AUMF

A modest proposal: let's name the Wall Street bailout legislation in a more illuminating fashion. I think a good fit is "Abandonment of the US to Monetary Fraud", or AUMF for short. It really is all of a piece now isn't it, just bookends on eight years that have unravelled a country?

Supply Side Follies

I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just stand back and marvel at an apparently inexhaustible supply, a veritable white hole of folly. As the current phase of the mortgage related asset hurricane gathered strength, as I watched my 401K hemorrhaging like a stuck pig (albeit, sans lipstick), and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the need for a bailout plan, I thought to myself:

"OK, surely, during the last year and a half that this crisis has been brewing and building, some very smart, conscientious people - I mean there have to be a FEW of those, surreptitious competency insurgents in the Bush administration's political hack/ideologue corps, somewhere in the government, right? - had seen the same storm clouds on the horizon that I'd seen, and had been spending brutal hours piecing together contingency plans for a spectrum of potential crises that could arise."

I anticipated that Paulson would roll out a mildly modified version of one of these ideas, perhaps tweaked a bit to a few finer details of the storm's actual landfall. That is, a plan presumably pretty well thought out and pretty much fully formed.

The next frackin' paragraph:

And then I read it. All three pages. Three frackin' pages! Three frackin' pages that asked for $700,000,000,000 and provided not one frackin' word about how this plan would be implemented! Three frackin' pages that a frackin' presidential candidate, a frackin' presidential candidate who insisted that he was playing a vital role in addressing the crisis, a frackin' presidential candidate who insisted on sticking his big frackin' presumptuous presidential nose into negotiations on the proposal and gumming them up, hadn't bothered to READ, though he was flapping his big frackin' presumptuous presidential gums about it. Three frackin' pages that included an unconscionable, unconstitutional "no oversight" provision. Three frackin' pages! I've written frackin' proposals for $500 that were three times as long as Paulson's Nigerian email scam and which required explicit implementation and oversight plans.

Seven hundred billion dollars! OK, you know when I buy a cup of coffee, and let's say its a liberal elitist frou-frou four dollar cup of coffee, I might get a penny back in change and I'll leave it in the little penny cup on the counter. The penny equivalent on seven hundred billion dollars is $1,750,000,000; that is, the penny cup change on what this proposal asked for is over a BILLION dollars.

Ooh, ooh, and then WHY, exactly, seven hundred billion dollars? OK, there's this funny scene in the movie Twins (I've also been told there's a somewhat similar scene in the series Taxi) that's set up when Danny DeVito’s character accidentally comes into possession of a complicated device. DeVito’s character has no idea what the device is or its value but nevertheless hatches a scheme to extort money in exchange for it. Sitting in front of a phone preparing to place his extortion call, he writes down and auditions a series of wildly varying numbers, quickly crossing them off as he attempts to home in on the best sounding "right" extortion amount. Very amusing fiction, right? Then, THIS is what a treasury department spokesperson actually, honest-to-god, said about the seven hundred billion dollars:

“It’s not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Um, what about 39 biggity-big fatillion galillion? Isn't that a really large number? God help us.

So anyway, all this and much more to be disgusted with, to be nauseated by in the mortgage related asset crisis has already been noted by other commentators and in most cases much more articulately and humorously. Yet for a week or so I still had a vague and nagging sense that I was missing something, that there was something hiding in plain sight in all this. And finally, it dawned on me: the Paulson proposal left out the budget it needs for pallets and shrink wrap!

Maybe Roy is on to something.

Update: Roy Zimmerman has taken down his song from YouTube that was linked above. It was his "Impeachment Song" and I suspect his attorneys counseled him to remove it, touching on the subject of beheading as it did. Find it and listen to it!

Drill baby drill

“Drill, baby, drill!”, perhaps the most memorable slogan of the Republican convention. How odd that those conventioneers so blithely and enthusiastically chose to evoke the horror movie title, “Kill, baby, kill”! IMDB.com lists two movies associated with that title, the first a movie also known as “House of the Living Dead”, the second whose plot is initiated by an unmistakable symbol of greed, an autopsy that reveals a gold coin imbedded in the heart of the deceased. Can it possibly be a mere accident, an unfortunate coincidence, that these messages were broadcast to the attentive by their mindless chant? I think not: I suspect these were uncontrollable howls from their very foundations, from deep in their souls. Would that we were paying attention.