2-27-09

2-27-09--If the reception accorded Mr. Huckabee on the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference was any indication, his words found a receptive audience. Few speakers, including Mr. Huckabee, a once and possibly future presidential candidate, left the stage without engaging in a fair amount of hand-wringing about where the conservative movement took a wrong turn.... But the mood on Thursday among the thousands of conservatives at the annual session was not defeatist. This, after all, is the conference where Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, is a major celebrity, and where the talk show host Rush Limbaugh gets a prime speaking slot. During the three-day event, conference attendees have their choice of dozens of panels like “Al Franken and Acorn: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System” and “Bailing Out Big Business: Are We All Socialists Now?”—NYT A19

2-26-09

2-26-09...the US, at 30%, is tied for sixth place in college graduation among those 25 to 34 years of age, 2006 data show, behind such countries as Norway, South Korea, and the Netherlands. OCED data suggest that the US was No. 1 around 2000, but has lost its edge as other countries have stepped up their efforts to promote higher education. WSJ A4

2-25-09

2-25-09--...a neoconservative foreign-policy guru is not exactly a respected calling these days. As early and influential cheerleaders for the Iraq war, neocons occupy a level on par with investment bankers and eviction specialists. –Franck, WSJ A13

--Bailout Hearings. Senator: Mr. Dogbert, did you fly herein a corporate jet? Dogbert: Yes, the same jet that took you on a fact-finding trip to Aruba, you wool-coated glob of fat. Bring it on! I can do this all day. Senator: I yield my time to the hypocrite from another state.--DILBERT

2-23-09

2-23-09—Early last year, official s were still fretting abut the rise of London’s financial industry and the competitive threat it posed to New York. Now they are worried about filling a huge hole in the city’s economy while ring to retain thousands of laid off financiers before they scatter across the globe. –NYT A19
--I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust do we. It’s like how many have there been? You know, we get it. It was grim. Move on. No, I’m doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar. I’ve been nominated four times. Never won. And the whole world is going, ‘why hasn’t Kate won one.’ That’s it. That’s why I’m doing it. Schlinders ‘bloody’ List. The Pianist. Oscars coming out of their ass.”—Kate Winslet

2-21-09

2-21-09—Mr. [Nouriel] Roubini tells me that bank nationalization “is something the partisans would have regarded as anathema a few weeks ago. When I and others put it in the context of the Swedish model [of the 1990s]—i.e., you take banks over, you clean them up, and you sell them in rapid order to the private sector.... at some level it’s good to have a framework to think about the world, in which you emphasize the role of incentives and market economics ... fair enough! But I think it lead to an excessive ideological belief that there are no market failures, and no issues of distortions on incentives. Also, central banks were created to provide financial stability. Greenspan forgot this, and that was a mistake. I think there were ideological blunders, taking Ayn Rand’s view of the world to an extreme.” --WSJ A9

--2007--Gaitskill gives Granite/Rand the needling she deserves, and it would all be very funny except for the fact that people beyond Dorothy take Rand seriously. People like Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and a number of other people on the Right who now enjoy positions of great power and influence in this country. Indeed, the rest of the people on the Right who might not seem inclined to share the religionless vision of Rand and Greenspan nevertheless seem to embrace the worldview summarized in The Gods Disdained excerpt given above. Again:

The book was about the struggle of a few isolated, superior people to ward off the attacks of the mean-minded majority as they created all the beautiful important things in the world while having incredible sex with each other. It ended with almost all the inferior majority being blown up in chemical disasters, perishing in airplane wrecks or collapsing buildings, all more or less simultaneously, all as an indirect result of their own inferiority. (163)

With some minor adjustments, the paragraph might well describe the essence of the Left Behind fantasies of the Christian Nazis who revel in their dreams of apocalypse.
In short, it might be fine if these issues of power, abuse, and abasement were confined to the bedroom. Unfortunately they leak and pour into offices, schoolyards, workplaces, and politics. Ayn Rand and her Christian allies share one solution.
--Bachmann, EXTREME PROUST p. 337

things are tuff all over

2-20-09—The Justice Dept. sued UBS AG to obtain access to 52,000 accounts belonging to US clients—some 30,000 more than previously known—a day after reaching an agreement to settle a criminal investigation that called for the Swiss bank to turn over 250 accounts in a wide ranging tax-evasion probe. WSJ A1

--The very first actress to win an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences played a woman reduced to prostitution [1929] ... During the following decades, the Academy would nominate dozens of actresses for playing prostitutes, call girls, and courtesans of one sort or another ... Jeanine Basinger: “The way to land an Oscar as a woman is either to take off your makeup or put on a lot more. You’re either a prostitute/stripper or you’re a mother/nun.” ... [Oscar nominee Michael Radford] let his cast choose what kind of roles they wanted to play . And what roles did they choose? Strippers, naturally. Mr. Radford says the actresses were attracted by the edginess of that occupation as well as the ways that stripper roles deviated from the “vacant romantic roles” so often offered to women in Hollywood.—WSJ W4

--March 2, 2009—GLOBE, pp 16.17: With his legacy and marriage in tatters, former President George W. Bush has plunged into such a depression friends fear he may be suicidal. ...[he] is * scared to death the Obama administration will prosecute him for war crimes or other illegal acts. * Worried that former First Lady Laura will expose embarrassing secrets in her upcoming memoir. * Devastated that people are calling him the worst President in American history ... sources say Bush—who stopped drinking at age 40—has been finding solace in his old friend, Jim Beam.

2-19-09

2-19-2009—Germany stepped up efforts to stabilize its banking sector, approving a draft law that allows forced nationalizations...WSJ A10

2-17-2009

2-17-09--Countries that have adopted a “war on terror” response to terrorism have done “immense damage” to international law and human rights, according to a special panel set up b the International Commission of Jurists, a Geneva based group of lawyers and judges. ... The panel said increasingly secretive action was becoming widespread in democratic states. NYT A8

--A leading scientific group has announced its intention to boycott Louisiana because of a new state law that could open the door to teaching creationism in the public schools. NYT A14

--...Benedict ignited another [firestorm ]by appointing the Rev. Gerhard Maria Wagner, known for his Katrina comment [that New Orleans’ sins brought Katrina] and for saying that homosexuality was curable, as the auxiliary bishop of Linz. ...In Mexico, another crisis is undermining confidence in the church: this month, the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative religious order, said that its founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, had led a double life and fathered a child in an affair. Before his death last year at 87, Father Maciel was forced by the Vatican to leave his ministry after allegations that he had sexually abused seminarians. NYT A5

update

David Brooks assured his readers in the New York Times that the incoming [Obama] apparat, its members “twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them,” embodied “the best of the Washington insiders.” “Achievetrons ... who got double 800s on their SATs,” said Brooks, taking pains to list the schools from which they had received diplomas. (Columbia, Harvard, Wellesley, Harvard Law, Stanford, Yale Law, Princeton, etc.) ... Take into account the Ivy League’s contribution to the Bush Administration [Ashcroft Yale, Rumsfeld Princeton, Chertoff Harvard] and I can imagine a doctoral thesis commissioned by the Kennedy School of Government and meant to determine which of the country’s leading institutions of higher learning over the past 50 years has done the most damage to the health and happiness of the American people. ...The high fees charged by the band-name institutions include surer access to the nomenklatura that writes the nation’s laws, operates its government, manages its money, and controls its news media. ... Achievetrons don’t do floors and windows.
Lewis Lapham HARPER’S March 2009 pp. 9f

Friday 13

2-13-09TOKYO — The Obama administration is committing huge sums of money to rescuing banks, but the veterans of Japan’s banking crisis have three words for the Americans: more money, faster.
The Japanese have been here before. They endured a “lost decade” of economic stagnation in the 1990s as their banks labored under crippling debt, and successive governments wasted trillions of yen on half-measures.
Only in 2003 did the government finally take the actions that helped lead to a recovery: forcing major banks to submit to merciless audits and declare bad debts; spending two trillion yen to effectively nationalize a major bank, wiping out its shareholders; and allowing weaker banks to fail.
By then, Tokyo’s main Nikkei stock index had lost almost three-quarters of its value. The country’s public debt had grown to exceed its gross domestic product, and deflation stalked the land. In the end, real estate prices fell for 15 consecutive years.
More alarming? Some students of the Japanese debacle say they see a similar train wreck heading for the United States.
NYT B1

off to Elkhart

2-9-09—Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan. And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal. ...
So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.
For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”
No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

Franckluy speaking

2-4-09--The market god has failed. WSJ A11

2-3-09

2-3-09—Shoe is thrown at Chinese Premier. NYT A6

--Wall Street, a Financial Epithet, Stirs Outrage and Punch Lines. ... “I’d almost rather say I’m a pornographer,” said a retired Wall Street executive who, for self-evident reasons, asked not to be identified. NYT A1, A14