http://leesburgtomorrow.blogspot.com/2008/05/john-mccains-apcalpytic-friends.html

http://shrillblog.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html#8344037869940865889

Characteristically Restrained:

They write letters « The Poor Man Institute: [It is a] matter of little consequence to the average American: whether Prof. Yoo picks up his paycheck from Berkeley or Liberty University, or whatever Home for Temporarily Inconvenienced Wingnuts would happily scoop him up. But probably a matter of consequence to the [Berkeley] administration, who - unless they want to rebrand their university as Liberty West Coast Satellite Campus - might not want their most recognizable faculty member having as his primary field of expertise “concocting legal sophistries to undermine the foundational values of western civilization.” Perhaps also of concern to alumni, who might feel less inclined to cut large checks to their alma mater if their Golden Bears sweatshirts started inviting questions about whether they played home games at Abu Ghraib (football fans can be very cruel).

The student body might have an interest in this matter, as would, I imagine, faculty and staff at other UC campuses, and even the taxpayers of California, who might wonder if they wanted to be so openly associated with a person who scuttled around the dark corners of an administration... asserting, for example, that the President had the right to crush the testicles of children in order to compel or punish their parents. So it could matter to more people than you might think whether Prof. Yoo gets to practice his craft in decent society, or whether he has to join the other crackpots and undesirables in the shadow reality of wingnut academia, where Jesus rides a dinosaur and the Moonies pick up the tab and the vast liberal fascist secularist conspiracy doesn’t give a f--- what utter bullshit you get up to so long as you stay down in your f------ hole. The thing about the Universe is that it likes to align itself harmoniously. I suspect there’s a way of putting things in order here.

http://shrillblog.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html#7385181876573706950

He writes:

Matthew Yglesias (April 22, 2008) - The Blind Praising the Blind (Media): I continue to wonder what the point is of exercises like having Adam Nagourney or the team of John Harris and Jim Vandehei defend the ABC News debate. What the debate's critics are saying, after all, is that ABC's conduct was the apotheosis of everything that's wrong with MSM campaign coverage. To point out in response that the people most responsible for the MSM campaign coverage status quo thought it was good seems totally non-responsive.

What I'd like to see in defense of ABC would be to identify some likely Democratic Party primary voters in Pennsylvania or some other upcoming state who are now better-informed about the election than they were previously. Until that happens, though, I'm going to stick with James Fallows' observation that ordinary citizens show an extremely low level of interest in this sort of stuff. The fact that the people who've turned political reporting into appalling farce found the somewhat more appalling than usual farce of last week's debate even more delectable than the merely appalling debate work we'd seen earlier from Tim Russert and others is no kind of defense at all.

http://shrillblog.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html#874940117577920513

Boy is Felix shrill:

Ben Stein Watch: April 27, 2008 - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com: Stein is maybe a little bit chastened, since he seems to have given up on trying to impart his own ideas in his column. Instead, he gives himself a reading-comprehension test, taking a widely-circulated speech by David Einhorn and trying to boil it down to its most salient points.

Naturally, Stein fails the test.

Einhorn's speech is worth reading, but Stein's self-described "CliffsNotes version of it" isn't. For instance, Einhorn makes the point that since employee compensation is a function of revenues, investment-bank employees are incentivized to maximize those revenues by adding leverage:

The managements of the investment banks did exactly what they were incentivized to do: maximize employee compensation. Investment banks pay out 50% of revenues as compensation. So, more leverage means more revenues, which means more compensation.

Clear and simple, right? Here's the SteinNotes version:

The fellows who run big investment banks have a strong incentive to maximize their assets and leverage themselves into deep trouble because their pay is a function of how much debt they can pile on. If they can use relatively low-interest debt to generate slightly higher returns, the firm earns more revenue and executive pay increases. Often, an astonishing 50 percent of total revenue goes to employee compensation at Wall Street firms.

Longer, more convoluted, and - in the last sentence - utterly missing the point.

There's nothing "astonishing" about the 50% figure, in an industry which relies on human capital. Stein calls himself a lawyer, so he probably knows that the employee-compensation-to-revenue ratio at law firms is closer to 100%. And in any case, the 50% figure is well known to anybody who follows the investment banking industry, and long predates the credit crunch. That Stein is astonished by it only goes to show how ill-qualified he is to write about this stuff.

Stein also has no idea what "capital" is in the banking industry. Banks 'can hold some scary "assets",' he says, making sure to put the word "assets" in scare quotes just to reinforce just how scary it is. He then continues:

What do they hold as capital against such risks? You would think it would be cash or Treasury bonds, wouldn't you? But no...

The S.E.C. -- acting as one of Wall Street's chief regulators, mind you -- also allowed such things as "hybrid capital instruments" (much riskier than cash or Treasuries), subordinated debt (ditto) and even deferred return of taxes, to be counted as capital.

Once again, Stein has managed to mangle one of Einhorn's points. Here's Einhorn's clear English:

Only tangible equity, not subordinated debt should count as capital.

How Stein managed to read that bit about "tangible equity" and decide that it referred to "cash or Treasury bonds" is beyond me. Stein is clearly too dim to realise that cash and Treasuries are assets, which means that they can hardly be used as capital to hold against assets. The point about cash and Treasuries, of course, is entirely Stein's, it's never made by Einhorn.

But Stein isn't really trying to channel Einhorn, he's just using Einhorn as an excuse to bash the same old drum all over again. This is 100% Stein, for instance, and appears nowhere in Einhorn's speech:

Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, is calling for merging the S.E.C. with the easygoing Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in the financial equivalent of setting off a Doomsday Device.

A Doomsday Device? It would be great if Stein could tone down his language just a tiny bit, because while merging the SEC with the CFTC may or may not be a good idea, I don't think anybody (except perhaps for Stein) considers it to be tantamount to the End of the World. But then again, as the NYT itself pointed out, Stein is something of a master when it comes to such cheap rhetorical devices:

Blithely ignoring the vital distinction between social and scientific Darwinism, the film links evolution theory to fascism (as well as abortion, euthanasia and eugenics), shamelessly invoking the Holocaust with black-and-white film of Nazi gas chambers and mass graves.

No doubt Stein would do the same to Hank Paulson if he were allowed to incorporate B-roll into his columns. Let's just be thankful the NYT's multimedia push hasn't gone that far.

http://shrillblog.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html#8208473578697279650

Here's Klein. The occasion is that he recycled the title of his column. The Democrats, you see, are always shrinking:

The Incredible Shrinking Democrats: There was a cheap metaphor to be had in the remarkable moment when Safia al-Souhail, who had just voted in the Iraqi elections, and Janet Norwood, whose U.S. Marine son was killed in Iraq, embraced during the President's State of the Union speech last week.... [N]othing should detract from the emotional truth of the moment, the magnitude of Norwood's loss, the exhilaration of al-Souhail's ballot. Yes, disentanglement will be difficult. And, yes, we shouldn't "overhype" the election, as John Kerry clumsily suggested. But this is not a moment for caveats. It is a moment for solemn appreciation of the Iraqi achievement--however it may turn out--and for hope.

The Democrats are having trouble with graciousness these days....

This was a symptom of a larger disease: most Democrats seemed as reluctant as Kerry to express the slightest hint of optimism about the [Iraqi] elections. Congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi diminished themselves....

Reid's claim that George W. Bush would reduce Social Security benefits 40% was hogwash. The President has merely stated the obvious, that reductions will be necessary. Reid also made the absurd comparison between Bush's very conservative investment-account proposal and Las Vegas gaming tables. Finally, there was the boorish and possibly unprecedented hooting of the President....

The day after the President's speech, the party's congressional leaders gathered at the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial to carp. How 70 years ago! "Progressive" Dems—-and I use the term advisedly, since liberals seem more interested in preserving the past than in discovering the future—-are right to admire Roosevelt. But the Roosevelt they worship is a bronze sculpture, frozen in time. The real F.D.R. was a gutsy innovator. The current Democrats resemble nothing so much as the Republicans during the 25 years after Roosevelt's death-—negative, defensive, intellectually feeble, a permanent minority... undifferentiated opposition [to Bush] is obtuse and most likely counterproductive. The Democrats' current crudeness is a function of their desperation, and the imminent ratification of Howard Dean, the least charming presidential candidate in recent memory, as their party chairman only serves to punctuate the problem.

All of which leaves Bush with a lot of room to lead. His speech last week was striking... with the exceptions of his empty call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage--a congressional nonstarter, but a sop to religious conservatives--and his continued refusal to support federal funding for new stem-cell-research lines.... There is... a profitable discussion to be had between "ownership" Republicans and "third-way" Democrats about transforming the stagnant bureaucracies of the Industrial Age... the stunned and churlish Democrats are refusing...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

http://wbeegle.blogspot.com/2008/05/roof-roof.html

This weekend I was hoping to bike "about 30 miles, with some hills". I set off towards the Fells while trying to avoid 93 with some success, and found this odd little neighborhood on top of a hill in northeastern Medford. (It has a park, and a church, and a firehouse, and...) I rode through the Fells on the obvious road route, took Montvale Ave. across to Woburn Center, and from there followed the Insane Hill Route up Turkey and Arlmont Hills. This came in, says my bike, at 23.52 miles. Route map

I clearly Wasn't Making It up Arlmont Hill, but I also didn't feel like I was pushing hard enough or something. I was definitely slower on the Concord Ave. back to Camberville segment, but I also didn't feel like I pushed and pushed and couldn't do it, more like I ran out of steam partway up, repeatedly. This clearly means something, probably that I need to get my endurance up and push myself more even on the relatively flat bits.

http://wbeegle.blogspot.com/2008/05/mow-mow-mow-your-yard.html

http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=1419

Dear Apartment Leasing Agent Jerkfaces:

Okay, guys, for real this time, say it with me now: CALL FIRST. Seriously. I was even *home* this time. In pigtails, no doubt looking my absolute best in a dusty nerd t-shirt (”Distributing Clue to Lusers,” by O’Really), and carrying an armload of sheets that were about to get shoved in a box…said boxes all over the damn place and hardly any floor actually open to be walked on, and the apartment not exactly in prime condition to show. Because I was packing. Because I am moving. *Honestly*. Frigging CALL FIRST.

Grrrrrr.
–sabrina

The albums of Ben Folds sound just like the albums of The Ben Folds Five except they have a little thicker mastering and Ben Folds is a little more self-indulgent with his piano solos and his screaming.

Sorry, guys. You were expendable.

Originally published at Ergotism. You can comment here or there.

Jackson, the executive architect, said his design team had aimed for a powerful yet reflective representation of King.

“The image of Dr. King had to be inspirational,” Jackson said yesterday. “It had to be an image that projected this man as an intellectual. It had to be an image that projected Dr. King as someone in thought.”

Unhappy With ‘Confrontational’ Image, U.S. Panel Wants King Statue Reworked

Why exactly does it have to project Dr. King as someone in thought? What’s he most famous for? Thinking? Or organizing massive collective action? Why does this guy want to present Dr. King as the black Gore Vidal?

A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too “confrontational” and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.

Makes sense. Why make his statue confrontational? It’s not as if Dr. King was ever involved in any famous confrontations.

If I designed the statue, it would be of Dr. King taking a bite out of the severed head of J. Edgar Hoover.

Originally published at Ergotism. You can comment here or there.