ARM Reset Schedule

Bonddad had a great post the other day on how long to expect the mortgage crisis to last. He summed it up with this graph from the Credit Suisse report:


It's going to be a long year for a lot of folks. I'm happy to see Bush is at least discussing what to do for those affected, which probably says a little sumpin' about just how big of a threat this problem really is.

Iraq

The surge has increased the number of US held captives in Iraq since February from 16,000 to 24,500. Juan Cole graphed the stats from the reporting NYT article to show us who the bad guys are:



Assuming that the ratio of those we've captured in Iraq can be applied to represent those we're actually fighting there, the data says a lot about the al-Qaeda-in-Iraq sleight of hand Bush has been pulling. To hear him speak, you'd think Iraq was on the verge of falling to al-Qaeda. And, since raising the specter of al-Qaeda in Iraq does much to keep the loyal base supportive of his war, I don't expect him to start telling us the truth anytime soon.

Perhaps it sounded cynical to say at the time but I thought it was pretty predictable that al-Qaeda would not be compatible with Iraq. The so-called al-Qaeda in Iraq share no ideological alliance with the Sunni, the Shia, or the Kurds. They popped up like opportunists in Anbar and Diyala to take advantage of the chaos until they overstepped and earned the wrath of the sheiks. The US happily parleyed that into success but it was sort of an inevitable success. Don't get me wrong -- I couldn't be happier to see a bunch of psychopaths meet defeat. And certainly I am delighted that the military has found a way to work with the Sunni sheiks. I just don't understand how people can extrapolate the victory in Anbar and Diyala to mean that the surge is "working". It's kind of like performing a tonsilectomy on a cancer patient. Sure, the tonsils are no longer inflamed but that really wasn't the primary threat.

So, IS the surge working? I have no idea. I don't trust that the news media has the whole story and I sure as hell don't think the Bush administration would tell us the truth even if we put electrodes on their testicals and waterboarded them for 12 straight hours. It kinda sounds like the troops are achieving some military results wherever they've been placed. Whether they're playing whack-a-mole again, I do not know. Whether the military achievements will have any effect at all on the political scheme, I am still extremely doubtful. For one thing, they can't keep up the 'surge' indefinitely (an undeniable fact). If Bush plans to compliment the surge with the removal of Maliki from power (replacing him with Allawi?), then he's only prolonging the inevitable. That desperate move might be the only one left on the board but I find it difficult to believe it's going to create victory in Iraq.

"This Part Of The World"

Fascinating.

Since The Decider repeated the phrase 3 times in the space of 3 sentences, I have to believe it was deliberate. The intent does seem to be to distance himself (and all of us, really) from NOLA, as if it's some remote third world country's problem instead of America's.

rePUBLICan Restroooms Are So Gay

On the heels of the whole Bob "Big black men forced me to be gay " Allen, another Republican has been caught red... er, handed... trolling for sex with men in a public restroom. Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) is this month's anti-gay gay outing (although the actual incident happened in June).

I feel sad for people who feel compelled to hide who they are at the core, leading lives of self-loathing and desperation within the party of anti-gay hysteria. On the other hand, being gay Republican is just a lifestyle choice. It doesn't have to be like this.

Gonzo Goes Home

AG Gonzales has resigned. Or was fired. Or resigned. Or...

It's amusing to hear the news clip of Bush inferring that Gonzo was the victim of politics. "His good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons." It's funny; I chuckle.

Now it's true that there are reasons I don't like Gonzales that don't actually merit his removal from office. But there are also other valid - very valid - reasons that he is unworthy of the office he has just exited.

Reasons I don't like him that do not actually merit his removal:

• His head is eternally stuck up George Bush's ass (their friendship spans back to Texas, where Gonzales helped Bush avoid a call for Jury Duty that would have revealed Bush's prior DUI). I think of Bush as the Michael Jackson of politics: he really, really needs someone to quit feeding the god complex and just start telling him the truth. "No, you cannot invite 9 year old boys to sleep in your bed." "No, you cannot subvert the constitution." Gonzo should have been that guy... He wasn't.
  
• He dismissed the Geneva convention as 'quaint' and essentially set the stage for all that transpired at Abu Ghraib, which set back our progress immeasurably during the time we were still seeking to capture Iraqi "heart and minds". Poor Colin Powell... the smartest man ever to be ignored in the Bush Administration.
  

Reasons I don't like him that also happen to be reasons he is not fit to serve the office of the AG.

• He has lied under oath... multiple times... and got caught. One might argue that lying under oath is all the rage in Washington these days, but YO - he's the freaking Attorney General. Death of Outrage, anyone? And if that's not bad enough, he lied about the abuses of the freaking Patriot Act. The same Patriot Act we just had to trust the government would never ever abuse and if the Patriot Act didn't get passed we were all gonna die and anyone who opposed it was a treasonous asshole.
• He attempted to pressure Ashcroft (while Ashcroft was in intensive care) to support illegal warrentless wiretapping against the advisement of, well, just about everybody else involved. When Bush removed Ashcroft for refusing to bless his unconstitutional activities, Gonzales stepped in as AG and did it himself.
  
• He abused the office of the AG, not just to make political appointments (which is not uncommon) but to ensure that specific political appointments supported very specific partisan political activities in key congressional districts. A distinction that seems lost on the Fox News crowd.

Bush's insistence - and Gonzales's, by proxy - that it's A-OK to piss on the constitution with good intentions is seriously wrong. It's wrong to claim power you were very deliberately not given. It's wrong for the servants of the highest offices in the land to break laws "for our own good." It's wrong to use a public office to help implement a Rovian plan to wreck havoc with our democratic processes. If ever the term "abuse of office" was meant to apply to anything, this is it. And it's wrong for the citizens of this country to excuse it just because the guy they voted for hired him.

Obama And The Forgotten City

Whether you like Obama or not, you have to admit that he's not afraid to put himself out there. Where other candidates spin vague, bland, "can't be used against me later" descriptions of opinions they may or may not hold tomorrow, Obama states not only his opinions but also his plans. I'm not sure why more people don't have a better appreciation for how rare and remarkable that is in this day of careful triangulation.

You can read Obama's plans for New Orleans or a number of other issues here (follow the site links).

I find it interesting that his latest position paper addresses the forgotten city of New Orleans. I suppose it could be an attempt to court the black vote (still overwhelmingly going to Hillary) but this is a topic that everyone -- and I do mean everyone -- has avoided for two years. I find it phenomenal that a whole American city sits in ruins with barely a mention. And not just any city, but some pretty important coastal real estate. Whether it can or should be saved may require some discussion... so why aren't we having one?

Football Mania!

My son's first year of junior tackle begins. After practicing two hours a day, four times a week, for four weeks, the Carlson Huskies had their first game yesterday -- alas, a loss. Grandma, UB1, and UB2 (number one in our hearts) came to cheer for them on what turned out to be a gorgeous, rainless afternoon.

I've been to all but one practice so far and except for quibbling (silently) with the head coach on a few of his choices (doesn't every parent silently quibble?) I have to say it's an extremely well run program and I'm thrilled for Ryan that he seems to be enjoying it so much.

I'll get some better pics once I discover what my daughters have done with my digital camera. The fuzzy shot above came from a cell phone cam.

Gooooooooooo Huskies!

Risk and Reward

Nouriel Roubini explains how the subprime meltdown is impacting the market.

I don't suppose the banking aspect of this will be any more deadly to the economy than the S&L scandal of the 80's. The bigger issue would seem to be a credit tightening since most of our real economic "growth" has been consumer driven by cheap, available money. When consumers can't buy that new flat screen for "no money down, no monthly payment," or when they lose the equity in their homes to draw against, I suspect they will decide they can do without.

Also, when big investors can no longer use massive amounts of debt leveraged against marginal assets to get rich quick, it's possible that the DOW - the Republican's sole measure of economic prosperity - might start to actually start to reflect its true value. I mean, have people really thought the market numbers this year are real? Do they actually believe there's been such an injection of value into the market that it justifies the 2000 point increase that took place between January and July? Doesn't that seem a little far fetched?

Not to confuse the issues, but one aspect of all this that makes me crazy is the way the deck has been stacked in favor of the investor class. Their rally cry is, "Regulation is bad! Government wants to kill growth!" And then at the first sign of trouble in the market their collective bottom lip begins to quiver and suddenly they're crying for a government bailout, Fed rate reduction, etc. In the ageless risk-reward paradigm, they expect to reap the reward while the taxpayers and consumers carry all of the risk. That's one of the reasons the bankruptcy reform legislation of 2005 really pissed me off... who didn't see this coming from a mile away? The financial community made a shit load of money by engaging in predatory lending that they knew to be risky. They fought every attempt at consumer protection against those lending practices. They further lobbied to ensure, via legislation, that when the party was over, the only one stuck picking up the tab would be the consumer. That's a nice way to rig the game, don't you think?

Shut Up and Sing, Ted

I hope everyone on the right who was oh so offended by the Dixie Chicks will be speaking up with the same intense outrage against Ted Nugent. Musicians should shut up and sing, right? In fact, I'm sure Bill O'Reilly will be hosting a record burning soon at a high school near you.



UPDATE:
Chicken Hawk Ted -- hysterical!

The Funniest Joke On TV: Bill O'Reilly

Seriously, folks... have you heard the one about the anti-Semitic hate site called Daily Kos? As it turns out, it isn't. Bah-duh-dum!

Bill O'Reilly got busted AGAIN for lying to his (apparently) willfully ignorant audience. Sadly, we here at Think, Dammit! aren't expecting to see a retraction from Mr. War-on-Christmas anytime soon. We'll settle for watching Keith Olbermann mock him instead.



As an aside, it's pretty funny to see the O'Reilly clip (in the link, above) where he appears to be insinuating that there's something nefarious about "hidden" comments. Clearly O'Reilly doesn't understand that hiding comments is how the website community self-polices against offensive commentary that occasionally gets posted via anonymous posters.

Then and Now

Dick Cheney now: Iraq war supporter.

Dick Cheney in 1994: Not so much.



Obviously 9/11 did not change the fact that Iraq was not 'winnable', nor did it swing the odds of the outcome of war in our favor. All it changed was the emotional reception to the idea of invasion, which is a very bad way to run a foreign policy.

Four years later, the argument for invading Iraq is being framed in the basic concept of risk vs reward, with Cheney saying 9/11 tipped the scales in favor of eliminating Saddam. I don't know how anyone can claim that the decision to invade was made analytically since there was never any serious consideration given to the risks. The outcome thus far has proven that, not the least of which is that an examination of the risks would have produced strategies for mitigation, which were apparently never even considered.

Check out Jon Stewart's discussion of the topic, below.

Padilla Verdict

Finally -- justice! Er, sort of. John Cole at Balloon Juice lays it out very nicely here in his round up.

I would only add that the way this case was handled - from beginning to end - should plant a few doubts in the minds of everyone who believes that our constitutional rights (and the laws that spring from them) are central to this democracy. When such laws become 'optional' based on the executive interpretation of how they should be implemented, we are truly fucked.

Obama on Pakistan

Obama is getting pummeled for insinuating that the Global War On Terra should maybe include, oh you know... fighting some terrorists. Not that it wasn't an interesting idea to invade Eye-rock and create some terrorists to fight there, but let's be honest: those terrorists seem more like your garden variety "I hate America!" regional opportunists than the well funded international al-Qaeda machine probably lurking in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

It seems Obama would like to go after the big dogs, the ones who aren't content with picking off the locals in western Iraq. He'd like to net the ones who aim to kill Americans in big, symbolic gestures of religious insanity. Unfortunately, Pakistan took offense. And to that I say, so what?

Let's offend the House of Saud next.

Why People Powered Politics Matters

Because it's about people.

Demonizing The Blogopshere

It's fascinating to me, this suddenly intense effort by some to demonize the left side of the blogosphere. If you believe them -- if you've never actually spent any time reading blogs, or if you've never read a web site like Daily Kos -- then you'd think that people like me are dangerously far left. Why, you'd think I was downright subversive! You might, in fact, believe that there is some ring leader... some organizing, unifying force that is determined to shove (shove, I say!) the far left down America's throat. Against America's will, of course.

Except for the fact that the blogosphere is perhaps the only pure ideological entity in politics today. It's organic, sprung up from a groundswell of previously untapped human participation. It's also free form... there is no 'leader'. If Kos died tomorrow (and believe me, infamous bloggers get sick and die with cruel regularity) the people would shift to other forums without missing a beat.

The blogopshere is extremely effective in its ability to spread ideas and drive discussion from the bottom up, across the country, almost instantaneously. Although there are some popular right wing blogs, it's definitely a realm for the left -- the regular talk radio/Fox News tv crowd doesn't appear too interested in logging on. And it's growing, daily, hourly, by reader and by writer.

The blogosphere is a dangerous place if the idea of people powered politics scares you or if a shift in the power paradigm means you stand to lose whatever power position you've managed to carve out for yourself. The idea of normal, tax paying, folksy people actually paying attention to politics is not what our current political institution desires. They count on us all wandering around like ignorant sheep, popping our heads up every 4 years to cast a vote based on whether we support abortion or not.

So whether it's the DLC or the GOP or some pundit bloviating on your tv, participatory politics scares the fuck out of the establishment and don't for a minute believe there's anything more to the demonization of the blogosphere than that.

Pigs Fly, Hell Freezes Over

And I am in near perfect agreement with Newt Gringrich.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday the Bush administration is waging a "phony war" on terrorism, warning that the country is losing ground against the kind of Islamic radicals who attacked the country on Sept. 11, 2001.

A more effective approach, said Gingrich, would begin with a national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil and some of the regimes that petro-dollars support.

None of you should believe we are winning this war. There is no evidence that we are winning this war," the ex-Georgian told a group of about 300 students attending a conference for collegiate conservatives.

Read the whole thing.

The Great Orange Satan

RE: public enemy #1: The Daily Kos.

Fox News's Bill O'Reilly seems to take criticism very personally -- right up until the point where he attempts to convince the audience that his enemies are also, of course, their enemies. It's an interesting tactic. He did it first with Media Matters and now he's done it again with The Daily Kos. More on Media Matters at another time... today let's take a look at his persistent attack on Kos (examples here, here, and here).

I was reading and posting comments on The Daily Kos (and blogs in general) back when O'Reilly was too busy trying to bang Andrea Mackris to notice that the Great Orange Satan existed.

It was a little different back then, a smaller community. My Kos id is #36,652 and that was because I read it for a whole year before joining... currently there are probably closer to 200,000 participants registered. The organic, spontaneous grassroots nature of it was stunning, and while there were already a zillion blogs on the internet by the time I found it, none of them provided the opportunity for discourse that Kos did. The Daily Kos gave a forum to all of us with something to say and a desire to be heard. It also provided ideological shelter for those whose liberal outlook was sneered at and ridiculed by those who thought sneering and ridiculing liberals made them one of the cool kids.

In addition to Kos's "front page" posts, registered users could submit their own essays in the form of "diaries" that were read, rated, and commented on by the rest of the user community. The first thing I noticed about dKos is that there are some damn fine writers out there who don't have the benefit of a syndicated column or op ed slot. The second thing I noticed about dKos is that it resides under a big fucking tent. Oh that's right... read it and weep, people... Democrats as a group are about as diverse as it gets. You gotchyer commies, you gotchyer blue dogs, you gotchyer libs, you gotchyer progressives, you gotchyer centrists, you gotchyer moderates, you gotchyer Reagan Democrats, you gotchyer hippies, you gotchyer single issue voters, you gotchyer my-daddy-raised-me-this-way Dems, you gotchyer converts, you gotchyer militants, you gotchyer gays, you gotchyer fems, you gotchyer Jesus freaks... you name it, it posts on Daily Kos. Naturally it had me at hello.

But eventually - in my opinion - the community got too big. It fought amongst itself a lot. Not a single comment could be posted without a countervailing opinion, usually spawning a crop of counter-countervailing opinions, until it was like reading white noise. Very thoughtful and well researched diaries would scroll off the list after 30 minutes, lost forever in archive oblivion without due love or attention. I started to seek out less chaotic corners of the blogosphere (eventually creating my own).

Just before I departed, the size and raucous energy of the Daily Kos began to draw the attention of Dem politicos who didn't know quite what to do with it. They wanted to harness the energy for political gain so they began to post their own occasional diaries. Depending on the issue or the tone, our congressmen quickly discovered that the Daily Kos could not be domesticated. Kossacks were just as likely to bite them as they were to praise them. For every vocal Pelosi lover there exists his perfect evil twin: the vocal Pelosi hater. Whichever was there to receive them that day was only a matter of luck and timing. Also, the Daily Kos had long since ceased to be under the control of its creator, Kos, so trying to solicit his sponsorship is a worthless endeavor. The Daily Kos is an unmoldable entity.

Fortunately for the Kossacks there are a few relatively unifying topics, one of them being the sad state of our corporate media. And there Bill O'Reilly really shines, for nothing brings together a pack of furiously feuding Kos posters faster than an O'Reilly segment on Youtube. So, in a way, when O'Reilly calls the Daily Kos a hate site he is speaking the truth... for surely few anywhere are hated more than Bill O'Reilly.

What I have found around the intertubes is that Democrats, or at least the Daily Kos variety of them, have a wicked, free-wheeling sense of humor in comparison to their dull, robotic Red State brothers. Snark abounds, as do photoshopped pics, as does satire, and some of it ain't very nice. Humor is, after all, in they eye of the beholder. All Kossacks aren't particularly nice, either, and there are plenty who I don't like or agree with. Since there are about 200,000 who are registered to post, it would be a little difficult to police everything everyone says. And quite frankly, I think it would be criminal to try.

Because the point of it all is this: We in America are told from birth that it's our duty to participate in this democracy but, in reality, all our democracy wants from us is our money and our vote. Our politicians don't want to hear what we have to say. They want to speak for us without the burden of having to listen to us. But now -- for the first time in history -- we have a voice. The internet has proved to be a great equalizer, for not only does it enable our peasant voices to be heard, but it projects them to an audience the size of which we never could have imagined. A comment posted by me on Daily Kos -- me --the middle aged, middle class, anonymous mom from the Midwest, userid #36,652 -- can be read by 500,000 people in the course of a day, including politicians, newsmakers, newsbreakers, and John Doe from Peoria.

So let O'Reilly whine on about a few uncensored comments on the Daily Kos. Let Michelle Malkin tell her audience that the whole site is "sewage". I suspect it's closer to the truth to say that O'Reilly can't stand the sound of anyone's voice but his own. And not for lack of trying, the Republicans have not been able to duplicate the site's success. My personal theory is that the vast majority of Republicans come in two flavors these days: those who like to tell others how to think and those who like to be told how to think. Two-way conversation isn't even on the menu, hence the popularity of the one-sided conversational forum offered by popular Republican TV and radio shows.



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Gratuitous O'Reilly links:

My all time favorite, the humorously detailed sexual harassassment complaint against Mr Falafel himself. Ms Mackris taped and transcribed his phone calls for way more entertainment than Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinski ever provided.

O'Reilly the propaganda pimp.

O'Reilly calling the kettle black.

You Knew I Couldn't Stay Away

I'm back early. Not full steam, of course, and I did manage to stay away for two months. Cut me some slack, will ya?