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Buddy Holly

Friday, November 16, 2007

Reaching way back. With Thanksgiving approaching I thought to put Arlo up, but the only versions on Youtube can’t be embedded. So here’s Buddy

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pribHw93OPc&feature=related[/youtube]

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Krugman spreads the word

Friday, November 16, 2007

I am second to no one in my admiration for Paul Krugman, the almost lone voice of reason among the elite punditry. But as someone who, each day, tries to think of something fairly original to say to differentiate myself from the thousands of other blogging types, I must say that Krugman has it easy. Consider this morning’s column, Played for a Sucker, in which Krugman observes:

Inside the Beltway, doomsaying about Social Security — declaring that the program as we know it can’t survive the onslaught of retiring baby boomers — is regarded as a sort of badge of seriousness, a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you are.

Consider, for example, this exchange about Social Security between Chris Matthews of MSNBC and Tim Russert of NBC, on a recent edition of Mr. Matthews’s program “Hardball.”

Mr. Russert: “Everyone knows Social Security, as it’s constructed, is not going to be in the same place it’s going to be for the next generation, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.”

Mr. Matthews: “It’s a bad Ponzi scheme, at this point.”

Mr. Russert: “Yes.”

But the “everyone” who knows that Social Security is doomed doesn’t include anyone who actually understands the numbers. In fact, the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided.

…

How has conventional wisdom gotten this so wrong? Well, in large part it’s the result of decades of scare-mongering about Social Security’s future from conservative ideologues, whose ultimate goal is to undermine the program.

…

Social Security isn’t a big problem that demands a solution; it’s a small problem, way down the list of major issues facing America, that has nonetheless become an obsession of Beltway insiders. And on Social Security, as on many other issues, what Washington means by bipartisanship is mainly that everyone should come together to give conservatives what they want.

Krugman has the luxury of reading the blogs, absorbing what is conventional wisdom, almost cliches, thereon, and regurgitating it to an audience for whom it represents a new and piercing insight. This column appeared today, Friday. The stuff about Russert and Matthews was so Monday to us internet junkies, and the remark about beltway “seriousness” is standard fare.

By no means am I disparaging Krugman. He is doing yeoman service. These are ideas that need to be put before a wider public, not to mention into the faces of the beltway media. We can all be thankful that the Editors of the Times hired the man, a move they might now regret. Still, I have more than once felt quite sure that he has recycled his internet reading, an option foreclosed to those of us who are writing for an audience that is not otherwise fed a diet of beltway wisdom. In any event, he has a way with words, and has become something of an expert in distilling a lot of substance into the few paragraphs with which he has to work. I’m looking forward to reading his book, which is sitting upstairs in my Christmas stack.

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Kerry issues a challenge

Friday, November 16, 2007

Good for John Kerry:

Sen. John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential campaign was torpedoed by critics of his Vietnam War record, said Friday he has personally accepted a Texas oilman’s offer to pay $1 million to anyone who can disprove even a single charge of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

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Kerry said he would donate any proceeds to the Paralyzed Veterans of America.

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In his letter to Pickens, the senator challenged the billionaire’s honor.

“I trust that you are a man of your word, having made a very public challenge at a major Washington dinner, and look forward to taking you up on this challenge,” Kerry wrote

In a letter to T. Boone Pickens, the Massachusetts Democrat wrote: “While I am prepared to show they lied on allegation after allegation, you have generously offered to pay one million dollars for just one thing that can be proven false. I am prepared to prove the lie beyond any reasonable doubt.”

The concept of honor has become somewhat antiquated. There was a time when “gentlemen” were overly concerned about their honor, and had a rather odd sense of what the word meant. In the early years of the Republic politics was, if anything, nastier than it is today, but there were certain matters that would leave them no choice but to spill each other’s blood in duels.

Nowadays, no one seems to care if they are, or are even perceived to be, honorable. Kerry is proposing the civilized equivalent of a duel, and is even giving T. Boone the advantage, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Pickens to pick up the guantlet. I think it’s fair to say that T. Boone will find a way to deflect Kerry.

Update: Well that was quick:

Rich Texas bastard T. Boone Pickens boasted that he would give $1 million to anyone who can disprove “even a single charge” leveled by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who he funded to the tune of $3 milion. Kerry offered to meet with Pickens and do so, with the million dollars going to veterans’ charities.
But now Pickens is reneging:

Pickens, who provided $3 million to bankroll the group during Kerry’s race against President Bush, responded by saying he won’t consider giving Kerry the reward unless he surrenders his combat films, additional military records and wartime journal.

In other words, Pickens was full of bravado when he made the offer in a keynote address in front of a bunch of friendly right wingers at an American Spectator dinner, but when Kerry took him up on it, he was a bit too cowardly to back it up:

No honor. No surprise.

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What a difference a few days makes

Friday, November 16, 2007

On the 13th, Harry Reid said that Democrats won’t approve more money for the Iraq war this year unless President Bush agrees to begin bringing troops home.

Today, they took a vote, and the bill lost, 53 in favor and 47 against, because of course Harry Reid would never think of forcing the Republicans to actually filibuster. (Democrats unable to bring troops home):

Frustrated by Republican roadblocks, Democrats now plan to sit on President Bush’s $196 billion request for war spending until next year — pushing the Pentagon toward an accounting nightmare and deepening their conflict with the White House on the war.

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Now, Democratic leaders say they won’t send President Bush a war spending bill this year. They calculate the military has enough money to run through mid-February.

When will the Democrats learn that you don’t play chicken if everyone knows you’ll be the first to chicken out. Now they are practically announcing that they will wait until next year to cave. Do they really think Bush cares? He knows he’ll get his money, along with another blank check.

In the real world, when someone is frustrated by a road block, the only effective response is to get rid of the road block. That sort of thing never occurs to the Democrats.

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No telecom immunity for the moment

Friday, November 16, 2007

The Democrats in the Judiciary Committee have sent a FISA bill to the floor without telecom immunity. Details are a little unclear. It looks like after a series of machinations, which included a vote in which the Democrats failed to strip the provision from the bill, it somehow got sent to the floor without the provision (no I don’t understand this either), where proponents will have to add it back in as a stand alone amendment. That means there will, if it survives a filibuster (if the Democrats have the guts to mount one) be an up or down vote on what Arlen Specter now wants to turn into a giveaway, where we taxpayers would indemnify the telecoms for spying on us. So it will be impossible for the Republicans to claim that the vote is about protecting the American people from terrorists. Okay, they’ll do it anyway, but even the media might have a hard time swallowing that line. Okay, no it won’t, but the American people probably won’t fall for it.

Apparently, Harry Reid has the option of bringing up the bill that came out of the Intelligence Committee, which includes a telecom immunity provision. He has indicated through a spokesman that he’s not inclined to do that, but who knows.

In any event, and for now at least, the Democrats appear to have done something right.

(This post was written on the 15th, but I must have forgotten to push the “publish” button).

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One more reason why Congress is held in contempt

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Time to confess to error. A while back I reported that the Congress had filed contempt charges against Harriet Meiers and Joshua Bolton. I erred. In fact, the Judiciary Committee had merely filed the charge with the full House. I was wrong about something else:

A criminal contempt charge must be enforced by a U.S. Attorney. Bush has already mandated that this will not take place. The charges will languish, and Congress will do nothing.

I was wrong about this because Congress is not going to give Bush the chance to demonstrate its impotence. The leadership has decided to take the bull by the horns and demonstrate that fact all on its own:

House Democrats have postponed a vote until December on contempt resolutions against White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, delaying for now any constitutional showdown with the White House over the president’s power to resist congressional subpoenas.

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has been pushing for the contempt vote, arguing that the White House must be held accountable for ignoring subpoenas issued by his panel as part of the U.S. attorney firing scandal. Other top Democrats, including Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), have argued that the House should put off that fight while debates over Iraq funding and electronic eavesdropping dominate the floor. The contempt vote had been tentatively scheduled for Friday before Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) informed his colleagues that it was being delayed.

There will, of course, always be something more pressing than establishing that Congress is a co-equal branch. After all, when you are up against the most unpopular president in American history, you have to be careful. There is no reason to try to rein in an abuse of power of one sort while trying to limit other abuses of power. You might reinforce your own message and no Democrat would want to do that.

Maybe the strategy is to wait until we get a Democratic president, who won’t stand in the way of a prosecution. I doubt it, though. If the Democrats take the White House, and don’t underestimate their chances of blowing it, or of the Republicans chances to steal it, they will no doubt decide that we must get all this stuff behind us. No truth commissions in this country.

I will venture a prediction: Miers will never testify and she will never see the inside of a cell.

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Presidential politics summarized

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

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Heard this before

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that Democrats won’t approve more money for the Iraq war this year unless President Bush agrees to begin bringing troops home.

By the end of the week, the House and Senate planned to vote on a $50 billion measure for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill would require Bush to initiate troop withdrawals immediately with the goal of ending combat by December 2008.

If Bush vetoes the bill, “then the president won’t get his $50 billion,” Reid, D-Nev., told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made a similar statement last week in a closed-door caucus meeting.

At the very most, they will find a way to make it look as though they withheld the funds, while providing Bush a loophole big enough to drive a truck through to take the money anyway, thereby continuing this disastrous war and making themselves, once again, look weak and ineffectual.

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Remind me again. Who won the election?

Monday, November 12, 2007

Just think. A year ago a new day was dawning. Who would have thought then that we had elected a Congress that would give us two more years of Republican governance?

Last Thursday, Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid said that they would jettison the renewable energy provisions in both the House and Senate versions of the 2007 energy bill in the interest of passing a bill before the Thanksgiving recess begins on November 17.

Republicans have been holding up action on the bill for months now, refusing to participate in conference committee meetings to reconcile the House and Senate versions. The big sticking points for Republicans have been support for renewable energy and ending billions of dollars in subsidies for oil companies. Democrats would like to use the oil subsidy money to support solar and wind power.

Both Pelosi and Reid seem to think that passing anything, no matter how terrible, is better than passing nothing. The third alternative, forcing the Republicans to actually put up or shut up never crosses their minds. As to the refusal of the Republicans to participate in conference committees, since when does that prevent the Democrats from going forward? When the Republicans were in charge they refused to let the Democrats participate on those very same committees, and their legislation just rolled on through. And back in those days it only took 51 votes to get something through the Senate. Nowadays, it takes 60 votes, except when you want to confirm an Attorney General who can’t find his way clear to condemn torture.

In the entire time they were in the minority, the Democrats stopped one thing: the destruction of Social Security. And they wouldn’t have done that if they had not gotten incredible pressure from the grassroots. We all remember that Joe Lieberman was ready to destroy the program, and the rest of them would doubtless have followed but for the heroic efforts of people like Josh Marshall. By contrast, the Republicans have gotten pretty much everything they have wanted since the supposedly lost the election.

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Ben Stein: subprime borrowers profited from the mortgage mess

Sunday, November 11, 2007

If memory serves, Ben Stein, who appears to be a semi-Renaissance man, in that he is mediocre in a number of professions, opined that the credit crisis was no crisis at all. (I can’t find a link, as I write this the Times search server tells me that it is temporarily unavailable. In today’s Times he appears to recognize that we have a problem, but points out that there’s a silver lining: if so many people lost big money on these deals, it stands to reason that someone made money off those suckers, so in a way it all evens out. At least that appears to be what he’s saying.

He states:

Someone sold these debt instruments to these huge banks and investment banks. The someone might have been a borrower who was not qualified, or another player in the financial field like a hedge fund or a mortgage originator.
…

There are gainers somewhere, and it sure looks as if some home borrowers are in that group. Obviously, with hindsight, we can see that the lenders’ risk premium in fees and interest rates should have been even higher than it was.

I’m not a lawyer, writer, actor and economist, but I don’t need to be all those things to see that there’s something not quite right here. Stein appears to be saying that the borrowers made out like bandits because they were such poor risks that they should have paid even more for the loans in both interest rates and up front fees than they did. They got those mortgages cheap friends, and the fact that they bought a one way ticket to financial ruin is, apparently, totally beside the point. The borrowers are the only group of people that he specifically singles out as having profited from this mess, although he does, at least recognize that the banks may have bought the securities from someone else.

I’ll grant him that there were probably a lot of borrowers that should not have gotten loans, but it is a stretch to say that the typical subprime borrower has somehow bilked the banks who bought the securities peddled by the middlemen who got those borrowers to pay large upfront costs to get mortgages at high interest rates on which they were doomed to default on homes that would likely fall in value thus leaving them with nothing but foreclosed homes and a mountain of debt. They are not ahead of the game.

There are, of course, lots of people who are very much ahead of the game, including folks like Angelo Mosilo, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/business/11angelo.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print who Stein can read about in the very issue of the Times in which he suggests that it is mostly borrowers who soaked all that money from the banks. It was the folks who conned both borrowers and bankers who made all the money. They made real money, not hypothetical gains on real estate that was sure to keep rising in value, except for the unfortunate fact that it was impossible for that to happen. The corporations for which they worked may now be bankrupt, but the millions they took away while the con was running well have now, for the most part, been safely parked elsewhere, and it was all somewhat perfectly legal. In Mosilo’s case, Countrywide is still around, and he appears to believe he can save it, but he took almost $500 million out of it in the past few years, and he was selling stock big time in the months before it tanked. No matter what happens to Countrywide, he’ll be able to keep buying gold Rolls Royces.

Stein is a Republican, so he must be forgiven for his inability to see the obvious. Only a Republican could claim that the borrowers have gained from the subprime mess at the expense of the banks, while all but ignoring the folks who created and profited from this debacle, people who walked away with millions in cold, hard cash.

By the way, I recognize that it would not be impossible to get anecdotal evidence of borrowers who actually did well with a subprime mortgage. There are exceptions to every rule. Stein implies, without outright saying, that the exceptions are the rule.

Putting aside all that, how is it the case that a loss on one side implies a correlative gain on the other, at least as far as the borrowers and the holders of the securities are concerned? The securities are of little value because it is now clear that the real property that was security for that debt is not worth what everyone “thought” it was worth. The bank’s securities have decreased in value because the borrower’s real estate has decreased in value. Both sides are losers. It’s true that the borrowers got cash to buy those houses, but that cash went to the seller, and the borrowers can’t get it back unless and until home prices recover before they lose everything to foreclosure or bankruptcy. The winners in that picture (again, ignoring the middlemen) are the sellers of the houses, not the buyers, because the money went to them, and they get to keep it.

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