• John McCain's had some more time to think about John Lewis's words of caution about the level of racial intolerance and violence coming out in this election season. He thinks John Lewis' words were unacceptable. [CNN]
• Of course, he probably didn't read this article about how calling an African-American political figure a socialist has a long and unfortunate history dating back to efforts to make African-American political leaders — and their fight for equality — seem foreign and scary. [American Prospect]
• Or this one about how too many white people subconsciously associate white people with America and black people with foreign stuff. [Washington Post]
• Or this one, about how people think only the white working class voters of the Midwest count as an authentic political coalition. [American Prospect]

• Meanwhile, Barack Obama's got a new economic plan that involves you being able to access your retirement savings more easily and puts a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures. [NY Times]
• But the McCainiacs definitely read that because their on-again-off-again new economic stimulus plan is back on again for tomorrow, which is totally the way to avoid looking erratic. [TPM Election Central]
• And Nancy Pfotenhauer Pfuckingsucks still fucking sucks and is forced to, giggling, accuse über-conservative Bill Kristol of buying into Obama's hype. [Think Progress]
• Oh and, yes, Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics. I sort of feel bad now that I skipped reading his book in college. [NY Times]

SPENCER: It is 8:11 a.m. and the dude sitting near me at the BWI airport 50s-kitsch diner counter just ordered a 20 oz Miller Lite
MEGAN: Well, at least is isn't a 40? I am sitting in the hallway outside of security watching the tourists parade on by and watching the security people wonder what I'm doing. The security lady says it's coldest in the hallway between the A and B gates, a truth to which I can currently attest.
SPENCER: Interesting fact about the difference between A & B gates: for the purpose of eating or using the bathroom, you're better off using B, even if your flight is at A. No bathrooms at A, and the only stuff to eat is like Arby's and such.
MEGAN: Ooh, I remember that but please don't remind me how much I need to pee after all that coffee I drank to be awake enough to drive you up here. So, I feel like we should lead off with the story about how when Jesse Jackson suggested castrating Barack Obama, he also dropped the n-word, in reference to, well, pretty much every African-American person in America.
SPENCER: Also I bought an issue of Wired for the first time ever — I had a girlfriend who subscribed and my lack of interest in the magazine was a minor issue between us — because Julia Allison is on the cover and I still do not exactly know who she is, but she has extremely impressive cleavage.
MEGAN: Really? If you wanted a picture of impressive cleavage, you didn't have to pay for it.
SPENCER: Ah yes. You know who's upset that she doesn't get to use the N Word? Internment-camp apologist Michelle Malkin. Yes you have very impressive tits and I would never say otherwise.
MEGAN: I prefer that such knowledge be widespread, I will admit it. Also, how much does Michelle Malkin really suck, truly?
SPENCER: Hahahaha the waitress just brought me the Miller Lite by mistake
MEGAN: Dude, the man bought you a beer, it's only polite to accept.
SPENCER: I suppose with my Blackwater t-shirt and tattoos I look like the sort of air traveller who'd have a beer with his omelet
MEGAN: I can't believe that you're getting hit on by dudes this morning and I am not, I need to step up my game.
SPENCER: What is it with right-wingers and their desire to say the n-word? Like, what's in it for you?
MEGAN: Spencer, I mean, obviously, it's not faaaaaair that black people get to use the "n" word and get to be all offended about it when other people do. It's, like, practically anti-American. It's hating on our freedoms (to be racist, disgusting sonsofbitches).
SPENCER: Life is unfair to Michelle Malkin but I feel it is so for reasons independent of her inability to type the N-word.
MEGAN: I don't think like is unfair to MM. I think she is probably pretty damn content with her life. If we want to talk unfair lives, we'd talk about my life. Or yours.
SPENCER: So what are we supposed to believe follows from the apparent fact that Jesse Jackson used the N-word? The significance is...? My life is pretty great right now: I'm about to fly to Austin to attend and speak at a conference of the anti-American terrorist supporting left. i shaved my mustache down and grew out my beard so i could look like a Salafist.
MEGAN: Well, I think it's the hypocrisy of him being part of the campaign to get rappers and the like to stop using it.
I did notice your beard was longer, but I don't notice when the 'stache is shorter, I'll admit.
SPENCER: Oh that was Jackson? Should I blame him for the fact that Nas' record is called Untitled and not N Word? I feel like this is the sort of thing that only a non-black person could possibly find hypocritical
MEGAN: Yes, he was one of the anti-n-word campaign which, frankly, I'm not completely opposed to as I cringe when I hear someone say the word regardless of race, but it is the height of hypocrisy to moralize about it publicly and then use it privately. And/or to threaten to cut off the balls of the first black candidate for President when he suggests that some black men should take responsibility for their children when you've knocked up your mistress.
SPENCER: Like, I don't agree with this argument, but there's nothing a priori hypocritical about saying the n-word but not wanting prominent black figures to use it as the titles of their books or albums or movies or what-have-you. I don't think it's hypocritical! oftentimes I say things in unguarded moments that it's better not see print/publication/distribution. that's an issue of judgment, not hypocrisy. as Dave Chappelle taught us, a world in which everyone constantly keeps us real is not one we'd actually like to live in.
MEGAN: Well, I think that if you're going to argue for a word to be banned from use, then it shouldn't be a word that you're wont to drop yourself. Also, I'm mostly just disappointed in Jesse Jackson the way I am in Geraldine Ferraro, because I thought he was so awesome when I was a little kid and now he's just another big jerk. Plus, whenever I hear Rainbow Coalition, I think Rainbow Connection and now I feel like he has besmirched Kermit.
SPENCER: Have you ever listened to his "I Am Somebody" speech? It's beyond awesome. liberals should remember their history — we tend to think of the 80s as a wasteland of Reaganesque triumphalism but there were some real high points, and Rev JJ's 1984 convention speech is one of them
MEGAN: No, I completely agree. 1984 is really the first election I remember (him and Geraldine being little girl highlights of mine) and so that's really the source of my disappointment.
SPENCER: Jesus fucking CHRIST the Miller Liters are shouting out "Strong Island" to some women who sensibly left the diner-counter in a hurry. ok now i need you to explain something to me
MEGAN: Oh, God, I'm glad I'm not with you right now.
SPENCER: On our internal FDL email listserv, my blogospheric colleagues noted that there was a near-riot at an IndyMac branch in California. I have no idea why or what happened, nor what IndyMac, like, is, so I'm counting on you to explain.
MEGAN: Um, so, I take that back, a woman just sat down next to me out here and started clipping her toenails.
SPENCER: Done with breakfast now!
MEGAN: Ok, so, IndyMac: was a bank in California, still sort of is. The Feds moved in last Friday after it was determined that they didn't have enough money to meet their depository obligations because of tighter credit and foreclosures. Though, it might be eventually facing fraud charges.
SPENCER: and this is Housing-Crisis-related?
MEGAN: Yes, mostly. I mean, housing crisis and financial mismanagement, which are basically being seen as one and the same these days. But, so, like, if you didn't know, any savings accounts and CDs and the like are insured by the federal government up to — and only up to — $100,000.
SPENCER: I did not know
MEGAN: And the FDIC has determined that up to 10,000 IndyMac customers have deposits in excess of the FDIC limits, which is like up to $1 billion in uninsured deposits, and the FDIC expects to have to pay $8 billion + for the bail out. But those people with more money in than the FDIC insured, those people will basically be considered the bank's creditors and will wait years or more to get their money back (if they ever get their $$ back), which is why people were freaking the fuck out yesterday
SPENCER: Okay, I think I found the incident in question — it appears to have occurred in the San Fernando Valley:

Police ordered angry customers lined up outside an IndyMac Bank branch to remain calm or face arrest Tuesday as they tried to pull their money on the second day of the failed institution's federal takeover.
At least three police squad cars showed up early Tuesday as tensions rose outside the San Fernando Valley branch of Pasadena-based IndyMac.

So this is a riot of the formerly-rich?
MEGAN: Welcome to the Depression, and why the government started the FDIC in the first place, though it does provide a significant financial disincentive for banks to not do a great job self-regulating. Well, "formerly rich"
SPENCER: or is it only bloggers who don't have $100,000-plus in the bank these days?
MEGAN: I mean, some of these people, that might be their retirement savings because when you get within 5-10 of retirement you're told to take your money out of the stock market and put it in insurable, risk-averse assets.
SPENCER: Whoa you used the D-word
MEGAN: Ben B can come by and flog me later.
SPENCER: I am sure when I arrive at Netroots Nation there will be no shortage of invective on this, and i don't mean that pejoratively. Oh hey could I refer back to yesterday's CH for a second?
MEGAN: Which part? I know not the food parts...
SPENCER: The Iraq/Afghanistan parts
MEGAN: Sure
SPENCER: My friend Elle Reeve — someone else that TNR fucked over — read yesterday's CH rather attentively, as her husband Scott, a rather unfortunately infamous Iraq veteran, is scheduled to return for his second Iraq tour in the fall and she grounded yesterday's discussion of the Obama/McCain debate over Afghanistan/Iraq troop levels in a really compelling way, so I hereby introduce CH readers to the awesome Elle Reeve:

Obama wants to send two brigades to Afghanistan, and now McCain wants to send three. Where would these dudes come from? They're not going to pluck guys from one war zone and deposit them in another, right? So will troops scheduled for Iraq get sent to Afghanistan instead, and the guys in Iraq won't be replaced as their deployments expire? If Obama's elected and starts pulling out, wouldn't guys in Iraq have shortened deployments, while the guys in Afghanistan would still be deployed for 15 months at a time?

MEGAN: Oh, geez, that sucks that he got re-upped.
SPENCER:

Scott's brigade is mechanized, so there's little chance he'd be sent to Afghanistan, since tanks and Bradleys don't work well with mountains, right? The brigade is set to be in Iraq through near the last of Obama's 16 months. So what will happen to last of the guys in Iraq? Will they pull out of less volatile areas first? Because his co-workers totally deserve someplace nice in Kurdistan after serving in Baghdad last year. Basically, I'm looking to seize on any possibility that he'll be in a marginally less dangerous area. Or an area I can sneak in to. Kidding! Sort of. Give me the illusion of control.

Given that I need to board a plane in like 10 minutes, I sympathize deeply with Elle's desire for the illusion of control
MEGAN: I mean, who doesn't? I always prefer to have the illusion that I have any control over anything. And have a kickass time in Austin!

• Want to hear Jesse Jackson say something embarrassing and regrettable about cutting Obama's nuts out that is probably even more regrettable considering the supposed context is some shit about how Barack Obama needs to stop focusing so much on taking black men to task for being bad role models? Then turn on O'Reilly at 8! Yeah, I'm choosing beer in this case. [Drudge]
• Test missile launches always seem like the ten million dollar equivalent of showing up at your ex-boyfriend's party with some hot dude you blow at around midnight in the corner, in full view of at least three of his closest friends. Which is to say, they're just sort of inexplicably lame to me but it's the sort of behavior that shows you know exactly how to fuck with dudes. [WSJ]
• Sure you can get mad at Obama for supporting this rotten warrantless wiretapping retroactive immunity crap, but do you really think "swing voters" would buy that he doesn't support the U.S. Constitution solely on grounds that he's an Allah-worshiping terrorist? [Salon]
• Handy "analogy for the whole fucking economy" of the day #1: My grandfather's people are about to start getting paid in Euros. [WSJ]

• Handy " " " #2: High-flying super expansionary company employing 17,000 mostly unskilled uneducated Americans and some untold number of Chinese sweatshop workers goes down the tubes because it never really made money in the first place, and as it turns out its actual "earnings" came mostly from the same sweet loans and real estate kickbacks that have sent the rest of the system into disarray, but at the end of the day some rich Penn guys and Sarah Jessica Parker will get paid. [WSJ]
• Oh yeah so the market fell today, led by companies involved in those mortgage thingys, putting the S&P 500 index officially in the same "bear" category as the Dow. [WSJ]
• Angela Merkel does not have a crush on Obama, but her foreign minister does, which I guess means this whole awesome saga is playing out in Germany about some speech he wants to give before the Bradenburg Gate. [Breitbart]
• A depressing way to remind oneself that Istanbul is not actually the capital of Turkey. [NYT]

• Yet another tale of a creepy pageant mom who spends $600 a month on beauty treatments on her 11-year-old daughter. • A new study shows that women who are already "subfertile" worsen their chances of infertility by drinking coffee. • More weird studies! Adults who were born at a low birth-weight tend to leave the nest later in life. • A father in Georgia killed his 25-year-old daughter after she said she wanted to divorce the husband with whom she had an arranged marriage. • A neighboring town to Gloucester, MA mocked the towns now infamous "pregnancy pact" teens in a July Fourth Horribles parade. • Ew! A woman spent half of her day with a baby bat hiding in her bra before she noticed it. • The family of the woman who died on the floor of the Kings County Hospital psychiatric ER plans to sue the city and call for criminal charges. • Could a gene variant make women more prone to alcoholism through endorphin release? Well, it happened in some lab mice. • Two tween-aged girls are missing from a foster home in California, as is their parent's Lexus. • Violence between romantic partners is common among college students with men most likely to perpetrate sexual violence and women more likely to perpetrate physical violence. • Doctors are planning to introduce a cheaper (and less effective) form of in vitro in Africa, where infertility and a stigma attached to it can be stronger than in the West. • Cute video of the day! My favorite Japanese doggy troublemaker gets more than he bargained for when he tries to play with a pack of 5000 dachshund pups!

MOE: Morning Megan! Nice weekend? Good thing I already know the answer to that question because there are like ninety things we need to discuss this morning, and like, none of them is George Carlin! We should maybe start with how they abandoned that whole election idea in Zimbabwe after Mugabe made the truly salient point in a speech that "How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?" And Mugabe has so much more than a gun, and he's been wielding them liberally to assassinate pretty much everyone with the combination of courage, integrity, idealism and purposefulness to openly oppose him.

MOE:

One such target was Better Chokururama, a 31-year-old activist with an appetite for bravado and fisticuffs, nicknamed “Texas” for both the cowboy hats he favored and the moniker of a torture camp from which he once escaped. He was abducted on April 19, and his legs crushed by his captors with boulders.
He said in an interview afterward, as he lay with both legs in casts, that he had told his captors “that beating people would not change anything because the opposition had beaten the governing party, ZANU-PF, in the elections.”
“They laughed loudly,” he said, “then threw me out of the moving vehicle.”

MEGAN: Ah, Zimbabwe. Is it sad, or accurate that I wonder if his statement was coerced? Because he only just got back to the country, and I can't imagine that Better Chokururama (or the 86 people killed, or the 10,000 who've been injured or the 200,000 refugees) would prefer not to cast their vote for Morgan Tsvangirai right now than wait for... something. Mugabe's death or whatever, not that his hand-picked successor will likely be any different.
MEGAN: It almost makes me wish I'd watched the end of Last King of Scotland only when the white dude fucked Amin's wife I was like, ok, seriously, I don't really need to see how this ends, it ain't gonna be good.

MOE: I'm not reading you re whether the statement was coerced. "Beating people will not change anything" or "They threw me out of the moving vehicle." The rest of his story, which I omitted, has him getting captured again with some other activists whose bodies showed up a few days later. But there's some other news that I kind of want to get to starting with how the chairman of the chief financial regulatory agency was about as worthless during the whole Bear Stearns debacle as…the old CEO of Bear Stearns! He missed most of the conference calls for birthday parties and went on vacation with his family. Guess that's what you get for expecting someone to police people making nine figure pay packages on a six figure salary!
MEGAN: Well, I meant whether Morgan Tsvangirai was coerced to drop out of the race. He got back from exile to avoid being coerced and dropped out within hours. It seems suspicious to me.

MOE: Ugh, what the FUCK is a former Orange County congressman Reaganite lose doing fucking regulating our financial sector…Oh Morgan Tsvangirai's statement that the election was a violent illegitimate sham of a political process and that he didn't want to start a civil war?
MEGAN: And re: Chris Cox, that's what you get for hiring a guy stupid enough to be a conservative Republican in New Jersey who wasn't exactly known for being hte most go-to Congressman ever to run a regulatory agency when his political ideology is based around smaller government i.e., not regulating. The only good thing about Chris Cox at the SEC is that he's not in Congress anymore.
MEGAN: And by Jersey, I meant California, sorry.
MEGAN: Well, I mean, they already have a civil war. They also put another top party leader in prison and charged him with treason, not that anyone's seen him since.

MOE: Yeah a fucking Reaganite knownothing donothing, God I fucking can't stand those ideological free marketeers whose understanding of the financial sector begins and ends at best with some P.J. O'Rourke essay.
MEGAN: Do people really still read O'Rourke?
MEGAN: Also, he was a Congressman. I'll bet he thought the SEC gig was a step up with fewer actual responsibilities because he has more staff to hold his soft, white hand and do everything for him. Why would he miss a birthday party for regulating anything? He never did in Congress I'll bet you.

MOE: But in the wake of the internet bubble which was followed by the corporate malfeasance fest which was followed by the options backdating debacle how the fuck does someone like Cox get that job? And can Obama make hay out of this? Because I'd rather that than make um oil out of corn but that's neither here/there!
MOE: If anything it makes Obama look less hot to the Brazilians:

“We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned in Iowa were going to destroy the market” and contribute to inflation, Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo. “Besides, it is wrong,” he added, to tax Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, “which is much more efficient than corn ethanol.”

MEGAN: But it's the market! The market! Market failures will be regulated by the market and so regulation just damages the ability of the market to correct itself which it will do if you don't overregulate it and so Chris Cox is just doing his job by not regulating the market because regulating it would damage it!

MEGAN: Well, it's a tariff, not a tax, and it's not just on sugar-based ethanol it's on all imported ethanol but McCain's point remains valid. It's incredibly ineffecient and not environmentally sound policy to put tariffs on imported ethanol as a way of additionally subsidizing the construction of ethanol plants in the Midwest that can only be used for corn instead of whatever plant is cheapest. But that's US ag policy: those little family farmers that hardly exist anymore need your tax dollars, dammit, and if a few hundred million or more need to go to multinationals to make sure that a couple farmers won't sell out to them anyway, well, that's the trade-off we all accept to continue fetishizing the family farm.
MOE: Yeah and just to put a number on that…the last agriculture bill was $370 million, yes?

MEGAN: It was a lot, let's just go with that...
MOE: Because fucking agribusiness is so cash strapped right now the leading corn syrup supplier is only commanding a 31% premium over the market price of its shares Man, take a fucking look at this chart. If only I'd been pissed off about ethanol back when I was busy being pissed off about …oil!
MEGAN: Oh, well, ethanol was a better oxegenate for the environment than MTBE, and it seemed so environmentally friendly when the corn growers were all lobbying for it to be a corn-oxygenate back in the day. I mean, it's whole fucking purpose is to allow us to continue driving the exact same automobiles in the exact same way while marginally reducing emissions.
MOE: Anyway suffice it to say the corn industry hasmore than enough money left over to convince America the corn industry is good for America.

MEGAN: It is good, see, sweet delicious corn!
MEGAN: So yellow, so environment-y!
MOE: Ok check out this segue. So that last story was about the corn industry's public relations push to remind Americans that High Fructose Corn Syrup really isn't any worse for you than sugar…and guess what has HFCS in it? Ensure nutritional beverages…Al Qaeda logistics mastermind Abu Zubayda! Which is just one of the numerous fascinating facts we learned from yesterday's A1 Scott Shane story on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Did you read that? I highly recommend it.
9:30 AM
MEGAN: Ensure is so disgusting, it's supposed to be a supplement for old people and instead they're marketing it as a meal-replacement solution for healthy people and it's not. Talk about sick PR. But, no, I didn't read the story. I'm sure it's bad.
MOE: Okay, so let me guide you through the important parts of the story: I think the "little farmer guy" who turned in KLS in hopes of earning a quick $25 million and resettling himself and his family under a new identity in the US has to be my fave. Do you think there is some gated community tailored for, like, lottery winners and successful plaintiffs in massive malpractice suits where they could just sort of hide that guy away? Because that could be a fun movie starring Kal Penn.
MOE: But I guess mostly it's a profile of the lead interrogator Deuce Martinez, a wonky egghead analyst who skipped waterboarding classes and played "good cop"

MEGAN: I would snitch on anyone for $25 million, I'm just saying. Didn't we discuss a few weeks ago that the CrimeStoppers programs always end up paying out a ton more money when the economy sucks? I feel like we did.

MOE: Hahaha I really wish I remember what the fuck I read a few weeks ago but I'm just saying I don't think you could interrogate that out of me. Anyway, the whole thing was, well, KLS was waterboarded and subjected to other miscellaneous forms of torture a hundred times, but yeah aren't we sick of talking about the whole torture thing? More weird details! KLS wrote poetry to Deuce's wife! He was captured a few days after the informant sent a text message "I'm with KLS." He was originally transported to Thailand! (Or maybe that was Abu Zubayda) ... Thailand and the US are so close they didn't even have to tell the Thai PM. And Poland is "the 51st state." Really the whole "secret prisons" things seemed to be improving our relations with a lot of foreign countries before Dana Priest discovered them and Bush had them all flown back to Guantanamo.
MEGAN: The Poles just want to be part of the Visa Waiver Program and will do anything to get it. They're the only country in the EU at this point without it, if I recall correctly, but Congress keeps talking about and never passing a bill to let them into it and DHS has no idea.

MOE: I guess we have to talk about campaign finance today. But first I'd like to draw the readers' attention to this handy guide to why you can't really blame the war for the crap economy, despite what Stiglitz says, and even Stiglitz says the war has only added like $5 or $10 to the price of oil, but basically the point is that every globalization has its discontents and our objectivist malcontents didn't pay attention to that when they were setting policy so now we have more discontents over here while some folks in India and China are starting to enjoy better lives/deeper carbon footprints. ANYHOW
MEGAN: Prosperity brings global warming hooray! But only the rich can afford to reduce their carbon footprints. And I always find it difficult to believe that people really think that the war brings the bad economy when war generally makes the economy better. It was one of the reasons Hitler and WWII were initially so popular in Germany — taking shit over improved the economy almost immediately. War spending did its part for ending the Great Depression, etc.

MOE: Well yeah but as Stiglitz pointed out in 2003 Iraq was hardly "total war" and the economic benefits were thus hardly going to be evenly spread around. And as this report points out tax cuts, airline bailouts and No Child Left Behind played their early part in deficit spending. Oh man there are really cute dogs on my Fox News right now. Oh how sweet and all their owners have swaddled them in American flags and "freedom"-themed accessories!
MEGAN: Do they have freedom-themed leashes?

MEGAN: Yeah, I mean, while Bush was cutting taxes he was also presiding over the largest expansion in government history. I was at a speech by Andy Card in 2005, I think, and he went through all these verbal gymnastics to deny that the Administration had expanded the government which made the ambassador from an unnamed country next to whom I was seated marvel at his stones. It basically required that he exempt from consideration the Defense Department or DHS, which are (naturally) where all the increases have been, so it was absurdist in its brilliance. Sort of like if you don't want to be quoted, just curse every other word.
MOE: Hey, speaking of the defense budget is Israel trying to save us some money by just bombing Iran for us? Because that's awfully generous, considering all those fears we are about to elect that Muslim Marxist guy to lead the country and who knows what that means for the Jews…
MEGAN: Well, I mean, we are a leetle busy right now, I think we thought we'd be done enough in Iraq (the same way we're, like, totally Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan) that we could've started bombing Iran on our own.

MEGAN: Anyway, so, campaign finance?
MOE: Oh right, that's not my issue. And I must admit, I was occupied with this crazy Botox bandit story…and also vaguely transfixed by some story they're running on Fox now about some woman who lit up on an airplane, and in her mugshot she just looks kind of drunk or high so it kind of makes sense that she would do that, especially with fares so high these days you'd think you could do whatever you damn well please — ha! On my Virgin flight they wouldn't even let me use the blanket during takeoff, which was insane — and anyway, oh yes, Obama. We should talk about this. I guess it's disappointing but not surprising? I dunno

MEGAN: Well, but they all opted out of public financing for the primary and there were rumors McCain was going to for the general. Plus, I mean, it restricts him to $85 million which is maybe one of the reasons that, you know, Democrats don't go to states they "can't" win and ditto with Republicans and so everyone fights for Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida and concedes the others to one another.

MOE: I will say that even if it is blatantly hypocritical it also appeals to that side that worries about his ability to play dirty/be pragmatic/blahblah. Which seemed to be a big concern of Clintonites.
MEGAN: Oh, sure. I mean, I think the real issue is that 99% of Americans probably don't know anything about the public financing system so they whole OH MY GOD WHAT HAS HE DONE thing is probably right over their heads.
MEGAN: Which is why it's smart, release the video, let the talking heads pontificate for 24 hours just before the weekend, then release a new ad and start airing it in red states and let them think about that.

MEGAN: But, also, I think he makes an interesting point. Public financing comes from the $3 check-off on your tax return, so it's like small donations from small people funneled through the government. He's got 1.5 million donors, half of which are small-amount donors. He's practically creating his own public financing system, it's just one in which there are no limits on what he can spend after the convention.
MEGAN: Which is an interesting thing, actually. The party that has the Presidency gets the last convention, which means that the party without it gets a week or more where they are hamstrung by the public financing limits and hte incumbent party is not. In 2004, it was a full two weeks because the Dems went before the Olympics, then the Olympics and then the Republicans went and Bush became subject to the spending limits.
MOE: Hey check this out we're using one percent less gas than last year! And this is unrelated but here's a pleasant photo of a highway in Beijing, where starting July 20 they will also be using less gas, for obvious reasons. Okay, now I'm headed to Peggy and Brooks. Krauthammer and Krugman both wrote today about McCain's offshore drilling blah blah, one of them is for it and one of them is against it I'll let you guess who!

MEGAN: Gosh, so hard! Also, by the way, the DC metro system had 2 top-10 ridership days this week alone, and they're blaming it on gas prices.
MOE: David Brooks likens Obama to Mr. Rogers playing Ari on Entourage. (Would that be good for the Jews?) Anyway, he proceeds to do exactly the thing I was talking about where Obama actually gets praised for "selling out" in a move that should disappoint his starry-eyed media fans but actually makes them cream their pants because they are ashamed of their idealism and also, masochists:

MOE:

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

MEGAN: I think it's funny that Clinton supporters either think he's the worst of the Chicago political machine or a naive waif and never anything in between.
MOE: Although uh Noonan isn't feeling the sentimentality shame so much today:

In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn't. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn't, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better.

MEGAN: Yeah, she was on Scarborough this morning and they all got maudlin about Tim Russert.
MOE:

That's what we talk about in eulogies, because that's what's important. We don't say, "The thing about Joe was he was rich."

MEGAN: Also, her site is down.

MEGAN: Off-topic, our friend Calderone has the story of the wacky Hardball ad about Michelle's supposed make over and an even funnier fake one for Cindy McCain.
MEGAN: I also think the whole thing is funny, like Michelle needs a fashion makeover? The figures aren't dancing ladies in the Obama ad as much as fake runway models
MOE: I hate sentences like that. How many eulogies have any sort of basis in the reality of someone's life? I went to a very rich guy's funeral once. All the eulogies were like "great guy worked hard loved the outdoors cared about his family" and meanwhile half the family is sitting there seething over what a cold unemotional terror he'd been. But yeah, I dunno. Anyway I failed to mention that the Bush Administration's spying on Americans thing may, like the shitty economy and the shady no-bid multibillion dollar overbudget defense contracts and chaos/anarchy/fear in Iraq, get to outlive the Administration.

MEGAN: I also love that the Dems rolled over on retroactive immunity for telecoms as part of it, giving just enough judicial oversight to make it look like there will be some if we aren't paying attention, but little enough that it will make any difference to the telecoms.

MEGAN: So what did you miss most about the States besides good burgers? I was shocked in Europe in 1998 when I got served a horsemeat hamburger.
MOE: Well annoyingly I missed that you already covered the story of the rush to buy ships to drill for oil in the News Roundup, which is an interesting tale of the insatiable demand for deep-sea rigs, which cost half a billion dollars apiece, not that that's that's a big deal when, you know, just by way of example, Exxon's earnings before interest/taxes/depreciation/amortizaiton for the past 12 months (during which oil futures have probably averaged half today's price) was $77 billion…
MEGAN: And, hey, if we built them here (ha!) it could revitalize the dying shipbuilding industry.

MOE: South Korean shipyards are making most of these things, incidentally. Didn't we used to have shipyards in this country? I feel like they've all been turned into luxury condo developments and office parks. Where are the world's cruise ships and container ships built?

MEGAN: I think the only thing our few remaining shipyards build are navy vessels. I'm sure the cruise and container ships are all built in low-wage, non-union countries.
MOE: Yeah but that doesn't really describe South Korea and it definitely doesn't describe Singapore.
MEGAN: I have two words that do, though: industrial subsidies.
MOE: Hahaha yes and its evil cousin INDUSTRIAL POLICY.
MEGAN: We have an industrial policy! It's called reducing the capital gains tax! And R&D tax credits.

MEGAN: Well, we could discuss this article in which a former DeLay staffer bothers to notice that Republicans are losing in moderate states by being too Christian conservative and not Republican enough, and rejects calls for the party to get more conservative and praises Rahm Emanuel.
MEGAN: So, he's making friends.

MOE: Is it possible to be in an industry that manufactures single products that weigh thousands of tons, provide the backbone of billions of dollars of global commerce, are giant combustible moving targets for terrorism and pirates and cost $500 million apiece and are generally ordered in eleven or twelve figure (often government) contracts…and not involve the government? No. And you know, shipping isn't going anywhere and shipbuilding = jobs. So why does it seem like the EU and the US just, like, gave that industry to Asia while they took the aerospace stuff? Admittedly I don't fucking know anything.
9:10 AM
MEGAN: I think the margins aren't that great, subsidies aren't passing muster with the WTO and we'd rather spend our government money on bombs and guns than big ass ships.
MOE: See, that is just our problem. The "the margins aren't that great" problem. Well, guess what, Samsung Heavy just raised prices $100 million, so 25%, and they know they could charge more. So the margins are pretty damn good now, because you're not just going to see someone open a competing shipyard specializing in deep-sea vessels down in Bangalore. Beyond that, with all the government intervention, the opaque accounting of the contracts involved, blah blah blah, the margins can seem almost impossible to calculate. Whatever, "the margins aren't that great" is just code for "it's hard." It's hard because the capital expenditures are huge, the labor costs are huge, and the price of fucking up is huge. But the thing about those cyclical industries we're always trying to get out of: for all those reasons the jobs aren't going anywhere.

MEGAN: I don't know that it's just capital intensivity, though. We have plenty of capital intensive industries in this country (like: heavy equipment manufacturing, for whom I used to lobby) that has survived despite it being cyclical and all the rest. I'm going to guess that the reason military shipbuilding has survived while commercial hasn't is partially because the margins on the military contracts are better.
MOE: Hahaha today on Fox they're trying to get everyone to back down from the accepted conventional wisdom that lifting the ban on offshore drilling would take 7 years to have an impact by finding some nutjob who claims it will only take 2. Since so much sentiment is packed into oil prices I suppose he could be right, but then we'd be willing that the markets are somewhat irrational or something?
MOE: Oh god now they're talking about the laxative cake.
MEGAN: I mean, it would take that long to have an impact on supply, not that I think supply is the problem or that drilling offshore would have a huge impact on it. But I'm sure the markets would get all irrationally exuberant about it and prices would dip briefly and then continue on their steady upward path.
MOE: Ah, Obama opted out of public financing.
MEGAN: Because the system is broken! And he has lots of money.
MOE: I love how all the people behind this inane Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less campaign are citing polling data that tells us 64% of Americans "Expect It Will Lower Prices." I wonder what those 64% of Americans thought invading Iraq would do! Besides destroy Al Qaeda which was financed by Saddam Hussein who was the half-brother of Barack Hussein Obama's Indonesian father?? Speaking of which, Iraq oil contracts…did you read that story?

MEGAN: 64% of Americans expect it will lower prices because the news media keeps repeating the fact that John McCain and George Bush want to do it to lower prices.
MEGAN: I didn't read the Iraq oil contracts story but, let me guess... corruption?
MOE: Well, the winners of the "unusual" no-bid contracts were Exxon, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, who won out over some 40 companies including Chinese and Russian ones, and while they only last a year they give those companies a head start international observers are headscratching etc. etc.

It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

MOE: Here the Iraq is calling it a "stop-gap measure" just to get people in and digging etc. etc.
MEGAN: Right. Because what Iraq needs is obviously more US and European-based multinationals exploring for oil that everyone knows is there. Talk about capital intensive industries.
MEGAN: Once they're in there, they'll stay and everyone knows it.
MOE: And all but Chevron were original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company so it's really like a Restoration of sorts!
MEGAN: Aw, how sweet, it's like a family reunion! Only with more money!
MOE: Holy shit two Bear Stearns executives were just arrested at their homes for…knowingly bilking some investors out of $1.6 billion

MEGAN: Wow, the government cares about that now? Also, by the way, Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) hs called for the nationalization of U.S. oil refineries.
MOE: Right I'm reading about that. The "Drill Here Drill Now Pay Less" of the Left is apparently some outfit called Oil Change International, or at least they're spinning it that way. Remember that Crappy Hour a few glorious months back when we actually read long stories where we discussed the pros and cons of the global shift toward the nationalization of oil? Yeah I don't really remember either.
MEGAN: Do I remember Crappy Hour yesterday?

MEGAN: Hey, do you remember when we were all shocked that the Air Force mistakenly sent nuclear components instead of batteries to Taiwan? Well, it turns out that they're actually missing like 1,000 sensitive nuclear parts and that's why the dudes got fired. Hopefully we didn't ship those to, like, China or something.
MOE: That reminds me there was something in the paper about Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou's new China policy which isn't really a new policy, it's just more like an attitude, because Ma is "mainland Chinese" meaning his first language is Mandarin and he came over with Chiang Kai-shek and the last president was a "native Taiwanese" meaning his first language was Hokkien and for most of his adult lifetime he was one of the majority of the population who had Japanese colony nostalgia (this nostalgia did not go over well with the mainland Chinese) .. anyhow but see, we're missing the real meme here, which is Larry Sinclair at the National Press Club.
MEGAN: I sooooo wanted to go, but I had to blog yesterday.
MEGAN: By the way, the HuffPo story on it is even more epic.

MEGAN: I love, too, that they get Clinton supporters on the record being all like, well, the crazy guy might be telling the truth, he really could've sucked Obama's dick.
MOE:

And pay Sinclair did — for the venue and its microphone, as well as for a kilted lawyer (with a suspended license) named Montgomery Blair Sibley, who informed those assembled that his preferences in dress were arrived at as a way to secure comfort for his unusually large sexual organs. "I don't know why men wear pants," he said with a poker face. "It's a function of male genitalia. If you're size normal or smaller, you're probably comfortable with [pants]. ... Those at the other end of the spectrum find them quite confining."
"I asked him to wear a suit and tie," Mr. Sinclair said ruefully. Then, he admitted to suffering from a brain tumor.

MOE: What?
MEGAN: I know, how sad are you that we weren't there? By the way, Sibley was the DC Madam's lawyer and is somehow connected to Larry Flynt and Sinclair was hinting around that he was going to have a special surprise guest so the media showed because they thought Larry Flynt would be there.

MOE: Ummmmm is it just me or is today, like, all about POLICY??
MEGAN: It does seem like my jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none brain when it comes to policy issues might come in handy this morning! Where do you want to start?

MOE: Maybe with the incredibly astute words of McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin:

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief economic aide to Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, dismissed the Obama strategy as "classic industrial policy which shows a lack of faith in private markets."

MEGAN: Obama's got this part right though: "How much you pay in taxes as a corporation a lot of times is going to depend on how good your lobbyist is."
MOE: I mean, what have the private markets done to instill faith in you lately? Are we supposed to be like Job with these things?
MOE: right.
MOE: This isn't something I would mind seeing: "Americans with incomes above $2.8 million would see their after-tax income decrease by 11.5%."
MEGAN: Hardly anyone pays the actual income tax rate because of loopholes. If I heard my now former boss say it once, I heard it 15 times, if you eliminate deductions and credits, you could reduce the corporate rate to, like, 25% without losing revenue. You could lower personal rates even further and eliminate taxes for a percentage of the population. It's an incredibly inefficient system.

MEGAN: I did an analysis of the candidates' tax plans on young single women. Obama's is better.
MOE: Did you see this handy graf on the rebirth of the plutocracy? Just before the Great Depression the top .01% of households averaged 892 times the household income of the households in the bottom 90%, and that number of course plummeted and only really began steadily rising in 1980 to the point that it's now 976. These are imperfect numbers, of course — how big is the top .01%? How about the top .1%? Etc. etc. But it's a nice visual aid!

MOE: The income required to make the Top 400 list of earners has tripled since 1992, AFTER ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION.

MEGAN: I mean, the question is, from a policy perspective, is whether that's truly undesirable and what can be honestly done about it. Given the nature of the international financial sector and personal and currency mobility, would heavy taxation be effective? Can we limit income? Can you create or force businesses to create better oversight and board systems to protect shareholder interests, say, with a mandate that multimillion dollar compensation packages that aren't effectively tied to long-term performance are considered not in shareholders' best interests? I don't think either of the candidates has really talked about serious policies aimed at resolving income inequality because it's such a squishy issue to get your arms around let alone resolve from a policy perspective.
MOE: A few things: 1. Well yeah I think income inequality is truly undesirable from a policy perspective. 2. And the only way to deal is tax the everliving shit out of capital gains and use that money to beef up the SEC and education. Because the people who set executive compensation, the people who "look out for the interests of shareholders," the people who monitor the people allegedly looking out for those interests, the people who kick out executives for underperformance and are charged with luring in a new guy to "clean house" — all those people are part of this racket. And one, their version of "long term" is at most five years. And two, they set the yardsticks, the standards. They're all friends and acquaintances and they all know exactly how much everyone gets paid and they've pushed the baseline up up up.
MEGAN: What is "taxing the shit" out of capital gains? Back up to 25%? Higher? Won't they just try to pull some work around if that happens, the way private equity funds are just an elaborate way around taxation?
MOE: Well every policy creates loopholes, and certainly you'd probably see some money shift to less taxable assets, not that we didn't see that already with the real estate bubble, but none of the hundreds of executives indicted on backdating their stock options worked for a private company, you know? I mean, eventually the big payoff in private equity tends to come from the public markets, right? Or an acquisition? The thing that people need to get through their thick fucking heads is that yeah, there's always a greater and greatest fool losing out here, and we've missed out on a lot of the fundamental zero-sumness of corporate earnings growth because our standards of living are being propped up by artificially low standards in China, which China maintains as part of its INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

MEGAN: Hypothetically speaking, then, not that this is in my personal best interest as a homeowner, one of the ways to keep people from transferring assets into real estate to reap tax benefits would be to reduce the tax preference for home ownership and for real estate more generally.
MOE: Right. Although I don't know if you'd do that in the middle of a housing crisis?
MEGAN: Which, by the way, would probably have helped slow the bubble, and would slow the growth in home prices because creating a tax preference creates a market for people seeking to exploit it and it pretty quickly gets built into the price
MOE: Well yes.
MEGAN: Well, why wouldn't you? I don't know that it could hurt anymore now. If you wanted to be fair you could grandfather it or give some sort of one-time rebate payment or something and call it a fucking day.

MEGAN: The mortgage interest deduction and state and local tax deduction (which includes property taxes) are two of the largest deductions in the tax system, that are taken advantage of almost exclusively by people earning above the median income. They're also, along with having kids, the main reason people in the so-called "middle class" end up paying the Alternative Minimum Tax, though "middle class" is kind of a stretch for someone making $100, $120K/year when median income is $45K, but I'll accept that definition. Obama's willing to go up to $250K.
MOE: I wonder if there is like, a rich folks CPI that tracks the rising costs of… luxury real estate, private education, corian countertops, that sort of thing.

MEGAN: Not, by the way, that this bears any relationship to the conversation at hand, but coffee may be helping us live longer. I'm hoping alcohol consumption offsets that.
MOE: Okay so I'm creeping through his interview and, you know, the Journal basically says "well Clinton said a lot of this stuff but then he became obsessed with the deficit and it's not like THAT'S not a problem right now" and Obama says like "well now we have energy problems too so there's that." Like there's this meme out there that alternative energy is going to become this huge new sector of the economy but like who is going to lead that?

MOE: Ha I like how it ends

WSJ: A lot of folks would say cutting corporate tax rates are equivalent growth.
Sen. Obama: I don't want a distorting effect of our tax code on corporate decision making. But that's different from just saying you know, let's run up the deficit another couple of trillion dollars …

MEGAN: And after all those bonuses, too!
MOE: Yeah they're only on track to get $19 billion this Xmas sad sad world. But I don't know, can we really make the argument that it would be societally optimal for that money to …maybe find other uses for itself?
MEGAN: Ooch, Obama is co-opting the Republican small government ethos, but with a delish Democratic twist — making it, you know, actually effective.

I think the danger is always to equate size of government with effectiveness, and I don't. It's not clear to me that we want a larger government, but we certainly want a government that is setting more intelligent priorities and using taxpayer dollars more wisely and structuring tax policies that are conducive to long-term economic growth. As I mentioned during the speech, there may be programs that no longer work. There's certainly all kinds of previsions in our tax code that are antiquated and are not spurring economic growth. We've got offices like the patent office that are outdated to take advantage of new discoveries here in the United States.

Republicans have gotten so focused at starving the beast or cutting off the snake's head that they've forgotten they can actually do proactive things to reduce gov't. Or, in the case of this administration, they haven't wanted to reduce its size.

MOE: Thomas Frank doesn't have a new column out yet I guess that happens tomorrow but he changed the name to "The Tilting Yard." Weird.
MEGAN: Is it, like, a Cervantes reference? Is he Don Quixote?

MOE: Well he had the same column name, "Fighting Words" as Hitchens, whose last column on Hillary and sexism is the most Hitchens thing Hitchens has ever written, right down to the Juanita Broaddrick ref:

Posterity may well remember the Hillary Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female gender had thus far gotten to the nomination of a major political party. But the episode will be recalled for many other salient features as well. The first time that the wife of an ex-president had leveraged her first-lady status into a senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. The first time that the candidate's spouse (and campaigner in chief) was a person who had been disbarred for perjury and impeached for—among other things—obstruction of justice.
MOE: The first time since the 1960s that a Democrat seeking the nomination had implicitly relied on a "Southern strategy" of appealing to the rancor of the "white working class." The first time since the lachrymose Ed Muskie that a candidate's eyes had welled up with tears in New Hampshire. The first time that a woman candidate was married to a man who had been believably accused of rape and sexual harassment (see my book No One Left To Lie To). The first time that a candidate had said of her half-African-American rival that he was not a member of the Muslim faith "as far as I know." The first time that the loser in the delegate count had failed to congratulate or even acknowledge the winner on the night of his historic victory.

MEGAN: I tried to write something about it, but it's so hard to respond to stupid sometimes.

MEGAN: This is, after all, the same dude that ejaculates at the thought of Bill Clinton. Granted, it's at his humiliation, but I don't think that makes him any less of a gay, S&M fetishist with a hair trigger. I feel sorry for his wife.
MOE: So maybe Tilting Yard was a dig at Hitchens who I bet 1. gets it and 2. has had on more than one occasion, like, epically tilted into something mid-rant at a party or something, but that is just my guess.
MEGAN: Well, if by "tilted" you mean "stuck his small British peen into the vagina of a 19 year old with hero worship in her eyes," then, yes, he's done that at parties.
MOE: So guess what, I totally missed talking about torture again, or the Army official who claims he was fired for refusing to approve a billion dollars in shady fees to KBR, or like, drilling in the wildlife refuge or whatev. Do you have anything to say about this shit?
MEGAN: Oh, McCain doesn't want to drill in ANWR, he wants to drill along the CA/FL coasts, something that Bush and Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist and Arnie and the Republicans from all those states have opposed because it will ruin the views of Republican voters who hate high gas prices and environmentalism but love them their views.

MEGAN: Also, the KBR thing is just confirming what everyone already knew, which is that pressure was applied at some point. I am amazed that no one caught the part where the Administration recently signed a 10-year contract with KBR to provide services to our troops in Iraq. That's, you know, until 2018.
MEGAN: We also didn't talk about the floods will raise food prices or the Chinese expat newspaper article about Obama's skin color, but shit happens.

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed thinks the courtroom artist drew his nose too wide. He lost a bunch of weight on the Guantanamo diet and totally turns out to be one of those secretly vain terror masterminds. [USA Today]
• This will shock you: Bob Dylan is voting for Barack Obama. Okay, I was kidding about the shocked part. [Times]
• There was this whole movement afoot to strongarm Barry into picking Hillary over some of his other bros but I think Hillary took a step back and said, "You know, this is bullshit, I don't care anymore, if he wants me he wants me," and although the hardest part about doing that is always the realization that he's probably gonna be all "It ain't me babe," I'm glad she did that. [NY Times]
• You just have to accept that in the Catholic Church shit takes awhile, and that if a priest is accused of pedophilia it might take a few years or even decades to remove him. Now, if he mocks Hillary Clinton and it ends up on YouTube, on the other hand, now that is when you gotta sever all ties right away. [Chicago Tribune] [The Root]
• Well this is a new one: alcohol cutting your risk of arthritis. I pretty much always thought gout was arthritis, and that you get that from wine, so this is pretty awesome news, not that I would even notice I had arthritis what with the shakes and whatnot. [BBC]

• What drives the economy and technological innovation and stuff? In some countries it's known "industrial policy." But in this country since the Cold War it's pretty much been porn, so I don't know what this guy is talking about. [Miller-McCune]
• The recession has driven Saks shoppers to Nordstrom, American Eagle shoppers to Aeropostale and everyone else to BJ's and Costco. [WSJ]
• Black people think Obama needs to remember the Sisterhood. This is not a particularly revolutionary essay but I'm linking to it because I read through it the whole way. [The Root]
• The other day I got an IM from my friend. "Could Lehman seriously become the next Bear Stearns just based on fear that it's the next Bear Stearns?" she asked. "Yup," I replied, and told the fear and greed aphorism. But apparently $60 billion worth of "tough to value" securities is another big reason. [Economist]
• Anyway, the big problem is there's a lot of greed, and not enough fear. Let me explain: we are the Fed, and bankers are dudes. We control the population supply, which seems like a pretty powerful position, but they have more time on their hands and thus much more elaborate ways of fucking with us to the point where we're basically their bitch. Anyway, this is called "moral hazard", which is almost as good a name for an okay first novel as The Undatable. [Economist] [WSJ]
• I'm thinking of changing the name of this feature, to something like "Narrow Thoughts" or "Profundities" or something. Deep thoughts, anyone?
• There is probably something totally awesome and life-affirming about being able to scale skyscrapers but, like…nah, I can't really see the point. [NYT]
• Oh yeah and you fucking dykes have sent me some pretty little sums to help get those feminists out of Basra! Why did I never wait tables on bitches like you? That's right, because we were all waiting tables together.

Because America is not part of Europe. You know what would happen if we joined the European Union? Let's "mark to market" our economic figures to Euros for a second. (This is not a particularly meaningful exercise, but when the Gross Domestic Product is passing for the ultimate barometer of economic health I feel entitled to dabble in the absurd.) In the same amount of time that our economy cracked the $14 trillion mark, it would have shrunk 10% to 9 trillion Euros. In other words, no one would be lining up to buy cheap American exports. Of course, not that that much stuff is made in America anymore, which is why our 13% increase in exports of goods only contributed 0.2% in the way of GDP growth. But 0.2% can make all the difference!

Because The Rest Of The World Is Starving Thanks to land and pork barrel politics, agriculture remains a thriving (if small) sector of the American economy, and thanks to those same pork barrel politics we decided to drive food prices higher than oil prices would have already rendered them by paying people to use perfectly good corn to run cars or somesuch. Well, we make corn in America! And soybeans, and lots of other things that will make you fat if you aren't living on $3 a day in Nairobi.

Because The Rest Of The World Is Still Coming Here (And Fewer Than Ever Are Sending Their Money Home) America's growing population helps our GDP numbers sound good even when everything is actually getting harder for the average person! Between 2003 and 2007, for instance, our per-capita GDP grew less than 1.9% a year on average; Japan's per-capita GDP grew 2.1%! But thanks to our swelling immigrant class (and possibly, the celebrity baby boom) we have a growing populace that pumps that number up to nearly 3% annualized growth when we pool our funds together!

Because Everyone Is Sick, And Getting Sicker Health care a very important sector of the American economy — in fact, it's the only sector that's created any jobs since the nineties — and the costs — hey, every cost has a "benefit," hah! — just keep rising! That means lots of profits for all the companies working hard to remind us how bad heartburn can make you feel. And all the accountants and managers and lawyers responsible for figuring out how hospitals can add treatments and procedures to routine hospital stays so the insurance companies actually pay them; they are drivers of economic activity too! In this most recent quarter, medical care might have been the single brightest spot of a very unhappy chart: costs rose 12.1% over the quarter.

Because banks control all the money. The financial sector might seem like it's a mess right now, but they didn't get to represent more than a fifth of the whole GDP by being unclever. After getting the government to set up a special body giving them "immunity" from failure in the wake of that touching Jimmy Stewart movie, bankers quickly set about figuring out how to control all the money in the universe and take a big a cut possible each year in fear someone would figure out what they were up to and shut the whole thing down. Over time, of course, they realized that they controlled too much money for the government to ever shut any of it down, so at that point they just overpaid themselves because that's what they did last year, and because that's what everyone else was doing, and because if they didn't do it they were the greater fool. By 2005 the average finance worker earned 50% more than the comparable worker in any other field — and a lot of them made a lot more than that. But it's hard to blame them — absurdly profitable ideas like $3 ATM fees and selling repurposed mortgages to old people literally on a "fixed income" are all in a day's work for these guys.

Because "information processing equipment and software" sales increased 10.3%. And they haven't even released the new iPhone!

Because They Hate Us. These are serious times, Americans! We have a beautiful country to defend, and defense spending was perhaps the brightest spot on the latest GDP report of all. The Pentagon spent nearly $700 billion defending our freedoms last year, a 7.5% increase from last. And we haven't even started bombing Iran!

Image grabbed from Refacing Government Tender via Metafilter

BEA Press Release: Gross Domestic Product [Bureau of Economic Analysis]
Economists React: Recession "Still Likely" [WSJ]
Food Firms Profit As Demand Soars [WSJ]
Grossly Distorted Picture [Economist]
FDIC Seeks Hires, Braces For Trouble [WSJ]
Gross Domestic Product By Industry, Winners & Losers [Visualizing Economics]
What's Really Propping Up The Economy [BusinessWeek]
One Guy Who's Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees [WSJ]

This is how you come to the Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which is no longer so paradoxical. The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed). And at the same time, you get a pool of women weighted toward the attractive, desirable "strong bidders." Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.

Evolutionary psychologists will remind us that there's a long line of writing about "female choosiness" going back to Darwin and the male peacocks competing to get noticed by "choosy" mates with their splendid plumage.

The Eligible Bachelor Paradox [Slate]

MEGAN: You know, I think if She wanted my mood to be better, it would not be raining again today.

MOE: They're not calling it the Great Depression for nothing! Unless it's some April Fools joke.
Ha ha ha, the number of Americans using food stamps for essential groceries is the highest since food stamps were introduced! Yes really!

MEGAN: One in eight residents in Michigan is on food stamps.
They're blaming part of it on the rise in gas prices making shipping more expensive. Good thing we have an adequate rail transport syst... Oh, shit. Sorry. No, we're fucked.

MOE: hahaha here's a funny joke the Washington Post website and/or all its readers are playing on us. The Most viewed thing now is called Yes, It Was A Good War. Ooooh oooh click!

MEGAN: Yeah, that article totally made me happier.

There were pacifists around before WWI, asshole.

MOE: Oh wait no better, Memeorandum is telling me the most important news meme happening right now is Obama bowling. I think people just love the word "dainty."

MEGAN: Joe Scarborough, I am not a dainty person or a dainty bowler. I just SUCK. I hereby challenge you to a bowling tournament. I will bowl drunk and without the benefit of either my contacts or glasses because, apparently, not seeing the pins makes me a better bowler. And then when I smack you in the face with the ball, you won't be talking about dainty no more.
Also, please, with that hair? Joe Scarborough doesn't bowl.

MOE: Oh this is a cool April Fools Day storyabout all the cool badges with crazy slogans that are the only things we know about the Pentagon's $32 billion in triple classified deep secret appropriations. I mean, I think it is a true story but there is really no information and instead of leaving me with a sense of "Wow, our Defense Department is doing destructive things with our tax dollars and no oversight" it left me with a sense of "Dog Latin? That is a language? I knew pig latin but what is dog latin?"

One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. "To Serve Man" reads the text above, a reference to a classic "Twilight Zone" episode in which man is the entree, not the customer. "Gustatus Similis Pullus" reads the caption below, dog Latin for "Tastes Like Chicken."

Also, this just in over the transom! "Deborah" Gibson is going to be playing at Harrah's Atlantic City for an unprecedented three week performance from May 4-24.

MEGAN: OH MY GOD.
Please tell me that's not a joke
Please.
Also, I hate Atlantic City but I might have to find some slouch socks and puffy paint and Keds and head on up there.

MOE: I love Atlantic City. Atlantic City is just America writ very small. No economy besides gambling and whores! Middle class standing around waiting to die! Overleveraged! Crumbling infrastructure! Abject poverty! Gradually being invaded by Chinese! Bottle service! Trump! And some of the greatest italian food I have ever had. I love AC, I have to say. The future of our nation, you can find it there. I bet Ashley Alexandra Dupre had some good underage times there.

MEGAN: Actually, you've just listed almost everything I hate about AC, but you missed the part where the "outlets" suck.

MOE: Oh yes OUTLETS THAT ARE NOT REALLY OUTLETS. A.C. is where "brands" go to die at the hands of tourists who are too dumb to go to real outlets... A.C. is like the Paula Abdul of all latitude/longitude combinations. Or something

MEGAN: Ok, but you and I are so getting Debbie Gibson tickets and meeting there, I'm just saying.
I'll find colorful scrunchies!

MOE: The Pentagon is over budget on only about 95 weapons systems. Um, also...speaking of...the Mike and Juliet show just showed an old clip of Paula Abdul and um Mike said something really funny.

MEGAN: Ok, I suppose we should, at some point, quit talking about the music of our tween years or something. Did you see the editorial on Obama by Alice Walker? It's a little hippie-dippy for my taste, but she did tell me that the whole "we are the change we have been waiting for line" that was totally mocked a couple month ago was a deliberate reference to an African-American poet and a modern spiritual. Whoops. Guess that's why the news networks might need a leetle more diversity in their commentators.

MOE: Wow, $1.6 trillion is the total budget of the weapons systems. That is a lot of money. Like the size of the russian economy but plus 60% or also the amount that banks are expected to writeoff plus 60%. Oh look it's the IO Digital cable commercial!

MEGAN: Dude, the commercial that needs to stop airing RIGHT NOW are those creepy AT&T mobile broadband commercials with the fake British guy finding the internet. They freak me out.

MOE: Wait, is this a joke? Stock futures are looking up! Because the "worst is over"? Because it's all priced in?

MEGAN: Because once us poor people are out of the system the institutional investors and hedge fund guys can have their say without being worried about lawsuits?

MOE: So this Alfonso Jackon stuff: what's the word? Are we going to get a fun scandal with whores outta this guy?
Not that scandals with whores are really that fun anymore.

MEGAN: Sadly, no whores except the political ones I think. Donors, favors, friends, incompetence. You know, standard issue Bushie stuff.

MOE: The bar, it has been raised SO HIGH this year.

MEGAN: It has, you're right. I mean, I guess hooray for Spitzer for being the scandal champ? I mean, do you think we can have a national conversation about expecting Puritan functionaries from our politicians?
Because I just feel like if we all had a healthier attitude about sex, and the "need" to be married, especially if you're a politician, maybe this shit wouldn't happen? Or else I've had just enough coffee to be utopian and not enough to get back to cranky. Or I'm just sorta depressed and thus want to pretend like the world that isn't my life could be better than it is.

MOE: Between the one trillion in bank writedowns and the $1.6 trillion weapons budget and the $9 trillion national debt there sure are a lot of people we owe money to! Thank goodness we have all those weapons, you know?

MEGAN: Oooh, is that the new way to pay your credit card bill? Because that would be kind of awesome. No, see, AmEx, I have bigger guns so I really think we're going to renegotiate these terms, thanks.

MOE: The second amendment is totes underrated.

MEGAN: Not anymore! The Supremes are about to throw out DC's gun ban on
its basis. Hooray for strict constitutionalism except when it comes to guns.

MOE: Dude the IO digital cable commercial is on AGAIN. "$29.95, don't forget to sign the label." Okay now I have to write the introduction to this stupid post that no one besides SinisterRouge can follow. (In that vein, I totally drank sangria with SinisterRouge last night! I never drink drinks like sangria but she is very convincing. As anyone who is still reading at this point which is to say no one because they have all boycotted Crappy Hour knows well, or not well enough.)

MOE: Dude, what is Joe Scarbrough wearing turn on MSNBC
Ooooooh Chris Matthews just said "Slavery was in the constitution! We gotta deal with those things!"
He's been aggressively repeating his triumphant confrontation with that Obama supporter.
MEGAN: I'm HOPING that's the ugly sweater his mother gave him for Christmas.
MOE: Oooooh and more hilarity from MSNBC. An employee on Hardball MISTAKENLY FLASHED A GRAPHIC OF OSAMA BIN LADEN as host Chris Matthews was discussing OBAMA
MEGAN: I saw that!
MOE: Hey guys, here's the video of Chris Matthews interviewing that Texas state senator. Oh, so now you like Chris, SinisterRouge? Ha ha ha well will you please answer the same question re Hillary? Honestly if I wanted someone who had already created palpable legislative change I might not be desperate enough to vote for an unproven Senator on the basis of his books and his biography! If I wanted someone who had accomplished shit, crap, I'd vote for McCain!!
But wait a second. I didn't just go there. Besides it's a moot point. Hillary is over, right? Or no?
MEGAN: I personally love how NAFTA isn't her fault because she "wasn't in the Senate" at the time, so she couldn't have anything to do with it... but she wants/takes credit for all these supposed legislative accomplishments as First Lady so she can talk about how experienced she is as a person in governments.
But, yeah, Stephanie Tubbs Jones is a great ssurrogate, and a really good debater and whomever let that poor little man from Texas go up against her was smoking some crazy weed, dude.
Or else Obama's Congressional surrogates from Texas weren't dumb enough to do it.
Um, it's not quite completely finished, but Hillary can't afford to take the rest of the races 51-49. She's got to win them all by the same margins as Obama did last night in Wisconsin (or more, since she's likely to have a few more losses) and start reeling in a lot more superdelegates to win.
And/or con Barack's pledged delegates into voting for her at the convention despite the damage to their own political careers.
MOE: Personally I would rather hear criticism like Samuelson's , who writes today in The Obama Delusion that basically Obama's policies amount to "goody bag politics." Because the reason a lot of Obama believers are into him is because at some level they share Republicans' distrust of government spending, which is why they don't feel like starting any new wars. But if the country is going to move into a sound place economically and socially I think some really drastic moves and some really unconventional thinking are going to need to be applied, and we think all that needs to be underpinned with the kind of political capital Jimmy Carter fell short on — hence Barry. But demonizing free trade and promising new federal programs is ...you know, ugh...I suppose that the real miracle would be if Obama was actually successful at affecting huge change that way. The stupid thing is that it's totally not his specialty, but when McCain talks about getting FedEx and UPS into the government so we don't have disasters like Katrina, or when he talks about "jobs that AREN'T coming back," he makes more sense. Fuck, like I pointed out, Huckabee's crazy Fair Tax is actually supported by a lot of nuts on the left, including someone claiming to be an economic adviser to Mike Gravel. Soooooo...
I guess the only thing we can all agree on is that the whole wealth management industry has too much money.
Which is why most people in that industry give money to Obama.
MOE: I want to pry into John Kenneth Galbraith's coffin and clone that guy for the Obama cabinet is the thing.
MEGAN: I don't like a lot of Obama's or Hillary's economic rhetoric because I don't think it's realistic. We're not going to reverse NAFTA and shit. The key to being successful in growing the US economy (as they recognize at one level by promoting "green economy" jobs) isn't slapping tariffs (i.e., more taxes that Americans pay in higher prices) on everything we import from everywhere all over the world, it's finding ways to encourage development in sectors in which we can be competitive without trying to pick those sectors and enshrining them in legislation that will outlast their competitiveness. Like, let's try not giving tax breaks and whatever to dying industries, let's help employees with retraining and even relocation or, God forbid, continuing education. Let's help businesses with the R&D of their choice or think about the weird ways or tax code fucks shit up for them (like a section of it that says that the depreciation schedule for a warehouse roof is long than the life of the average roof, so businesses end up paying taxes ON MULTIPLE ROOVES).
There are plenty of things to think about when it comes to free trade, but voluntarily raising prices for all Americans in the midst of a recession isn't a good plan, people.
Duh.

s
MOE: That's an important part, but where can America be competitive? I am actually quite convinced that our cultural veneration of the free market and our eminently free, and large, market has left us competitive above all in the business of "demand creation." Our vast expanse and embrace of free trade has also left us with some logistics powerhouses in Wal-Mart, Fed Ex and UPS. That same expanse and huge market and language supremacy and the something peculiarly cultural about our higher education has left us competitive in technology, and for that you have to give MIT and Harvard and Stanford a lot of credit. Our laws and liquidity and educational institutions — again, a function of the massive size of our market — make us competitive in financial services. But let's not forget the fact that in most countries that have produced dramatic economic growth the government has played a role in the decisions that steer the economy. It wasn't an accident that Asia built all those semiconductor fabs. Those are multibillion dollar factories that are incredibly expensive to run, and yet the margins are crappy and the industry is highly cyclical and you don't want to invest in a chipmaking company — or, let's face it, ANY manufacturing business — if you're