I shall first note the irony of backalley blogging on the front page of a blog.  There, that’s done.

Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.

Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.

Here in NYC the sun has gone down.  That’s the time to prowl.

Ever watch the old teevee show Bewitched?  All those times Samantha would do her magic and poor Gladys Kravitz or Larry or whoever witnessed these feats would have the most puzzled odd look on their faces, reality had shifted for them and they were stunned (well except for Gladys, who had her suspicions!).  And then either Samantha or Darren would cook up the most unbelievable alternative narrative to explain what had happened, it would be accepted, and normality would resume.

The audience of course was in on the joke, and we all knew WE’D never fall for that lame explanation.

From Market Watch:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that American International Group Inc. … agreed to freeze payments under its former chief executive’s contract. Cuomo sent a letter to current CEO Edward Liddy confirming that AIG will freeze any payments under ex-CEO Martin Sullivan’s $19 million contract, and will not make payments out of $600 million in compensation and bonus pools of AIG’s financial products subsidiary. Cuomo said that taxpayers should be repaid before any executives and that new executive pay structures should eliminate improper incentives

Not sure that freezing means the CEO will never get any money, and it is also unclear to me whether all of the executives at AIG will have their bonuses frozen as well.

Finally, I question what it means to say “taxpayers should be repaid” — at this point the bailout plan is so murky, the phrase seems meaningless to me.  Will our taxes go down?  Will we all get checks in the mail?

What a circus.  Send in the clowns.  Oh … don’t bother.  They’re here.

From one of my favorite NOLA bloggers, adrastos, a Bob Grant rant:

All the nuts in the US and A seem to be commenting on the 2008 election and some of them have talk radio shows. My new favorite winger weirdness comes from veteran yakker Bob Grant:

“[W]hat is that flag that Obama’s been standing in front of that looks like an American flag, but instead of having the field of 50 stars representing the 50 states, there’s a circle?” He then said: “Is the circle the ‘O’ for Obama? Is that what it is?” Grant later said: “[D]id you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the ‘O’ flag. And that’s what that ‘O’ is. That’s what that ‘O’ is. Just like he did with the plane he was using. He had the flag painted over, and the ‘O’ for Obama. Now, these are symptom — these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate — a dictator.” ‘

Check out the flag and the rest of the post; I don’t want to spoil this.

Open thread is now … OPEN!  

I was happy to see this over at Huffington Post:

At a John McCain rally in Woodbridge, Virginia, three people handed out “Obama for Change” bumper stickers with the Communist sickle and hammer and the Islamic crescent, saying Obama was a socialist with ties to radical Islam. Several moderate McCain supporters, Muslim and Christian alike, struck back – relentlessly bombarding the group distributing the flyers until they left the premises.

I will never understand how these rational folks could want to vote for McCain, but I applaud their action.  This is beyond electoral politics, I think.  The kind of hate speech and activity we’ve been seeing crawl out of the woodwork since the McCain/Palin campaign has decided to go negative isn’t good for anyone, right or left.

Here’s the video:

I’m sure most of you remember Judy Miller.  You know, the New York Times reporter who carried water for the Republicans in the lead-up to the Iraq War?  The good friend of the criminal Scooter Libby, who sent her cute little notes about aspens turning color in the fall?

Well now Judy has found a home that suits her to a “T”!  I’m so happy for her.

Judy is joining Fox News!

Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox’s Web site. “She has a very impressive resume,” says Senior Vice President John Moody. “We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped. It’s certainly something she’s going to be associated with for all time, and there’s not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. . . . She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for.”

Yes, there have been so many reporters who have helped turn the country towards war with a sovereign nation that did not attack us.

Judy Miller and Fox News:  A Perfect Fit.

So Medicaid is now in trouble, according to this Reuter’s article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Spending on the Medicaid health program for the poor is on a path to grow at a much higher rate than the overall U.S. economy in the next 10 years, officials said on Friday.

Spending on Medicaid benefits will increase 7.3 percent from 2007 to 2008, reaching $339 billion, and will expand at an annual average of 7.9 percent over the next decade, hitting $674 billion by 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a report.

Over that same time span, the projected rate of growth for the overall economy is 4.8 percent, the report stated.

The report’s release comes at a time of growing worry over the fact that health spending has become an increasing burden on individual Americans, businesses and governments.

And what does our esteemed Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Bush-appointed Michael Leavitt, have to say about this?

“This report should serve as an urgent reminder that the current path of Medicaid spending is unsustainable for both federal and state governments,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said in a statement.

“If nothing is done to rein in these costs, access to health care for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens could be threatened.”

Let’s take a look at Mr. Leavitt, who is so concerned about the health of poor people.

Kai, over at Zuky, has a post up, Time to Throw the Traders Out the Temple (Part 1) wherein he opines about our most recent economic catastrophe:

Every action that the US government is currently undertaking to supposedly “rescue” our economy has more theatrical effect than structural impact. The bailouts, the debt buyouts, the interest rate cuts, all appear designed to artificially prop up certain nosediving assets and mildly encourage a loosening of credit markets without substantially addressing or mitigating the immediate or eventual social costs of financial meltdown.

……

Most trades these days don’t even involve stocks or bonds, but derivatives, which are contracts establishing conditions and rules for the buying and/or selling of stocks, bonds, or other derivatives. For example, a common derivative would be a stock option; which, say, gives me the right to buy GimongoCorp stock at $5 per share by a certain date; and if GimongoCorp stock hits $10 per share by that date, I get to double my money by executing the option. But here’s where it starts getting funky: the option contract itself can be assigned a current dollar value according to market conditions (using a tricky little piece of calculus known as the Black-Scholes model) and traded on that basis. So for the most part, investment banks have ended up trading not merely stocks and bonds but derivatives of derivatives of derivatives of…and so on. The result is an impenetrable layer of multi-dimensional mathematical abstraction between the allocation of physical resources (i.e. actual societal investment) and the free-market mechanisms which steer that allocation, the proverbial invisible hand.

…….

The most tangible asset that a US citizen can “own” is a plot of land with a house on it. The single biggest historical driver in the accumulation of US wealth has been the theft, redistribution, and subsequent inheritance of real estate. From plantations to Indian reservations, from the Homestead Act to post-Civil War ethnic cleansings, from Jim Crow redlining to the covert racism of modern mortgage practices, the dominant culture has worked tirelessly to build multi-generational economic structures that enrich and advantage white communities while obstructing and disrupting the accumulation of wealth by communities of color. I don’t have to explain to readers here how African Americans and Native Americans and other people of color have waged long and bloody battles to knock down many obstacles. The Fair Housing Act, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and the Community Reinvestment Act all marked legal victories in anti-racist struggle; yet we all know that it takes more than legislation to reform centuries of racist cultural practice. Nevertheless, over the years many people of color succeeded in beating the odds, managing to acquire and defend real estate holdings, building thriving families and communities in largely hostile environments.

Open Thread Away!

Old family story.  My mother would never admit she was wrong about anything while we kids were growing up … with six children and little money, I guess she felt she had to be stronger than human or everything would fall apart.

Anyway, one day we were getting out our cereal for breakfast and my sister says, “Ma, this milk is spoiled!”

For some reason my mother didn’t want to hear that.

So she walked over to the table, drank some of the milk right out of the carton and proclaimed immediately “Sweet as sugar!”

A split second later the milk registered on her taste buds and she exclaimed “Sour as hell!”

It became a family joke, of course, used on many different occasions.

I once heard a woman say that having her purse stolen felt like being violated … not rape, but in the same vein.  Now with the giant handbags women wear in New York City, I’d say it’s more like having your car stolen.

I haven’t checked my 401(k) statement yet – I was going to, but I forgot my password.  It’s probably a lot less than it was.

When I first read this the other day, the news had not been confirmed.

Well now it has been confirmed.

Courtesy of Raw Story, which linked to Business and Media Institute:

While former Lehman CEO Richard Fuld was testifying before the House Oversight Committee Oct. 6, CNBC reported he had been punched in the face at the Lehman Brothers gym after it was announced the firm was going bankrupt. CNBC and Vanity Fair contributor Vicki Ward said Fuld was attacked at the gym on a Sunday following the bankruptcy.

“Frankly, I sat there and listened and I’m with the guy who apparently, the day before Barclays announced they were coming in and Lehman had already filed for bankruptcy, went over to him in the gym and punched him because that’s how I feel when I, you know, when I watched that,” Ward said on the Oct. 6 “Power Lunch.” “I didn’t think he was contrite at all, I thought he was arrogant.”

…

“From two very senior sources – one incredibly senior source – that he went to the gym after … Lehman was announced as going under. He was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold. And frankly after having watched this, I’d have done the same too.”

Seems like this is the only “accountability” moment I’ve seen during this misAdministration.

Of course Fuld no doubt has an excellent health care along with his golden parachute.

Figured I’d check out the NOLA blogs today.  They’ve already been through what the rest of us are now facing, so they have crediblity imo.

From Your Right Hand Thief oyster gives a sense of proportion to the robbery going on in our economy in his post entitled “We iz baelded out yet? linking to a couple of other great NOLA blogs:

Dow falls 800 points, below 10,000 (before recovering.  Forgotston has some questions.

Some good emails are making the rounds.

Here’s one I got:

If you had purchased $1,000 of AIG stock one year ago, you would have $42 left. With Lehman, you would have $6.60 left. With Fannie or Freddie, you would have less than $5 left. But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all ofthe beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have had $214. Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. It’s called the 401-Keg….

Cheers.

As the title says, this is an open thread.

I found it surreal that so many people made a point of saying that Sarah Palin’s “performance” in the debate last night was all right, she didn’t make any big gaffes, etc.

What have we come to that it boils down to “performance,” in the literal theatrical sense of the word?

The problem is, to me, that both McCain and Palin and the Republican machine are left only with lies, trying to cover that up with “performance”  — and in the meantime our Democratic nominees have no one to really debate with.

What it would have been like had there been a real challenge of ideas?  I can hardly imagine it, but I can enough to know that I’d have liked to see both Obama and Biden have to state their case, in specifics, as to why they were the better choice.

At this point, they are the only choice.  And the US is not the better for that.

No one brought up Katrina or the over 300 people still missing from Hurricane Ike, or how folks are coping with the floods recently deluging Iowa .  No one brought up the poor.  No one brought up immigration.  And that’s just a few examples.  They couldn’t … the entire debates and campaigns now are directed to the desirable “undecided voter.”

I understand that.  I understand that’s politics.  But there are consequences to this kind of politics.