Senator McCain somewhat gracefully trying to fight a fire he and Palin started:
“I expected John McCain to be the first person on his campaign to lose patience with the character attack strategy… you can see him doing that. He did not expect to be ending his campaign in front of audiences where he had to explain - as we just saw him do - that his opponent, the Democratic nominee, is actually a citizen of the United States and not an Arab. This is not where John McCain wants to be…”
- Lawrence O’Donnell, on MSNBC tonight
For a moment there, I saw a glimpse of the guy who ran for Prez in 2000…
“… it will be very alarming if this weekend rolls by without a credible announcement of a new financial rescue plan, involving not just the United States but all the major players.…the only things anyone wants to buy right now are Treasury bills and bottled water… You may think that things can’t get any worse — but they can, and if nothing is done in the next few days, they will.“
NYU Economics Prof Nouriel Roubini presents a grim assessment on his blog tonight:
“The US and advanced economies’ financial system is now headed towards a near-term systemic financial meltdown .. [this] crisis was caused by the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in the history of humanity..”
Even with aggressive coordination we could see near-term bank or market closures and otherwise fitful times. I reiterate my advice that you each seriously consider a personal or family contingency plan for a potential four-alarm banking emergency. This may seem unlikely - but it’s no longer out of bounds in pleasant conversation. We discussed this very delicate issue in a bit more length here, and I’m hoping to write a little more about it in the next couple of days.
Sorry it’s been a little bleak around here lately.
Conservatives are furious. Here’s a good Politico piece on McCain’s latest plan to bail out homegamblers with our money. Excerpt:
“Last night, he took that position on the housing issue of buying up everybody’s mortgage,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said on Fox News. “Conservatives are scratching their heads today and saying, ‘What happened?’”
“What on earth is that about?” Huckabee asked. “Then you got to ask, which houses? The condos in southern Florida, where people bought $500,000 homes as a second home and now can’t pay for them? Are we buying those, too?”
And in perhaps the only time in history I wanted to echo the words of Michelle Malkin:
It’s interesting to watch Europe grapple with the global finance fiasco. Until today I had not given a lot of thought to the much more complex policy environment they face with regard to the Euro. They have a single currency, yet no single government body nor bank to manage associated monetary policy. So, “internally” coordinated responses are nearly impossible. Milton Friedman once said the Euro was unlikely to survive its first recession. This will be another interesting dynamic to watch.
“The market in my opinion is on the verge of ceasing to function… it is nearing the time when my next post will be an obituary for the fixed income market.”
I am generally not one to delight in the misfortunes of others. But schadenfreude has never been more at home in my heart than in the story of Denver’s own Gabriel Schwartz. The obnoxious, self-impressed, clueless lawyer did an interview on the floor of the Republican National Convention… I don’t want to just dislike him for his worldview (although I do) - which mostly revolves around bombing and plundering Iran. I also dislike him because he’s such an assface. Think I’m being harsh? Watch the interview and tell me you don’t want to beat him with a stick:
I’m not the only one who has issues with this guy. The day after he gave that interview, he met a woman in the bar of his Minneapolis hotel and invited her to his room. Once they got upstairs, the woman asked him to get undressed while she prepared him a drink. That drink made Gabriel a very sleepy boy. (Is there a bomb joke here?)
“as a single man, I was flattered by the attention of a beautiful woman who introduced herself to me. I used poor judgment.”
Poor judgment? By the same Gabriel Schwartz I see in that interview? No!
I can only assume she saw the interview, or had an equally maddening conversation with him in the bar that night. Here’s what I wanna know: did she “plant a flag”?
Valleywag picked up a FriendFeed discussion between a few of us yesterday regarding the bailout bill within which Scoble blames “people like [me]” for the coming “breadlines”. It rings a little hollow considering where I’ve been on all this and where he’s been (i.e. nowhere), but it brings a much more important issue to the fore.
To the thread in particular, I realize how acerbic my tone can be when discussing such things and try to be cognizant of that every time I write. Sometimes my frustration - the result of a bit too much anguish about our national slumber - gets the best of me. But Americans sat mostly silent as international and domestic crimes were perpetrated in their names and their economy was wrecked - choosing to glide along as if they had far more important things to think about.
Robert is right to describe the financial mess as the result of our collective idiocy. The bill for one or two generations of stupidity has now come due and our remaining credit cards have been declined. And for the moment, the social media characters participating in the specific tendril of web masturbation that is Robert’s “what to do” post have come up substantially empty. So, I’ll see what I can come up with.
