer’s robot column today is right on the money:
Eliot Spitzer has written another one of those columns for the online Slate magazine, and he’s already mastering the “Slate Style,” which is to take a widely accepted belief (e.g., “Dogs make good pets”) and write a cool 600 words arguing why its opposite is SECRETLY truer (”Why all dogs should die”). In this column he tackles Obama’s big infrastructure plan, saying that instead of funding immediate road repairs and stuff for short-term stimulus’ sake, we should invest in transforming the foundation of America’s infrastructure. It is a stupid article because, um, Obama’s plans do include all of that, which is kind of the point. This leads us to Spitzer’s ace-in-the-hole, which is of course the massive federal funding of Robot Construction.
I can’t be the first one to wonder if Spitzer is just hoping this kind of robot will save him 2000 dollars an hour.
Open Thread
Dr. Mrs. F and I agree that this from XKCD is spooky accurate.
Discuss.