A man who was attacked by a black bear while walking his dogs survived only after crushing the creature’s skull with a stick.
Jim West needed 60 stitches on his head (picture above) and body to close wounds from the terrifying attack. Click on link below for full story
‘Bring it on, sweetie’: Man kills bear with stick (and he’s got the scars to prove it) | Mail Online
One had the sense this week that our entire political class is playing Frisbee on the edge of a precipice, that no one is being serious enough, honest enough, that it’s all too revved, too intense, and yet too shallow.
As to what they will do about the crisis, Mr. Obama will raise taxes on the rich and help us weatherize our homes, while Mr. McCain favors “energy independence” and buying up mortgages. On the causes of the crisis they spoke of insufficient regulation, or high spending.
But these were not the great causes. Neither party has clean hands. Or rather, both parties have dirty hands. Here is the truth, spoken by the increasingly impressive Sen. Tom Coburn: “The root of the problem is political greed in Congress. Members . . . from both parties wanted short-term political credit for promoting homeownership even though they were putting our entire economy at risk by encouraging people to buy homes they couldn’t afford. Then, instead of conducting thorough oversight and correcting obvious problems with unstable entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, members of Congress chose to . . . distract themselves with unprecedented amounts of pork-barrel spending.” That is the truth. Declarations – WSJ.com
While it doesn’t go into Credit Default Swaps, this PowerPoint cartoon does follow our mortgage meltdown, from after home-ownership was mandated on the Lenders by the Federal Government. This explains how the creative financial instruments tried to turn this lemon into lemonade, which we are all drowning in now. Click on the link. You’ll need PowerPoint o view it. Or download and install the free PowerPoint viewer from Microsoft. Thanks to Barbara Herwald mortgagemessexplained
Saturday Night Live” ran a spoof of the financial crisis that skewered Democrats like House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank and liberal contributors Herbert and Marion Sandler, who sold toxic-waste-filled Golden West to Wachovia Bank for $24 billion. Kind of surprising, but not for long. The tape of the broadcast disappeared from NBC’s Web site and was replaced with another that omitted the references to Mr. Frank and the Sandlers. Evidently NBC and its parent, General Electric, don’t want people to hear speech that attacks liberals.
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The government will be much more active in economic management (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Democrat). Government activism will provide support to corporations, banks and business and will be used to shore up the stable conditions they need to thrive (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Republican). Tax revenues from business activities will pay for progressive but business-friendly causes — investments in green technology, health care reform, infrastructure spending, education reform and scientific research.
If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.
After a liberal era and then a conservative era, we’re getting a glimpse of what comes next.
Op-Ed Columnist – The Establishment Lives! – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com
ANY good tradesman will tell you the importance of the bits of a house that you cannot see. Never mind the new kitchen: what about the rafters, the wiring and the pipes? So it is with financial markets. The stockmarkets are the most visible: as they soar or swoon, the headline-writers get to work. The money markets, however, are the plumbing of the system. Normally, they function efficiently and unseen, allowing investment institutions, companies and banks to lend and borrow trillions of dollars for up to a year at a time. They are only noticed when they go wrong. And, like plumbing, when they do get blocked, they make an almighty stink.
So it is safe to say that, until the money markets behave more normally, the financial crisis will not be over. And until the financial crisis is over, the global economy may not recover. So today the Fed moved to guarantee Commercial Paper and European Finance Ministers met in Emergency session to free up the plumbing. Click on the Economist link for a clear explanation of the plumbing of the Financial world.
Blockages in the money markets | Blocked pipes | The Economist
Keep track of the Financial Playoffs with this handy Ladder. Click picture to enlarge. Thanks to Phillip Marshall
First, as commenter That Anonymous Dude puts it, “MTM is the worst form of accounting, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Second, investors and regulators and reporters and corporate executives need to learn not to take any financial reporting numbers, whether marked-to-market or not, at face value. The health of a bank or any corporation can never be adequately measured by a single bottom-line number. Understanding the assumptions and uncertainties inherent in accounting numbers is crucial to understanding how to use them.
Third, Congress really ought to stay out of this. The last time the people on Capitol Hill seriously messed with accounting standards was with stock options in 1994. In the process they ruined America. As some guy wrote in Fortune a few years ago:
[W]hat it came down to in 1994 was that the powers that be in American economic life decided that dishonesty in the service of prosperity was no vice. In doing so, they may have paved the path for the outrages that followed. “Once CEOs demonstrated their political power to, in effect, roll the FASB and the SEC, they may have felt empowered to do a lot of other things too,” says Warren Buffett, a lonely voice in opposition to the options steamroller back then
Obama’s lone vehicle also is a green machine, a 2008 Ford Escape hybrid. He bought it last year to replace the family’s Chrysler 300C, a Hemi-powered sedan. Obama ditched the 300C, once 50 Cent’s preferred ride, after taking heat for driving a guzzler while haranguing Detroit about building more fuel-efficient cars.
We knew about Palin’s government-provided Suburban, a hockey-mom prerequisite. Her SUV ownership reminds us that for some ever-growing families, a seven-passenger car is truly the most efficient means of transport. Plus, it’s big honkin’ V8 is great for hauling snowmachines and a quick getaway during a Russian attack. It’s also surprising that such a strong proponent of offshore drilling drives a car that can get better gas mileage than a Prius. Continue reading “What the Candidates Drive”