The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Monday, February 08, 2010

On Goldman Sachs


A chief villain over at ZeroHedge is Goldman Sachs, the investment firm. (I am still pondering whether to add 0h to the sidebar.) A common slang term for the firm over there is "vampire squid".

This term - an unfortunate one, bringing to mind Der Sturmer cartoons - comes from a now-classic rant by one Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone. That magazine ain't all that great elsewhere; but it has, historically, published the fantabulous P J O'Rourke. For O'Rourke's sake, I am willing to take Rolling Stone economics coverage seriously. (Also, Taibbi is certainly smarter than David Brooks. But then, so are Ace of Spades, Instapundit, and, well, nearly everybody.)

Taibbi's rant is heated. Heidi Moore points out that its earlier sections are overheated - in that the Squid was one of many such cephalopods up to 2001, and by no means the leader of the school.

That was then, one might retort; we care about what Goldman Sachs has become now. Well, one issue is that Taibbi by overstating his case early on, has undercut his credibility in everything else. Also, it's possible that Goldman got where it is - not by being more crooked than everyone else, but just by not being completely foolish. Merrill Lynch, by contrast, was led by a fool.

At this point, though, Goldman Sachs does seem to have gained - even if by default - undue access to the nation's finances. Actually over several nations' finances. That makes them a target. Assuming they'd rather not be a legitimate target, they should relinquish certain of the privileges they have gained.

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posted by Zimri on 23:01 | link |

The prehistory of Nazism


A long while back I floated a balloon about how Nazism would have developed after Adolf Hitler. Last October I said it was a "cultural Right" expression. That assumed Nazism = Mein Kampf. But what of the "true Nazism" of the German Workers' Party, before Hitler took it over?

Because Hitler didn't invent the NSDAP; he'd joined it, and helped build it. Nobody quit the NSDAP because of Hitler until autumn of 1921, when he took it over. Before that Hitler was in line with its founding tenets.

Among the books I read during my little break, was Derek Hastings' "Catholicism & The Roots of Nazism".

We learn that Nazism started out as a movement of political, antiSemitic, and independent Catholics - like the Ghibellines, or Bourbon France. These Catholics labelled the more Papist of their fellow congregants "ultramontaines", hinting the latter were sellouts to the Italians over the Alps. And as a political movement, they held out a welcome for Protestants as allies. But still, they would not call themselves Protestants themselves, and revered the Pope as a spiritual guide. Many local priests offered full support for this "antiultramontanist" form of the NSDAP. (We recently had an analogue in northern Ireland of local priests who supported the IRA; against the Pope, who condemned the terror.)

By 1923 Hitler completed the transformation of the NSDAP into an incoherent alliance between the Catholic old guard and Protestant reactionaries, culminating in the Beer Hall Putsch. As you know this did not work; it just alienated the Catholics. With the NSDAP dead as a system, all that was left of it were the Hitler loyalists.

So there are two sets labelled "Nazism" - the pre 1921 set without Hitler, and the post 1931 set with Hitler. The pre 1921 set elected Hitler and failed. The post 1931 set under its new rules succeeded.

Nazism without Hitler is, then, a movement solidly on the Mitteleuropean Right; it was an attempt to remake another Reich, except with southwestern Austro-Bavarian Catholics rather than northeastern Prussian Lutherans. Presumably they felt that full Protestantism had too much historical taint from Calvin and, so, too much like the Guelphs.

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posted by Zimri on 20:00 | link |

Big business, brutal state


The SuperBowl came, and went, and we got the SuperBowl ads. Here's the ad for HitlerWagon's Audi, complete with climate-change Orpo. And yes, it offended me; as do all campaigns which make light of State coersion.

On that topic, I realised something was wrong with the Pepsi corporation - apart from its product, which was always crap - in the 1990s, when they put out ads extolling school uniforms. That's right. They were going to appeal to kids - on the basis of school uniforms. I hear the Diversity folks got big into Pepsi around this time; more recently Pepsi changed the logo to look like Obama's "O". And now we are called upon to sit through the Refresh Project.

If you see an ad talking up how socially conscious Brand X is, you know that Brand X is a Party-approved product. And I know to avoid it. I figure I pay for it with my taxes already.

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posted by Zimri on 19:33 | link |

More fun from AT&T


Yesterday pages.sbcglobal.net again stymied my attempts to post, this time giving the excuse "error 500, directory full". I deleted one file and one folder and still got the error, so I gave up.

I didn't think at the time that I was overflowing my limit. Turns out I wasn't.

Another day of crap service from my provider. Honestly they need to sort out their shit already.

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posted by Zimri on 19:24 | link |

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Tim Geithner, PR flack


Tim Geithner is saying we will "absolutely not" lose our "AAA" debt rating from Moody's Investors Service - "That will never happen to this country".

I am not a trader; I am just an interested observer. But even I can see that there's a backstory here. Moody's had issued the US Government an ultimatum last week - sort out your fiscal house or we'll downgrade you. A normal administration under such as threat might come up with an austerity programme and give a general impression of seriousness and competence. Instead what they've just heard from Geithner is this:

Geithner said investors around the world turn to U.S. Treasury securities and dollar-denominated assets when they are worried about global stability. That reflects “basic confidence” in the U.S. and its ability to bounce back from the global recession, he said.

Geithner's response, in short, is an assertion that the US economy belongs on a curve alongside Greece and Zimbabwe. It's no rebuttal. Moreover it's a challenge to the basic idea of objective bookkeeping.

Moody's is under no obligation to go along with it. They might even take Geithner's reaction personally.

I have to wonder what Geithner thinks his job actually is. An advisor, one would think, should stick to giving advice and leaving the PR hackery to Gibbs. Instead Geithner is out there delivering his own "spin".

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posted by Zimri on 22:13 | link |

Planes of morality


I was always a fan of Dungeons & Dragons (as you can tell from the homepage). I still have a lot of that stuff lying about the house. One of the more intriguing concepts from that game was that of the Outer Plane.

An Outer Plane is a pocket universe, linked to other universes - including the Earth-analogue in any given game - but intrinsically home to a morality. Morality is ternary, squared, and along two axes: Law and Good. This yields the nine canonical moralities - "alignments" - such as Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Evil and such.

In the original form of the game, by Gary Gygax, the alignment-planes ran in a Great Wheel around a central Plane of Concordant Opposition, True Neutral. To add some diversity, Gygax threw in some in-between planes for All-Lawful-and-a-bit-Evil, A-bit-Chaotic-and-all-Evil. The "Planescape" line brought that philosophical-planar idea to its fullest expression during the 1990s.

One editor of Planescape, Monte Cook, later founded his own company and dismissed this idea of organising the planes, even the Outer planes. In Beyond Countless Doorways he had the planes disconnected from the Wheel, instead connecting one to another by way of shared characteristics. A plane could still be - for instance - a hell with an Evil character, but never the only possible hell for that morality. There could be other hells with the same alignment, and they needn't have anything to do with one another.

I think that both Gygax and Cook did not take the moralities seriously enough. Gygax takes a side between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Good: that they're equivalent, in the "balance". (And he assumes that there is such a thing as Chaotic Good.) This fails particularly for the Chaotic Neutral plane, which logically should be the plane of entropy and thus the limitless chaos between and outside all possible ordered planes. Monte Cook's method is better but, still, has no theory of Outer Chaos.

To improve on the planar structure of D&D, I would propose modelling the planes based on how moralities likely developed.

It strikes me that Chaos is the default. There is no plane of Chaos; Chaos is the absence of plane. Not even Time applies here.

The first attempts to carve out a space within chaos would be Despotism - by which I mean: Evil with a Chaotic taint. Since this is by far the easiest way to carve out a livable space in Chaos, I expect that the vast majority of planes would have this character. The original D&D did well by allotting to the Abyss, 666 layers and more. The original D&D also had a Tarterus right next to the Abyss, basically its suburb.

I expect that several of these planes would shift back to Chaos when the despot loses his touch. For decadent Evil sliding back to Chaos: D&D gave us Pandemonium, the multiverse madhouse.

The next step will correspond to the Earth strongman who sets up laws and arranges things for his successor. I can't understand this impulse otherwise than as Lawful Good. I also can't see two Lawful Good planes existing as rivals. Therefore there is only one Heaven.

Actually - less than one. That First Strongman isn't "God" in an Earth sense. The "One Heaven" isn't a true plane, but an asymptotic limit to which other beings - and planes - eternally aspire. This model implies other, less perfect planes along this path. So there we have our almost-Good planes; some falling short on Law, some just falling short.

It is now my unpleasant duty to report upon that Lawful Evil plane, "Hell". The next stage in these planar arrangements will be those beings who, having accepted Law, grew selfish and perverted it. Since Law was founded for Good purposes, I must follow Milton, the Qur'an, and Enoch; these Evil beings must be the rebels against Heaven (in my model, some plane far along the Heavenly Path). I also agree with D&D canon that a nonAbyssal Hell is a plane which, having lost sight of Good, still insists upon Law. Unlike the Good planes, I can't see the rebels remaining united in one cause; Lawful Evil just doesn't work like Lawful Good.

Thus my multiverse, if I had to design one: dimensional chaos interspersed with hells, and a cluster of heavens with good gods working toward a Heavenly Asymptote with no One God.

Our universe exists as a creation of one of these transcosmic deities. Given that it follows known physical laws pretty consistently, the deity would have to be one of the Lawful ones. But whether this god was one of the good ones, or a devil, I won't presume to speculate.

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posted by Zimri on 00:01 | link |

Friday, February 05, 2010

The Dante game and why I won't be buying it


I've been a Dante fan since reading Il Inferno in college. Lately I've sussed out his political theory as well, and I more or less agree with it. So when I got wind of a video-game coming out, based on his work: I was keen to find out more.

One initial problem I have is that it is a Hell Game, which further rips off God Of War. Games go to Hell all the time - just from the 1990s I recall Doom (which I played) and Planescape Torment and Diablo (which I didn't). As for gameplay, I already have one copy of God Of War, thanks. Since the setting and the gameplay are done to death, everything then rests upon the storyline.

This game's "Dante" is a Crusader. The Crusaders were Guelph idealists - "neo-con" graduates of the mediaeval Truce Of God movements. In real life, Dante was an embittered ex-Guelph, with several trenchant arguments against the Catholic Church of his day. Dante was more Episcopalian than Catholic, more cynic than Christian.

Anyway, if the game can't get Dante right, then I can't trust the game elsewhere, and I'm not bothering.

As an aside, the fools who promoted the thing even dared fake a demonstration against it. I assume someone had recently seen Matinee on NetFlix. I think they missed the point - that one only fakes a sizzle when there is no steak.

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posted by Zimri on 21:26 | link |

Clusterf@ck Derangement Syndrome


Yesterday I tried to grapple with the concept of "liquidity" and with the Federal Reserve's role in it. Today, let's peek at Credit Default Swaps.

I first heard about these, as something that our financial industry was getting into, in 2008 about when the whole thing was collapsing. According to the EconomicsHelp blog, a CDS is an insurance policy against... default. That is, against going bankrupt.

In the real world, I might buy fire insurance for my home, and if the home burns down then the agent sends me funds to rebuild. In CDS world, I buy a CDS for my business (or at least for a business in which I own stock); and if the business fails, then at least I get funds to start it anew. This is "hedging" against risk.

There seems to be a conflict of interest there; but then, there's a conflict of interest in my buying fire insurance. What's to say that I'm not going to cut a few corners in fireproofing my house. This is a known problem, "moral hazard".

Also, what strikes me as weird about CDS is that people are buying insurance on SOMEONE ELSE'S business; and when that other business fails then the BUYERS get paid. In the words of Eddie Murphy, "I get it! You're a couple of bookies!" But anyway.

If there's no risk of default, this policy would be pointless, and so worthless. So you can see that the premium of a CDS goes up as the bankruptcy risk goes up. At least, it should. If the CDS's premium is locked in some way and the risk is going up, then that CDS with its too-low premium for a too-likely bankruptcy (and so, payout) will itself take on a higher value.

At the end of it all, CDS appears not to be evil, but to signal evil. When the prices of CDS go up, that means everyone is thinking there is a default in the offing. This is why the ever-pessimistic ZeroHedge is saying to buy German CDS. He thinks it's undervalued, because he thinks that Germany will be more at risk of default. (That all depends on whether the Germans want to bail out the Greeks and Iberians, mind.)

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posted by Zimri on 20:23 | link |

Wikipedia jihad


Last year I got interested in the history of predestinarian attitudes in Iraq under the House of Marwan. One of the opponents to this attitude was one Hasan al-Basri.

Someone "airjordan" made this edit. And then someone "khanman" made this edit.

Neither of these "two" names ever posted before or since. But... there was a guy "MezzoMezzo" who was, also, interested in this topic.

I smell socks.

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posted by Zimri on 00:20 | link |

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Military tribunals


From the NRO Corner, a couple of tl;dr posts about our Attorney General Mr Holder, and his argument that we did the right thing in charging the (foreign, al-Qaeda) UndieBomber as a civilian.

One of Holder's arguments is that we nearly did that for Padilla the "Dirty Bomber" (who didn't, IIRC, do any actual bombing).

I agree with Holder, and the Left, up to a point: that it's not cool to charge civilians as foreign combatants. For Padilla I had proposed a civilian trial: for treason. I never liked how AssCroft handled it.

But, if we must turn a civilian over to the military, then the civilian judge should revoke his citizenship retroactively. I believe it stands on firm ethical ground: to find out when a citizen has alienated his own citizenship, and has become a citizen of the Caliphate.

Since Padilla (in this scheme) would be legally a retroactive non-citizen at the time he got nabbed at what seemed (at the time) to be a terror attack: once the court kicked him out of America, the military arm could take over and do its own tribunal.

It might even be that Padilla revoked his citizenship, yet did not intend harm to us. That's fine too. In that case, set him free - somewhere else. If he complains then he can get in line for a green card like, well, I did.

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posted by Zimri on 19:44 | link |

Endorsement: J.D. Hayworth for Senate (AZ)


Wall Street Journal:

With the senator's approval, McCain allies filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission essentially alleging that Mr. Hayworth's three-hour radio show—during which he regularly attacked Mr. McCain—was a form of campaign advertising. ... Mr. McCain isn't shy about admitting his role in knocking Mr. Hayworth off the air. "I certainly didn't discourage it," he said in an interview. "I'm not saying he couldn't say anything he wanted to, but it's clear that was a political campaign he was running on the radio station."

Maybe Hayworth did have some "involvement" or "appearance of impropriety" concerning Abramoff. The consensus seems to be that there was no actual corruption there. Certainly the courts haven't found any.

What John McCain did here dwarfs that. He got the Federal government involved in shutting up an opponent's right to speak. And he did it as a Senator with a majority of other Senators behind him.

A Republican hack - or someone who owes McCain personally, like Sarah Palin - would say to support McCain anyway. No dice. McCain is a bully. Bullies should be punished. If McCain wins the primary election, I'm endorsing the Democrat in the general.

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posted by Zimri on 19:07 | link |

More news from the Sailersphere


Ben G, scourge of the Sailersphere, is back at it - this time dressing down HalfSigma. HalfSigma seems to accept his chastisement. To see the debate over Ben G's comment, you'll have to go to Ben G's article; I am not qualified to argue the point.

Ben G might be doing us a favour.

There are quite a few blogs out there wherein HBD meets super-sovereignty: Moldbug, Mangan, etc. The "Utopia" of this alliance should yield a nation of high IQs, all under the rule of one monarch, whose right to rule goes unchallenged abroad and whose subjects will not think to challenge him at home.

Chris Hitchens asks the Sailersphere to consider North Korea. Koreans, I understand, can boast a higher mean IQ than can American whites. As for sovereignty, nothing can dislodge the North Korean regime from its hold over its territory and subjects. Hitchens calls out the regime as Rightist, in the same way Rightists admit the Nazi regime was Rightist.

What's not to like?

I shouldn't have to say this, but... if North Korea is where the reactionaries' path is leading, then they're on the wrong path.

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posted by Zimri on 18:25 | link |

Fallin'! Fallin'! Fallin'!


I see that the Dow is drifting toward 10,000 again.

Back in 17 December, Mencius Moldbug predicted that a stock fall would hit around this time. Read here. Having read up on the jargon a bit, the key comment seems to be "Federal Reserve’s special liquidity facilities will expire on Feb. 1, 2010".

What's "Liquidity"? Is it something you can bathe in, like Scrooge McDuck in his silo? Here's wiki: "market liquidity is an asset's ability to be sold without causing a significant movement in the price and with minimum loss of value". That means, McDuck's silo is illiquid up to the point at which McDuck opens its vault door. Say McDuck's silo is valued at 100 million dollars. (Remember that a dollar is a share of equity in USCorp.) If McDuck rocketed that silo into outer space, everyone else's "100 million dollar silo" would be worth MORE as a result. However if McDuck spends one dollar of that 100 million, that one dollar has a negligible effect on its own. So Liquidity is the cash currently out of McDuck's vault - seen another way, it's the vault's potential for being opened.

To hear Moldbug explain it, the Fed's "special liquidity facilities" means that when you withdraw from your bank, you're really withdrawing from the Federal Reserve which has "assumed responsibility for" - seized - the bank's vault. Sure, someone else still pretends to be running the bank - but that someone else has no operative independence.

Moldbug saw as "the political context" in mid December: "the administration is weak, the Fed is weak, its chairman is awaiting confirmation, and Congress is actively on the rampage". Nowadays Ben Bernanke has his reconfirmation and Congress is more timid, which explains why the stock market did okay back in January. The bad news here is that New York is suing Bank of America, which might hurt Bernanke. Another question here is the failure of several states in the US starting with California - they will want to get the same deal as Bank Of America.

(What I don't pretend to know about: the future for Greece and, in the wings, Portugal and then Spain; not to mention the bubble in China. Crises there might help us here as people take their money out of the Mediterranean and the Pacific, and plant it in North America. On the other hand China might decide they really REALLY need their money back, from us, to keep from waking their fiscal dragon.)

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posted by Zimri on 17:44 | link |

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Leo Strauss


A couple of points from the Xenos article I linked a couple posts back:

Xenos describes Straussism - which is not quite the same as neoconservatism - as a gnosticism, of an inner group holding the mysteries of the Kingdom and an outer group of supporters and dupes.

The gnostic construction of society is that of a misanthrope - one who sees the bulk of the human population as too unintelligent to handle basic facts, including political facts. (This aspect of his thought is what appeals to me personally.)

Strauss had a love of the classics, and constantly cites classical terms in his work. He describes a "city" in terms which a patriotic Athenian might use for his Polis. This blog views a "city" in inherent terms, as a large shopping mall with living quarters; any further, to me, is humbug.

But perhaps a necessary humbug. Strauss's magical thinking of "city" causes him to assume that the city should run under a participatory form of "regime" (another Straussian term). But Strauss the misanthrope can't let the rabble have an equal vote. So he says to the elders, you need to converse with each other in measurable fact, and with the common rabble in cant and myth. "Philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city." Xenos sees that as "pure fascism". Also fascist, in Goldbergian terms, would be Strauss's bias toward "resolution" over politics, which he got from Heidegger.

Strauss wrote more opaquely here in the "liberal" United States than back home in Germany. Xenos thinks it's because of his reactionary instinct, but in my view it's because Strauss saw this country for the dictatorship of experts which Wilson, Hoover and the Roosevelts had made it. He could also tell that the country wasn't going to get any better.

Strauss's problem with the American "regime" wasn't that it was gnostic (which it is); it's that it's run by leftist gnostics. Strauss decided to launch his own "march through the institutions", with his own set of students. These could get into power under a non-leftist administration - and they did, under Ford and more especially Reagan and Bush Junior.

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posted by Zimri on 22:23 | link |

Once and future


I was wondering what had sparked DougJ's interest in neoconnery. I find out, via the Transterrestrial grapevine, that he might have read it in Newsweek.

"Neoconservatism" as a term, I'd thought, started as a pejorative which Communists had leveled at their fellow liberals when the latter plumped for a less-evil policy on this or that. Many of these liberals started out as Trotskyites. Then reality gave them the now-proverbial mugging. They became supporters of conservative means toward liberal ends. It all reminds me of T.H. White's strawman in The Once And Future King, King Arthur's aim "to establish Right by Might".

I say "strawman" because the monarchy of King Arthur was always going to end in blood and tears. When White defined his Arthur as a progressive idealist, he was saying that progressive idealism was a cosmic tragedy waiting to happen. White had written this book to counsel his fellow Britons toward isolationism - we now say, nuance and engagement - vis-a-vis Adolf Hitler. Americans mostly remember his book for the section, "Candle In The Wind"; and its devolution into cliche in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy. (We do not speak of Elton John in this blog.)

It is hard to say that the neocons were wrong. Certainly the butcher's bill is high in any idealistic adventure. But it seems to me, and it was apparent to Newsweek, that once they have succeeded in causing a war, at least the neocons do not interfere in the military's task. For instance the neocons became big supporters of Petraeus when they realised that Rumsfeld was failing. The neocons were never fans of Johnson's folly in Vietnam, but they did support the efforts under Nixon which might have turned that conflict around. I will take advice from an armchair neocon "chickenhawk" long before I take it from a compromised phony like John Kerry.

As for whether the neocons will die off, or return in triumph - wherever there are idealists, and as long as the dour Leftists and mealy-mouthed "moderates" don't allow that idealism to manifest itself into anything ideal, I don't see "neoconservatism" going anywhere soon.

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posted by Zimri on 21:35 | link |

What I've been up to lately


After about three months of continuous blogging, in which I've grunted out the impacted crap I'd been carrying around for three years or longer... I've decided to go back to reading. More fresh, green nuggets of wisdom will assuredly be forthcoming.

One of the sites I was reading, or rather trying to read, has been ZeroHedge. It shames me to admit to not understanding it, any of it. If ZeroHedge were a biblical, history, or maybe even mathematics blog then I would be ALL up in its bidness. To console me, I have Rugoff's text, This Time Is Different, which delineates eight centuries of financial folly. When I am through with that, or rather when it is through with me, nothing will stand between me and the life of a millionaire hedge trader in Singapore. Or at least Harare.

In other news, I have ventured back into DougJ's work in BalloonJuice, much against my better judgement; and it redirected me to Nicholas Xenos's classic piece on Strauss and neoconservatism. This piece had come out, I think, in 2003. If it had come out in 2002 I would have noticed it. At that time, though, I would have had nothing useful to say on it. Such is life. There's an even earlier, post-Web but pre-blogosphere piece linked here.

Elsewhere Mencius Moldbug is still running his pledge drive. He has made it clear that if you donate, you are donating to his PAST work. He makes no promises that he will not take this money, and his best friend Bruce, off to a most salubrious holiday in Provincetown. After all he has taught me, he is welcome to invite Jim McGreevy and to make it a three-way. (But I hope not Andrew Sullivan; a gentleman must have some standards.) So, $50 for him now; and I look forward to purchasing some actual merchandise when it come out.

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posted by Zimri on 20:31 | link |

Friday, January 22, 2010

Knifing the camel


I think today is going to be "Obvious Day". There are things I want to say, but they are so trite and self-evident that I feel embarrassment in saying them. No, I haven't been drinking. Maybe it's just the nature of Friday.

The parcel of obviosity I have in mind: that Massachusetts was a no-confidence vote against the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate. Harry Reid lost there and, given that Yankees are the vanguard of the Left, inductively Reid lost everywhere else. If this were a unicameral Parliamentary government, he'd be out on his ear and we'd all be awaiting new elections next week.

Fortunately we have two houses of Congress, and also an independently-elected President; in normal years, the damage would be contained to the Senate. Unfortunately the other House and also the President had put their chips on Reid's table. The whole elected government is cashed out. We should add to that the Democratic party, and the unions (who got that infamous exemption), and the pro-Obama media. About the only leftists standing, if you don't count Senator Lieberman, are Jane Hamsher and her understudies in FireDogLake.

Obama has, at last, redirected his caravan of fools toward structural economic reform - like he should have done last year. But his camel is dying and, as the Arabs say, the knives are out.

Take "charlesphillipsandyavaughniewilkins.com" and its attendant billboards. (h/t, Ace.) Charles Phillips is on Obama's economic advisory board. YaVaughnie Wilkins is his now-jilted 8-year lover. These billboards are an embarrassment to Phillips and, by extension, to his board. Barack Obama, again, looks like a guy who sure can pick 'em and like an economic moron. Did Miss Wilkins dare this stunt last year? Hell no! She's doing it now because she can.

Ben "The Helicopter" Bernanke is another one. Bernanke could have got reconfirmed, easy, if Coakley had beat Brown with the 30 point margin she'd had last month. The stock market was going up, for a start. Now, though, people on Right and Left are ready to grade his performance and they've decided he's an Obama yes-man with no credibility.

And I notice the Dow Jones went into freefall today - a "parabolic orbit", a function y=10,157.64-kt2, accelerating on its way down. Unless something positively Gaussian in its brilliance emerges from Washington and New York this weekend, I expect Monday to be brutal. And, forgive me for saying so, but I do not get the impression from this government that anything emanating from it will be earning a Fields Medal.

Barack Obama has lost his clout. He is in no position to accomplish anything significant this year. "It's every pol for himself", in the words of Dennis the Peasant. This government has imploded.

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posted by Zimri on 17:26 | link |

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Obama's trained seals on the faculty


Obama's pet historians have given him another B+.

I'd hat/tip a commenter from Ace here (again!) but I lost my place in the shuffle of posts today. Anyway. Here's the quote -

Five of the U.S. historians whose insights President Barack Obama sought at a dinner last summer give him grades averaging a B-plus for his first year in office if his push for health-care legislation succeeds.

Obama’s handling of the economy won praise; what was seen as a lack of leadership on health care and a missed opportunity to seize on populist outrage about bank bonuses earned criticism. Making the judgments were Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Dallek, H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley and David Kennedy, who were among nine historians at the June 30 White House meal.


When the economically-minded reader dismounts from these historians' pet rainbow unicorn, he finds that Obama's economic plan was an utter disaster and that his "leadership on health care" was headed in the wrong direction. Said reader would then question what blend of crack these historians were smoking.

Of these five historians: I know of David Kennedy for his 1970s textbook "The American Pageant", which critics now deride as Whig History paffle. Doris Kearns Goodwin barely needs introduction; she's the one who was outed as a plagiarist in 2002.

What I am saying is that none of these five are historians in the empirical sense. They are hacks who support the Party narrative, that Party being the Party of the universities and civil service. Obama may as well have graded himself.

Their advice last June will have been closer to intellectual flattery than to concrete proposals. I don't know what the other four said, but whatever it was it would have been drowned out by these five. I suspect Obama got what he asked for.

These dour apparatchiks are the men and women YOU PAY FOR, to teach your children.

As an appendix, it scares me that Obama prefers to take his advice from flatterers rather than from people willing to challenge his (Marxist) views.

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posted by Zimri on 18:02 | link |

McCain-Feingold, RIP


That flagship of antiConstitutional legislation, one of many Bush Dubya Disasters, and frequent whipping-post on his blog, has finally been put out of our misery.

I don't have anything to say about it, that I didn't say on the linked thread. Just take it as given that we're running rings about the "daaaamn those greeeedycorporaaations, duuude" contingent therein.

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posted by Zimri on 17:48 | link |

Gun control


Leaving aside my personal views on the Second Amendment, let's look at how it works politically.

Gun control is popular when people feel that they do not, personally, need a gun. This happens when they are confident in their own government and do not see a lot of potential criminals around them.

The 1950s were such times. Arguably, so were the late 1990s. This is not one of those times.

The Republicans shouldn't set out to run campaigns based on their gun-rights principles. However I suspect the Democrats can be trolled into attacking Republicans for taking money from the NRA etc. If the Democrats do that, like they did in Massachusetts, I see the tactic backfiring (if you'll excuse the term).

Hollowpoint doesn't see the issue as a winner for Democrats. I don't either.

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posted by Zimri on 17:33 | link |

The Republicans' Senatorial candidate for Illinois (ugh)


It's too late.

Half a year after the Cap And Trade fiasco, Mark Kirk still has no opposition worthy of the name.

Since then, Kirk has tacked to the Right - reversing himself on That Vote, and blasting the Pelosi health plan. In the general election, Kirk is going to run a "Brown campaign": as the candidate of greater Illinois against the Combine. He has to. Plus, we can probably troll Obama into campaigning against him, which will alienate him from the nationwide Democrats.

Spending your money on more outspoken conservatives, especially that empty suit Pat Hughes, will just serve to piss Kirk off. You want to get Kirk more pissed off at Democrats.

The "tea party" activists should concentrate on the downticket races, so they can get less-equivocal conservatives in the US House and State congress.

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posted by Zimri on 17:24 | link |

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The Darwin Fish sucks


You know the Darwin Fish. There's an ancient Christian emblem, the Nile Fish, which came back into style when more Christians learnt their history. More recently various trolls, who know that Darwin's "dangerous idea" annoys Christians, have taken this fish, added legs to it, and inscribed it "DARWIN".

It is true that Ichthyostega the first amphibian was basically a fish with legs. (I learnt about it in first grade.)

The symbol sucks anyway.

For the analogy to hold true, Charles Darwin would be an evolution of Christianity and it is NOT.

In fact, Darwin's thought (and Alfred Wallace's) "evolved" from Linnaeus and thousands of years of experience in animal husbandry. Darwin just happened to live in a post-Enlightenment society whose basis was a reaction against fundamentalist Christianity.

I get the snark. Truly, I do. But it's not good snark. Atheists, Darwinists, scientists, whatever - take that damned thing off your car. It's not just annoying, it's ignorant and stupid.

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posted by Zimri on 21:35 | link |

Student loans


CNS is reporting, that the next Big Project from our best and brightest is to seize the student-loan industry.

Not "just" the "14.3 million of the 17.5 million student loans ... federally subsidized for the 2009-2010 fiscal year". He wants all of it; he wants to ban private lenders from lending money to a student for the sake of a degree.

It would cost "a total of $103 billion" over the fiscal year in question, but these days hundreds of thousands of millions is funny-money. No wonder Russians prefer the Canadian loony - Canuck cash is less insane than ours.

I've posted on the "higher-education" boondoggle before; notably in the context of Great Britain (in worse shape than us, if you can believe that). The student-loan industry only exists in the first place because higher-education costs so much here.

Anyway, universities in the West at this point are little more than Puritan madrassas. They already own the government. Obama himself is a monster from this laboratory (Harvard Law division). This takeover is a further development of the university/government entanglement. It's a mere formalisation.

I can't, much, get angry over this development. (The bank bailouts bother me more.) I will say though that if you see someone who took a government loan for college, he's not to be trusted for hire as a political or policy thinker by the private sector. That is: Not On The Management Track.

(And I wouldn't hire him as a researcher in psychology or climate either.)

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posted by Zimri on 21:11 | link |

Big-picture voting


So I'm going down the list of Presidential elections for which I was eligible to vote:

  • 1996: Dole
  • 2000: Bush
  • 2004: Bush
  • 2008: McCain

For observers of this reactionary blog, there's no surprises here. (If we're going before that, in 1992 I supported Perot, but I couldn't vote then and I didn't have the Internet.)

But I'm wondering, how I should have voted, given what I know now. That is, would my life, the state of the nation, and the state of the world have been better if the vote had gone a different way?

To that end,

  • 1996: Dole
  • 2000: Gore
  • 2004: Bush
  • 2008: McCain

Oh noes! I've gone retroactively liberal! - well, not quite.

(For the record, I was working my way up to voting Gore in 2000. Really I was. But then that dirty trick of Bush's 1970 DWI came out the weekend before the election. I hear it turned many votes to Gore; for me, I got so upset with the news media I voted Bush.)

The contrafactual Dole Presidency, 1997-2000. This would not have got us any Supreme Court retirements. The US would have muddled along, with a decent economy - exactly as it did under Clinton anyway. Tech bubble set to go off after y2k as in our universe. Clinton would have been caught with bimbos. Al-Qaeda would have plotted and done the same stuff. The most major change is that we might not have intervened for Kosovo. I am not sure that Dole would have bothered again in 2000. Otherwise the Republican brand in Congress would have been slightly better off than in our universe, for lack of an impeachment scandal. Further, with Gingrich more in the saddle, DeLay and his corruption would not have taken hold as far as it did here. Overall America would have been better prepared for the 2000s, although not all that much more. The butterfly-effect kicks in and makes predictions of the 2000s hard.

The contrafactual Gore Presidency, 2001-2004 (remember, this assumes a Clinton Presidency beforehand!). Jeffords switches and brings along Chafee and Specter. On the Supreme Court, a possible Ginsberg or O'Connor retirement. The Republican House repudiates Compassionate Conservatism and George W Bush's weird attacks against ethnic profiling. We do not encourage the housing / finance bubble. "9/11" does not happen here; but we see terrorist attacks abroad, and perhaps an assassination of certain outspoken Zionists. (Basically the plot of The Siege.) 2002 is a slightly more Republican year than in our universe, making the Senate an effective tie with Vice President Lieberman as tiebreaker. After that, in Iraq Saddam grows weaker and spirals into low-level civil war with Iranian and Saudi interference. 2004 is a huge Republican year and Jeb Bush becomes President. The credit bubble bursts earlier, but we deal with it. I don't know if we do anything about occupying other nations (maybe Somalia / Yemen). Jeb remains President today.

The contrafactual Kerry Presidency, 2005-2006 (again, we're assuming all went as usual before: Clinton to 2000, Bush to 2004). A few votes in Ohio went the other way. It's fraud and Kerry lost the popular election, and it was a strong Republican year elsewhere. Kerry starts out a lame duck, and proves it by ruling incompetently. O'Connor, Rehnquist, Ginsberg hang on as long as they can - because Kerry won't nominate anyone decent, and the Republicans won't consent to the fools Kerry chooses. We lose Iraq (to Iran) and soon enough Pakistan and Somalia (to al-Qaida). Many dozen thousands of our troops die. Nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Southeast Asia irradiated. A caliphate in Aceh and much of Indonesia. There's a tsunami at some point in this span of time which just makes things worse. I don't know if Katrina, or Rita, or human sabotage floods New Orleans; that's butterfly-effect stuff. 2006 is a Republican blowout and Kerry is kicked out for gross negligence. I can't even rule out a civil war here.

The contrafactual McCain Presidency, 2009-2012. The economy better off than it is now. Afghanistan better off than it is now. But... possible coup in the House, taking over Appropriations and forming a rival powerbase to the Executive. Republicans roundly blamed for the clusterbang.

Okay, that was fun. So, all in all, I'd say: a bit of a wash for 1996, shoulda voted Gore 2000, we all ought to thank God that Kerry did not win 2004, and we're currently living the nightmare under Obama but I'm not sure how much better McCain would have been.

In 2000, the atheist webmaster (he didn't have a blog then) Richard Carrier warned us to vote against Bush on grounds of the economy. That comment made me angry, I thought it was purely because of anti-Christian bias, and I nursed a grudge for almost a decade. I owe him an apology. Gore might have been a worse President than Bush, but even so not MUCH worse, and over the long term his term would have gone better for us.

I suspect Gore knows that; that is why he is so bitter.

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posted by Zimri on 19:28 | link |

Where is Scott Brown?


BShor is saying Scott Brown is more liberal than Olympia Snowe, and now he’s pivotal, too. (H/t, Ponnuru at the NRO Corner.)

I believe this was true of his tenure in Massachusetts, where his job was to stay clear of the Kennedy / Kerry / Menino machine. It is also true that his campaign did not cite the Republican brand.

But despite all that, his campaign was explicitly conservative. This campaign further aimed at Federal issues, and did not promise any pork earmarked to Massachusetts. Previous aisle-straddlers - Specter, Jeffords, Chafee, and the Maine sisters - like to see their names in the paper; I do not get this impression from Brown. Brown also managed to make enemies among the Washington DC Democrats, all the way up to Barack Obama himself. Brown has to know that the Democrats will find a more credible candidate to run against him in 2012.

Brown's interest is in keeping up ties with the Republicans at large, so that should he lose in 2012, he can get a decent job in a Republican administration. Now that he's in the Senate, he could do additional good for Yankee Republicans, by calling in the Feds to root out Democratic corruption in Boston, as Senator Fitzgerald did in Chicago.

Therefore I do not see Brown staking out territory alongside Olympia Snowe, as a flamboyant RINO. I see Brown gravitating closer to Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, as a reliably moderate-Republican vote.

Which is not to say that Ponnuru is wrong on judicial appointments. I agree that we must brace ourselves for Brown joining the rest of 'em in confirming the next Sotomayor.

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posted by Zimri on 18:27 | link |

Affordability in housing


We've been talking affordability: how an ethical State would get there, and why its current implementation is a boondoggle. Here is how it works in housing.

Housing consists of a bounded parcel of land, some materials, and labour. The caveman who wants a house will mark his territory, find a few trees, and build the house. Then, there is trade in a central market. As the village can afford to employ more people, more people will come to fill those jobs, and those people will settle. It becomes a city.

This state of nature worked pretty well for northern Illinois in 1825 but works less well for Chicago today. The wilderness is filled up. There's sewage to consider. There's title disputes. There's noise, roads, electrics...

The facts are: land is finite in Chicago, and the cost of building on the land without screwing over everyone else has gone up. Events reach a point where the land is too expensive for all the people who want to live there. But someone might be able to afford PART of the land. Hence, the urban phenomenon of the Island, that lovely term which the Romans applied to a block of apartments.

The key here is that a city, as a defined parcel of land itself, is a sovereign entity. The city is just an apartment complex corporation writ large. By the ethics of all sovereign corporations, the city must turn a profit. Cheap housing is fine if it turns a profit. And the ultimate aim of that complex, too, has to be to turn a bigger profit later. To the city, all houses are halfway houses.

In economics there are two ways and only two ways to lower cost. The city can increase supply or the city can decrease demand.

We'll not talk about decreasing demand here. If you want a place which has decreased demand, I refer you to Detroit.

That leaves supply. The city could make new land by annexation or, on a coastline that is shallow enough and not very pretty, by building levees and dikes. In Chicago, the city has no choice but to take over some land no-one is much using, and to sell that to a developer of apartments.

Apartment complex owners can hold costs down by expanding the number of units in the complex: building upward, usually. This rarely lowers the costs, though.

As for city policy, the city is left to lowering the cost of the existent housing (efficiency improvements). There is a limit to what the city can do, and the law of diminishing returns applies here as well.

Affordability, ethically, cannot be a primary goal for the city. It's like a French restaurant designing an "Affordable Menu". There is no reason a city has to get involved in housing except to ensure that the proposed apartment complex does not lower the property values of the surrounding land beyond what the new complex would bring in.

If the city has an affordable-housing staff, that staff is probably more involved in lowering property values than in increasing supply. These guys are scamming the city twice: first, they are lowering city profit and second, they are taking wages for the privilege.

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posted by Zimri on 17:20 | link |

How the State makes something "affordable"


Last month I cited "-able" as a weasel suffix pointing to a likely boondoggle. In the case of "affordable", we're looking at the State interfering with cost.

Often, "affordable" means subsidised, and there is no inductive limit to the subsidy. It's Free Stuff on the taxpayer dime: hire person A to bribe person B with the wealth of C, and then create a democracy wherein A and B vote down C's complaint (and call C a villain for complaining).

The reasoning for how the State can handle Stuff that people need, in my view, ought to be to be inductive. Start with a caveman in the state of nature. Explain how the caveman could get that Stuff. Investigate why the caveman can't have it. Conclude with what the State must do as policy.

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posted by Zimri on 16:42 | link |

Monday, January 18, 2010

Bad Idea Rifles


I hear that our weapons are now Christian weapons.

I have no fondness for Islam, and I have no problem in coating the ammunition we use in Islamic land in something symbolically unIslamic. If jihadis don't want to get shot with it, perhaps they shouldn't attack our soldiers.

That out of the way, I think it's bad mojo to be pasting Paul's slogans and John's slogans on our weapons. From a Christian perspective, it doesn't help the Great Commission. From the perspective of non-Christians in the Army, and arguably even Catholics (more partial to Matthew and Peter), these slogans do not speak for them.

Something else is at work, and what is at work is evangelical muscle-flexing against the chain of command within the army. Chris Hitchens has already reported upon that.

Unfortunately our President is so weak, and has so little credibility within the Army, that I'm not sure he can do anything about it. I am afraid it will have to fall upon the generals. But for the sake of the Enlightenment and the Constitution - the true fruit of the Western Civilisation and the American experiment, and the true enemy of the Jihad - I urge the army to secularise itself.

We do not wish to become Turks, here.

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posted by Zimri on 21:39 | link |

How to help Haiti and Haitians


Haiti has a number of problems right now, but ultimately it boils down to: too many people, subject to not enough law, upon a moonscape of an environment. Now the Haitians don't even have a city to live in.

Haiti, and the Caribbean and the New World in general, can no longer afford Haitian poverty. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, it is time we abolished poverty - in Haiti, and for Haitians.

Here is how I would do it.

First, the American military needs to go in and restore order. Sorry if the French don't like it. Sorry if Ted Rall doesn't like it. Even an exploitative order is, still, order.

Any Haitian who doesn't want to live in Haiti, and any Haitian illegally resident in the US, should be encouraged to move to Senegal. It's Francophone, and the origin-point for much of the Haitian population at that. The Senegalese have already volunteered to take them in. (h/t, Shay Riley @ Booker.)

Then, a reforestation programme should be put in place, modeled after the policy which the Dominican Republic implemented successfully (28% forest there).

For those flatter areas not subject to the reforestation decree, the agricultural populace left behind should be encouraged to grow crops for export. To that end, the US must immediately quit subsidising its corn, ethanol, and sugar industries. Back in Haiti, the US will oversee the profits and skim some off the top, earmarked to defray the costs which the US and Senegal have accrued.

Encourage the Dominican Republic to build power plants (nuclear?) and to sell the energy to Haiti.

On the assumption that Haiti is to rule itself again, those left behind will receive a limited form of democratic franchise. The ability to pay property tax will earn the vote. Everyone else loses citizenship. Again: those who don't like it, they move to Senegal, and they take it up with the Senegalese.

The language of administration is to be English, and no longer French.

That should, I believe, cover the more glaring problems with the place; while retaining Haiti as a land for law-abiding and patriotic Haitians.


posted by Zimri on 20:27 | link |

Martin Luther King day


Every year around this time I have to sift through mounds of sugary paffle about Martin Luther King Junior. I expect this from Leftists. What is annoying me is commentary by people who should know better, taking King as some sort of libertarian / Republican hero.

MLK as a Republican earns FAIL for not supporting Nixon in 1960 and Goldwater in 1964. As a libertarian, extra FAIL for Goldwater.

I guess you may as well start here. It's typical of the genre; Rich Lowry at National Review Online (whose parent newsweekly opposed civil rights in the 1950s) is, now, waxing nostalgic over the 1950s civil-rights struggle and about the threats MLK faced then. But... first, that was the 1950s. Second, those who opposed civil-rights then, including National Review, had a hunch about some of those guys, that their ultimate aim wasn't really civil-rights.

MLK had a life beyond his marches for civil rights in the 1950s and early 1960s, and after his I Have A Dream speech. No: MLK lived, spoke, and wrote until April 4 1968. In the meantime, Republicans have chosen to forget the speeches on behalf of democratic socialism and the welfare state.

I've long been aware of several choice quotes from Where Do We Go From Here (1967); I'm surprised only that I haven't posted them here yet. Here's one: "the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income". How? "Some form of constructive coercive power". And more:

Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will... We have come to the point where we must make the non-producer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution... The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other... The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking. The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

MLK never ceased to speak in eschatological and apocalyptic terms - this promised land that we would always be striving toward, but never reaching; these dreams which would never become reality. There was never going to be a future in which men like MLK would drop their placards and set to designing bridges and resolving the Collatz Conjecture.

In addition, if King were such a fan of the rule of law and representative government, King would have supported Johnson's efforts to preserve same in South Vietnam. That King opposed Johnson's effort (rather than blaming Johnson for doing it wrong), shows that King was an opponent of similar values at home.

This isn't revisionism, to call Martin Luther King Jr a "democratic" socialist, but socialist foremost. To give him this label is to take King's dream at its word.

Insofar as MLK was a Republican, the worse for the Republicans. Insofar as blacks support MLK, the worse for the black character. And where people to this day take it as a point of pride that they "marched with King" - it must be asked of them, when did you march, and why.

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posted by Zimri on 19:29 | link |

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Dictatorship of the proletariat


My definition of government is "landowner of ultimate sovereignty". When "workers seize the government", the workers have taken over the land on which their own factories rest.

What happens next is visible in Russia 1917. Kerensky's government collapsed and the Soviets stepped in as the most credible parallel organisation left.

A worker takeover gives workers sovereignty over their own employers. Since the workers can grab what they need from the State, in practice they don't even have employers anymore. But even a new and revolutionary State has to survive, and to do that it must keep everything from crashing down. The State can't tell the workers they were wrong the whole time, so the State has to assume that role of "employer" for all essential functions.

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posted by Zimri on 19:11 | link |

What does Obama want with us?


What does Obama want for the United States? First, ignore the words that come out of his mouth. He hasn't "strengthened America"; he's strengthened the mandarinate at the expense of America.

If Obama has been deliberate in his hostile acts against this country, we'd have to impeach him and try him for treason. To support that I need proof.

Charles Krauthammer has laid out The Obama Doctrine, such as it is. Obama's ideal is a multipolar world in which the US takes its rightful place somewhere around the level of Brasil. This must mean American decline. However Obama need not seek to bring about an American decline actively. It might mean he muddles along while avoiding any major changes that might help.

Economically, he's been a disaster, but this too might not be intentional. We do know more about Obama's intent here; he told Joe the Plumber that he wants an economy "that's good for everyone". I'm allowing that Obama would be okay with a prosperous economy if, somehow, his New Model economy resulted that way.

I suspect Obama honestly thought he would be bringing on the Messianic Age wherein his wonderfulness would override the laws of realpolitik and economics. I think he is indifferent to foreign policy and to the economy beyond how "fair" they are. It takes an additional leap to say more.

Against that, tachyonshuggy countered:

The stimulus is a good example of what I'm talking about. It was equivalent to taking a massive amount of US wealth and flushing it down the toilet. Moreover, it was such a transparently-worthless thing that it has scared US business into not investing. How am I to take anything away from this other than he meant to destroy US wealth?

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posted by Zimri on 19:09 | link |

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Vito Andolini


Fannie / Freddie are defrauding us. (Powerline.)

None of this surprises me one bit. As Zero Hedge explains, it's the political class's slush fund, which they use to buy votes, bypassing the bits in the Constitution which say that Congress is supposed to appropriate funds. No way were the Democrats / Progressive Caucus ever going to "reform" this beast.

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posted by Zimri on 18:56 | link |

Government-approved community organisations


The "community organisations" which involve themselves in politics seek a monopoly over the possible interpersonal networks in any given place. So, they have to suppress those other networks. The way these networks have chosen to do this is to cultivate friends within the State and to get those friends to do the work.

In the words of Rhinestone Suderman: The lesson to be learned from this, is, of course, never volunteer to do anything in your community; if they don't go after you for taxes, the local unions will be hot on trail, trying to punish you for supposedly stealing their jobs.

But after a year of President Obama and a few more years of Governors like Patrick and Paterson, and seeing their incompetence and dictatorial flourishes, I suspect that many Yankees would like to go back to a more decentralised, local-community model.

Coakley might win this round. But the Northeast is increasingly wise to the tactic.

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posted by Zimri on 18:53 | link |

Why the Yankee Northeast votes for socialists


Yankees live in a cold climate and are a communitarian lot. They like for their local governments and associations to look out for their neighbours.

Because fellow citizens like their local government to help them, that means that an opportunistic network could convince them to get Boston or, better yet, D.C. to help their local government; and because citizens like practicality, the network can convince them to get that central authority to co-ordinate it.

In addition, Yankees are aware that Southerners do not share their attitudes of government, society, and religion. In Massachusetts (say) an appeal to local government sounds like an appeal to anarchy. The Party of the State can then play the xenophobia card, as we see in Coakley's advertisements against those Southern and Western bugaboos Bush, Cheney, and Limbaugh.

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posted by Zimri on 18:51 | link |

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