born live love die

The crowds that turn out to see the candidates are markedly different.

Ms. Palin’s   could be Woodstocks, too, though Woodstocks that are attended by hollering home-schoolers, hockey moms and heavy-metal heads.

There are more children on parents’ shoulders at Democratic rallies, more large young families together at the Republican events, many wearing matching clothing (often with anti-abortion-themed messages).

Heavy metal bands and families in matching clothing.  Okay, Eddy, I get it:

Take, God, my eyes.*

———-

*Platespeak translation

Colbert:

I don’t count polls, I count lawn signs.  So get ready for President Remax.

Josh is having a problem:

Why is Sarah Palin referring to Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) as “Uncle Barney Frank”?

Someone help me with this.

Because Barney Frank is gay, she is implying that he is a pedophile.  What ever the Republicans are this season, they always transparent when it comes to personal attacks.  They would say that he has sexual relations with his dog if they was a one word code that they could use to say it.

You knew the Paultards were racist.

Wonkette has the pictures.

People keep talking about McCain like a secular saint.

McCain’s problem is that he is more fecular than secular.

Alisa Rosenberg was a narcissistic twit.  Better known as Ayn Rand, she espoused a cotton headed belief called, aw, hell, who cares what it was called.  She was a selfish bitch.

Alan Greenspan was one of her acolytes.  He used to hang around her apartment in New York City.  He was at her funeral in 1982 which featured a 6 foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign.

Greenspan takedown at TPM:

Let’s set the stage. Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the rest of the big banks are run by hotshot Ivy League business school types. These are bright, hard working ambitious people who want to make lots and lots of money.

The executives at these banks are sitting on enormous piles of money that they can get access to as a result of being at these huge banks. The hotshot executives know that they can get huge bonuses by taking risky gambles with the banks’ money.

The executives can make bets, that if they pay off, will get them tens of millions a year in bonuses and other compensation. Of course, if they lose they can bring down the house, meaning that they bankrupt Bear Stearns, Lehman, etc.

What would Ayn Rand expect to happen? On the one hand we have the hot shot executives, on the other hand the schmucks who own stock in these banks. Would Ayn Rand expect that the executives would put aside their ambition, their lust for success, their greed, in order to benefit shareholders who are too dumb to even know what a credit default swap is?

Not for a second; Ayn Rand would watch the Wall Street big boys run roughshod over their shareholders’ interests and be applauding them every step of the way. That is how the game is played. If Greenspan didn’t think the Wall Street crew would rip off their shareholders for every last penny, then he was not a worthy disciple of Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand should be reserved for pimple-faced boys who have a hard time talking to girls and think that life is miserable.  That way, they can go off and be miserable with each other without destroying the rest of the world.

Writing a title for a post is usually fun.  I get to be snarky, clever or just punny.  I read something on The Daily Beast and I was flummoxed.  The post there was about Alan Greenspan.  What flummoxed me was that anyone still treats this guy with respect.  He lost me when he testified to Congress in support of Bush’s tax cuts in 2001.  He said then there was a danger that the government could end up being too successful in raising revenue and therefore Bush’s tax cuts would be a way to make sure that didn’t happen.

This judgement was delivered on projections of paying down the national debt in ten years.  Any sane person could look at those projections and know it would never happen.  Congress has a bad track record of showing any kind of spending restraint and to purposefully restrain revenue in an attempt to force spending cuts has never worked.  Bush’s eight years in office are evidence of that.  Spending cuts are politically unpopular and no sitting politician wants to cut money for their own projects.  Feh.

Greenspan testified before Congress yesterday and this is the reaction in The Daily Beast:

The real issue is that Greenspan has driven home how badly he messed up in presiding over the creation of the largest credit bubble in U.S. history. He missed its causes, its expansion, and even possible fixes at every stage. Greenspan comes across as an adrift theoretician, an aficionado of models with no relevance to the real world. His comments on what is happening are strangely impersonal and dispassionate, like he is watching all of this happen from 20,000 feet overhead, not as someone complicit in what has happened.  In watching the carnage that he helped create, instead of sounding contrite, Greenspan acts more like a bystander at a slow-motion car-crash.

No shit.

The author, Paul Kedrosky, does a better job than me in the title department.

“If I did it”

I see that the last game of the World Series will be played on October 30, if that game needs to be played.  I really don’t care.  I don’t care if another major league game of baseball is ever played any where again.

There was a time that I followed professional baseball.  When I was a boy, Don Wert played third base for the Detroit Tigers and he was like family.  Until he started hitting at .127 and got traded and was soon gone from pro ball.  That was a shock, that the Tigers would not continue to let him play.  He was Don Wert!

The people who run major league baseball have stretched the season out, from February to November.  Too much.  I can’t afford to go to the games, even though I make a pretty good salary.  It is entertainment and very expensive entertainment at that.

Feh.

Richard Lewis was on “The Daily Show” and looks a lot better than he used to look.  A few years ago, he was looking old.  He looks surprisingly young here.  Think he had some work done?  Maybe being married is working for him.

Colin Powell is on Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw and he just used the line “The US Congress had just voted overwhelmingly for the war in Iraq”.  He repeats all the tired lines about the information provided by the intelligence community.

We know now that the Congress was not provided with the best information, was were instead played by Cheney and his cohort.  Colin Powell had his own intelligence organization and it was telling him that there were reasons to not believe the cooked intelligence coming out of the Cheney organization.  He chose to toe the party line so as not to lose his job.  He knew that the plan was flawed but pushed it anyway.

He was not a reluctant fellow traveller.