Since I haven’t been blogging much lately, here’s a bunch of mini posts that have been sitting in my “stuff I should write about” folder :

    As part of the ongoing mortgage crisis, Countrywide Financial has started laying off employees of their “Full Spectrum” unit. The Forbes article on the layoffs has this bit about the division getting the axe :

The Full Spectrum unit originates Alt-A loans, mortgages that are better than subprime but not considered prime. Generally, this type of loan does not require borrowers to produce documentation of income.

I’m shocked that loaning thousands of dollars to people without even bothering to verify if they have a job turned out to be a rotten business plan.

    Political Wire has some hilarious (that is, if you find ignorance “hilarious”) results of a recent GOP poll :

Likely GOP voters were asked how familiar they were the healthcare plans of all their candidates, “even including non-candidate Fred Thompson.” “The results? In Nevada 29% said they were familiar with Thompson’s healthcare plan. In New Hampshire it was 15%, in Iowa 18%, in Florida it was 22% and in South Carolina had 24% with some idea about his plan.” The problem? Thompson hasn’t even discussed a healthcare plan yet.

Which means a significant percentage of Republican voters are either idiots or liars. Go figure.

    With all of the Republican politicians being dragged out of the closet by cops lately, I can’t help but wonder if they look across the aisle at Rep. Barney Frank with envy. Being openly gay has advantages beyond that whole “not having to live a life that’s a lie” thing. When you’re honest about your sexuality, you can have all the gay sex you want without having to sneak around. That and you don’t have to hire a lawyer.

    The President threw a fit a couple of weeks ago when a reporter insulted his fashion sense. Make sense when you consider that President Fancy-Pants prides himself in his tailor-made Oxxford suits and has made a habit of criticizing the clothes of the White House press corps. George Bush may like to pretend he’s a regular fella, but he’s really the Tim Gunn of the beltway (minus any of Gunn’s redeeming qualities) and he’s a thin-skinned little baby.

    Finally, why the hell does the term “out of print” still apply in the iTunes era? You’d think removing the costs associated with marketing, shipping, manufacturing, and retail space would result in result in a diverse digital marketplace, yet iTunes still lags behind brick and mortar stores like Amoeba records. If all it takes is a database record and some disk space, why is the only way get music like this on your iPod through (awesome, hard-to-find) bootlegs?

Or yeah, those damn copyrights. It seems the only way to get some long-forgotten music legally is to convince a record company lawyer that there’s a significant enough market for the particular music you want to hear to bother wrangling through the complicated web of legal rights. I wish there was a way to throw the $0.99 I was going to spend on iTunes into a piggy bank somewhere, waiting to be picked up by the artists in question.

I was in the middle of writing a post about the Katrina and 9/11 anniversaries, but got bored with it. Then another idea popped into my head, so I’ll do that one instead and keep the subject line intact.

Remember that weight loss drug I wrote about a couple of months ago that makes you crap your pants? Well, the makers of Alli prefer the term “treatment effects“. Here’s how they describe the most talked-about effect :

The active ingredient in alli attaches to some of the natural enzymes in the digestive system, preventing them from breaking down about a quarter of the fat you eat. Undigested fat cannot be absorbed and passes through the body naturally. The excess fat is not harmful. In fact, you may recognize it in the toilet as something that looks like the oil on top of a pizza.

Gotta love that upbeat wording. “In fact, you may recognize…” As if somebody’s going to turn around and say “Heey..I know you!”

Yeah, it’s funny as hell, but Atrios is right. There’s a bigger moron that people should be paying attention to for the next 18 months.

Based on who the American people have chosen as their leader, Miss Teen South Carolina probably should have won.

I’m on Facebook and noticed that The Washington Post has an app called “Political Compass” that gives you a few questions about politics to answer to find out how liberal or conservative you are. Not only are the questions frustratingly vague. For example :

The federal government should raise taxes so it can provide more help for people who need it

Which taxes? On whom? What kind of help? For whom? That’s the only question about taxes.

Law-abiding citizens should have more access to guns

Law-abiding citizens? Did the NRA write this question? Why not ask whether or not criminalizing guns will ensure that only criminals will have guns?

The United States must do more with its military power to fight terrorism around the world

I agree…in Pakistan. For one of the most important and complicated issues facing our country today, isn’t this a little vague?

The military should be given a timetable to leave Iraq

Once again, this seems written to willfully misinterpret the views of those who favor withdrawal to fit in with the President’s line that he listens to “the generals on the ground”. The timelines are for the Iraqi government, not the military.

The death penalty should be available for those convicted of heinous crimes

This one just annoys me because it’s poorly written. I suppose if criminals want to be executed the death penalty should be “available” to them, but I don’t think many are going to chose it.

Illegal immigrants who have shown they are productive members of society should be given amnesty and receive social services

Illegal immigrants getting amnesty. Peppering these questions with conservative language is like nails on a chalkboard.

I know getting annoyed with this sort of trivial thing is like getting mad at the horoscope for not coming true, but c’mon. This is the Washington Post. Couldn’t they have done a better job finding somebody to explain these in terms that would actually more accurately gauge someone’s place on the “political compass”?

For what it’s worth, here’s how I fared :

I’m a lot more liberal than that.

Yes, I am. I’ve been noticing a lot of activity in the Ron Paul posts, which I’ve been writing off to the puzzling support that Ron Paul has been getting from liberals, but then I looked at my referral logs. Welcome readers from the Ron Paul Forums and Andrew Sullivan’s blog. It seems that half of you are hiding behind strawmen and using narrow, self-serving definitions of the words “freedom” and “constitutional”. The other half just don’t understand the posts at all. Thankfully, Autumn Harvest perfectly summed up the point of my posts in the comments :

It’s clear that all you RP supporters have completely missed Greg’s point. Greg was saying that RP is no friend of liberals. So yeah, John Galt and Sleep Dog, Greg didn’t explain what was wrong with what RP said. But Greg doesn’t need to, because what RP said is self-evidently lunacy to any liberal. If you really think that liberals are an insane collective mass who want to ban Christmas, love Castro, and are like affirmative action because it helps oppress minorities, then fine, support RP; I think these beliefs are crazy, but I don’t particularly want to argue about them with you. But Greg’s point was that RP is not some wonderful blend of great liberal and great conservative positions, but a hard-core, fanatical, Fox-news-loving social conservative, who any intelligent liberal should run screaming from.

That’s the whole point of the quotes compiled in this post. It’s not just that I strongly disagree with statements like “the collectivist Left hates religion” and his contention that the “welfare state” is “the tool used by [the left] to maintain political control over large minority groups willing to be victimized” and his insistence that “Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America” and his claim that “Those who call for the abolition of the electoral college are hostile to liberty.” These statements are not only factually wrong, but they’re bitter, hateful statements that strike at some of my core beliefs. It’s not just what Ron Paul believes, but how he’s chosen to express those beliefs that have convinced me that he’s as hateful towards liberals as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, or any other wingnut.

On a slightly different note, The American Prospect’s recent article about Ron Paul has an interesting bit of trivia that’s been overlooked :

On Nov. 17, 2005, he introduced H.R. 4379, the We the People Act, which would remove contested cultural issues like abortion from the jurisdiction of federal courts.

Yeah, he sponsored some anti-abortion legislation. He’s one of those conservatives who mentions Nazi’s when discussing abortion, so that shouldn’t be much of a surprise. But calling it the “We the People Act“?? That’s the kind of Orwellian, wrap-yourself-in-the-flag crap I hate about the Bush Administration.

This is getting ridiculous. So, I wrote a post criticizing Ron Paul in which I quote from his column that’s the centerpiece of his Congressional homepage and I get this pissy comment from one of his acolytes :

Key word: Ghost Writers, which Ron Paul has discredited as his own columns many times. Do people BOTHER to do research anymore? Seriously, when you found this, I bet you RUSHED to make a blog posting out of it. Ron Paul has publicly discredited all these columns, including the ones where people make him out to be racist.
. . .
You sir are proof that all you Anti-Paulities are mindless drones, LOOKING for a reason to hate the guy.
. . .
Get educated. Is it merely coincidence that most people who make anti-ron paul comments haven’t properly researched the facts? I don’t know, you tell me.

Silly me, I thought reading something that Ron Paul has posted on his own site under his own name would give me a good idea of where he stands. Writing about Ron Paul requires extra research. After reading the essays the Ron Paul has posted on his site, then you need to track down his disavowal of those very sentiments. Apparently everything objectionable that he’s ever written is the fault of overzealous ghost writers. How convenient.

Ron Paul’s got the right idea on the war in Iraq, but other than that, the man’s a wingnut. Seriously, my fellow liberals, you might like him, but he hates you. Just take a look at some of what he’s written in his column “Texas Straight Talk”. This is the kind of stuff I’d expect to hear from Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly.

The politically correct religion of our nation has become Secular Humanism; although equivalent to a religion, it is incorrectly passed off by our courts and schools as being neutral with respect to spiritual beliefs and is often used to fill the void by forced exclusion of other beliefs.

- “Religious freedom found in following Constitution”

Through perverse court decisions and years of cultural indoctrination, the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our nation that religion must be driven from public view. The justification is always that someone, somewhere, might possibly be offended or feel uncomfortable living in the midst of a largely Christian society, so all must yield to the fragile sensibilities of the few. The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.
. . .
The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance. Throughout our nation’s history, churches have done what no government can ever do, namely teach morality and civility. Moral and civil individuals are largely governed by their own sense of right and wrong, and hence have little need for external government. This is the real reason the collectivist Left hates religion: Churches as institutions compete with the state for the people’s allegiance, and many devout people put their faith in God before their faith in the state. Knowing this, the secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war.

- “Christmas in Secular America”

Those who call for the abolition of the electoral college are hostile to liberty. Not surprisingly, most advocates of abolition are statist elites concentrated largely on the east and west coasts. These political, economic, academic, media, and legal elites overwhelmingly favor a strong centralized federal government, and express contempt for the federalist concept of states’ rights. They believe in omnipotent federal power, with states acting as mere glorified federal counties carrying out commands from Washington.

The electoral college threatens the imperial aims of these elites because it allows the individual states to elect the president, and in many states the majority of voters still believe in limited government and the Constitution. Voters in southern, midwestern, and western states- derided as “flyover” country– tend to value family, religion, individual liberty, property rights, and gun rights. Washington elites abhor these values, and they hate that middle and rural America hold any political power whatsoever. Their efforts to discredit the electoral college system are an open attack on the voting power of the pro-liberty states.

- “The Electoral College vs. Mob Rule”

The left may be more permissive toward lurid or obscene material, but it has zero tolerance for political, religious, and social commentary that falls outside the bounds of rigid political correctness doctrines it created. Liberals are happy to restrict so-called commercial speech; happy to jail those who commit phony hate crimes merely by speaking their minds; and happy to impose speech codes on college campuses.

- “Congressional Indecency”

The emphasis on democracy in our modern political discourse has no historical or constitutional basis. Yet we have become obsessed with democracy, as though any government action would be permissible if a majority of voters simply approved of it. Democracy has become a sacred cow, a deity which no one dares question. Democracy, we are told, is always good. But the founders created a constitutionally limited republic precisely to protect fundamental liberties from the whims of the masses, to guard against the excesses of democracy. The electoral college likewise was created in the Constitution to guard against majority tyranny in federal elections. The President was to be elected by the states rather than the citizenry as a whole, with votes apportioned to states according to their representation in Congress. The will of the people was to be tempered by the wisdom of the electoral college.

By contrast, election of the President by pure popular vote totals would damage statehood. Populated areas on both coasts would have increasing influence on national elections, to the detriment of less populated southern and western states. A candidate receiving a large percentage of the popular vote in California and New York could win a national election with very little support in dozens of other states! A popular vote system simply would intensify the populist pandering which already dominates national campaigns.

Not surprisingly, calls to abolish the electoral college system are heard most loudly among left elites concentrated largely on the two coasts. Liberals favor a very strong centralized federal government, and have contempt for the concept of states’ rights (a contempt now shared, unfortunately, by the Republican Party). They believe in federalizing virtually every area of law, leaving states powerless to challenge directives sent down from Washington. The electoral college system threatens liberals because it allows states to elect the president, and in many states the majority of voters still believe in limited government and the Constitution. Citizens in southern and western states in particular tend to value individual liberty, property rights, gun rights, and religious freedom, values which are abhorrent to the collectivist elites. The collectivists care about centralized power, not democracy. Their efforts to discredit the electoral college system are an attempt to limit the voting power of pro-liberty states.

- “Hands Off the Electoral College”

The administration and the media, except for Fox News Network, have a passionate hatred for the Cuban-American community and a love affair with Fidel Castro. Liberals profess to champion the right of all minority groups–except for Cuban-Americans who do not play the role of victim. The best way to understand this antagonism is to look at the way the liberal left treats Clarence Thomas. The fact that Thomas made it all the way to the Supreme Court should please those looking for successful members of minority groups. Instead, the left passionately despise Supreme Court Justice Thomas because he rejects the welfare state, the tool used by them to maintain political control over large minority groups willing to be victimized.

- Legislative Update, April 24, 2000

Despite what Ron Paul supporters insisted in response to my earlier post, this isn’t a bunch of recycled NeoCon propaganda. This is Ron Paul in his own words (or at least, those of his “ghost writers”). I don’t care if he can explain away his views under the consistent political philosophy of smaller government and states rights, I strongly disagree with him more than I disagree with any Democrats running for President.

I’m getting really annoyed with all of the scapegoating of China lately. Yesterday’s AFL-CIO Democratic debate is the latest example :

All the candidates were asked whether China is an adversary or ally. The U.S. has a $233 billion (€168.9 billion) annual trade deficit with the economic giant.

Most said they would take a tougher stand. “I do not want to eat bad food from China,” Clinton said, alluding to recent incidents of tainted food imports.

Edwards reminded the audience of the 2 million lead-tainted toys from China that were recalled last week.

I don’t care if China puts poison in their food, lead paint on their toys, or pee pee in your Coke. I don’t live in China, I live in America. If you want the increased flexibility and cost savings that come along with outsourcing your labor force to a foreign country, you need to assume the added responsibility of ensuring that the resulting products meet American quality standards. When all of these “tainted” products end up on American shelves, it’s American corporations and American regulatory agencies that are to blame.

It looks like the powers that be in my home state finally realized you can’t get your license plate to spell “I’m gonna break my boot off in Osama’s ass” with only seven letters. Instead, they’re issuing license plates that are so self-righteously patriotic that it almost seems like a bad attempt to jump start the 2001-2002 retro wave early.

Gotta love the use of desert-style digital camouflage. A nice bit of “Iraq is related to 9-11″ subtlety to undercut the in-your-face message of the rest of the design. It’s too bad they couldn’t find room to include a yellow ribbon or a paint-by-numbers version of George Bush praying.

So let me get this straight. For a few years now, the financial industry has made billions in risky subprime loans by essentially tricking people into believing they can borrow more than they’ll be able to pay back and now that this brilliant idea is going south, people are floating the idea of a government bailout. Well, screw ‘em. If you’re foolish enough to loan hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who can’t even balance their checkbooks, then you deserve to be as poor as your customers.

Then again, this is all assuming that these creditors were giving out loans in good faith in the first place. The way it looks to me is that these subprime loans were always about locking people into high interest loans for a few years until they went broke after which the banks would take back the house and any more money they can squeeze out of the debtors (thanks, bankruptcy reform!). Once they unload the house, which has almost certainly grown in value, they make a nice profit on top of the cash they gouged out of their now-homeless former customers.

The reason this has all come back to bite lenders in the ass is because they lacked the foresight to realize that when their customers were going broke, everybody else would be going broke as well, which would drive down the value of their repossessed houses and make them harder to unload to the next poor sucker who just wants to move out of an apartment.

In a truly free market economy, we’d be pointing these idiots towards the back of the line at the local soup kitchen, but these guys had a backup plan. They bribed (I mean, “lobbied”) every level of government that’s willing to cash their checks, insisting that if they pay the price for their moronic business practices, the entire economy will suffer. In short, they don’t need government bailouts to help themselves, but to help us.

I get the feeling that when people look back on the I-35 bridge collapse, they’ll be qualifying it with the word “first” :

More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the I-35W bridge, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.

“At least a generation”, as in “it’s been at least a generation since we’ve had a White House and Congress that were both run by responsible people”.

And that’s just the bridges. We’ve got steam pipes exploding in New York, a power grid that blacked out a third of the country a year or two ago, and a million other disasters waiting to happen because the grown ups aren’t in charge and haven’t been for a very long time.

“I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”

Here’s what it looks like when we’ve got a political environment that panders to voters with endless promises of tax cuts and dismisses necessary infrastructure spending as “pork” :

I’m sure there will be a great “free market” solution to this problem too, once they figure out how to make a profit fishing dead bodies out of the river.

Ron Paul sucks.

What? You want me to elaborate? Okay, let’s start with this quote from John Derbyshire (of “the best thing he ever did was get kicked in the head by Bruce Lee” fame) :

Ron Paul believes a lot of what you believe, and what I believe. You don’t imagine he’s going to be the 44th POTUS, but you kind of hope he does well none the less.

And why not? Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO; end the War on Drugs; overturn Roe v. Wade; repeal federal restrictions on gun ownership; fence the borders; deport illegals; stop lecturing foreign governments about human rights; let the Middle East go hang. What’s not to like?

First of all, abolishing the IRS is a batshit crazy idea. The idea that you can fix a problem by either abolishing the agency with problems (IRS, Fed) or pulling out completely (UN, NATO) is anarchy. It doesn’t make the need for those organizations go away, it just replaces one set of problems with a worse set of problems.

Ron Paul is one of those “free market” zealots (a scary breed of faith-based politician) who honestly believe unregulated capitalism is the cure for all of society’s ills. We tried that in the late 1800’s and we ended up with the Gilded Age, steel monopolies, children working in factories, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, etc. This “Invisible Hand” bullshit would lead us back to that awful time. Ron Paul’s rhetoric sounds good when you’re trying to get a crowd of people to pump their fists, but in terms of actually solving problems, it’s lunacy.

Another thing, and this can’t be repeated often enough, that Ron Paul caucuses with the Republican Party. The same one that wants to ban gay marriage, ban abortion, has exploded the deficit, etc. Odd that a principled, small government maverick would aid a party that has abandoned every ideal he stands for. It’s enough to make you wonder if “libertarians” like Ron Paul aren’t just a bunch of phonies or sellouts who will support a party whose platform they find abhorrent as long as they get their precious tax cuts.

Of course, the way liberals are jumping on the Ron Paul bandwagon, I can’t help but wonder if their support is equally based on a myopic one-issue platform, even if it means, for example, we get stuck with a small government conservative president who would likely oppose any effort to provide universal healthcare. As long as he ends the war, he can roll back Roe vs. Wade all he wants.

Normally, I’d just end the Ron Paul bashing there, but there’s so much more to cover, like this but from a recent NY Times profile :

A larger vulnerability may be that voters want more pork-barrel spending than Paul is willing to countenance. In a rice-growing, cattle-ranching district, Paul consistently votes against farm subsidies. In the very district where, on the night of Sept. 8, 1900, a storm destroyed the city of Galveston, leaving 6,000 dead, and where repairs from Hurricane Rita and refugees from Hurricane Katrina continue to exact a toll, he votes against FEMA and flood aid.

FEMA and flood aid are pork? I guess he gets points for not being one of those libertarians who favors abolishing everything only to backpedal when you start pointing out all of the things we really need the government to do, but voting against FEMA? Moreover, why is he the lone dissenter in these cases?

In 1999, he was the only naysayer in a 424-1 vote in favor of casting a medal to honor Rosa Parks. Nothing against Rosa Parks: Paul voted against similar medals for Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. He routinely opposes resolutions that presume to advise foreign governments how to run their affairs: He has refused to condemn Robert Mugabe’s violence against Zimbabwean citizens (421-1), to call on Vietnam to release political prisoners (425-1) or to ask the League of Arab States to help stop the killing in Darfur (425-1).

And let’s not forget that he’s a racist too. DailyKos diarist phenry found this choice nugget from the “Ron Paul Political Report” :

Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficultly avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action…. Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.

Oddly enough, Paul’s excuse for this stuff now is that his offensive articles were ghost-written. Don’t worry folks, Ron Paul just outsourced his racist rants.

A friend of mine was in an argument with a Ron Paul cultist the other day whose answer to criticism is that we’re just scared of “people with big ideas”. You know what’s even scarier? People with bad ideas.