MOE: Ok so THAT was fun... economic indicator time! I'm sitting in Starbucks and I had resigned myself to paying $10 for a crappy TMobile session, when it turns out they've changed Wifi partners and now AT&T is offering 2 hour blocks for $3.99, the price of a soy latte! How times change, okay, and speaking of Starbucks I think I'm going to be watching the returns in Boston with Barney Frank if anyone's interested in showing up to that. Dixville Notch will already be in bed natch! Landslide for Obama up there! Oh and did I mention that before I hit Boston I have to go to Philadelphia to cast my vote? And then the crappy AT&T Wifi service crapped out.

MEGAN: So you worked out the registration issue that got screwed up from the primaries? Good! Also, that sounds like quite the fun day of train rides, culminating with watching election returns with a seated Congressman. I will be live blogging for Jezebel. In preparation for it, last night I stopped by the grocery store and bought: 2 bottles of Guenoc Petite Sirah, one of cava, a six pack of beer and a bag of chips. I might have a friend over, or not if I don't feel like sharing. I'm already craving the salty chips.

MOE: Now I'm stealing Wifi and it is working better than the Wifi I legitimately clicked the "Terms & Conditions" box and PAID for. Yeah I called the hotline last night. They told me my polling place was at 23rd and Fitzwater!

MEGAN: Mine is around the corner, and has been for the last 5 years.

MOE: Yeah but you have to stand in line right? In Philly polling places are so small you rarely have to stand in line. It's like a few thousand Dixville Notches.

MEGAN: Well, I didn't wait in a line until 2006, when it was an hour wait in the morning and I gave up and decided to come back later but you should have seen the looks I got from people. I then managed to get caught in a deluge which caused three car accidents on the way home from work, ran into the polling place with 2 minutes to spare and there wasn't a line at all. I assume that, even though I will be voting mid-day, there will be a line. We are a swing state and all.

MOE: Hey so it turns out that the AT&T network just can't handle its traffic today. A guy came up to me and just informed me of this.

MEGAN: Great. It's like voting in a swing state, all fucked up. By the way, within the first 90 minutes of voting in Virginia, not one but two cities in Virginia were already having problems.

MOE: And we're back, on Gchat this time. Good thing I'm not voting by internet right??

MEGAN: I'm sure they'd find a way to make that even more fucked up than the system already is. And the system is pretty fucked up.

MOE: So, okay, there are many things to discuss. Many many things. And yet the whole topic feels so exhausted. Yesterday Rachel Maddow had Tim Pawlenty on her show and started grilling him about why McCain wasn't closing up the campaign by going out for Republican congressional candidates etc. etc. and you could tell even she wanted to tell herself to just give it a rest.

MEGAN: That's going to be a question a lot of Republicans start asking tomorrow, when the Dems are, at a minimum, in the high 50s in the Senate and way, way down in the House. I mean, $150,000 is a lot of radio ad time in, say, Tulsa.

MOE: Yeah, well, sure, but the Republican Party has bigger problems than that. As David Brooks captures. Contempt for government turns out to breed bad government! Which Republican Senators are losing btw? I haven't been paying attention ever since I sort of started to inherit Barney Frank's Senatitis.

MEGAN: Oh, gosh, Ted Stevens in Alaska, Liddy Dole in North Carolina and John Sununu in New Hampshire, for starters.

MOE: Right, I knew about them.

MEGAN: And then possibly Mitch McConnell, Roger Wicker, Saxby Chambliss and Norm Coleman.

MOE: I went to a Democratic dinner in NH with BF. Interestingly his favorite person in government is a longtime Dole loyalist, Sheila Bair of the FDIC. Have you written about her? There are few heroes in this financial crisis, but a wildly disproportionate number of them are heroines and she's one. (Also: Brooksley Born, Meredith Whitney, possibly Zoe Cruz.)

MEGAN: No, I have been all politics, all the time! Also, I forgot Gordon Smith in Oregon, because one generally always does. And there are 3 vacancies that the Republicans expect will be Democratic pick-ups. By the way, in case you were curious, Obama's grandmother's absentee ballot will be counted. Countdown to inappropriate Republican comment about a Chicago politician and dead people voting: T minus 2 minutes and counting.

MOE: Well I was going to say if you read one thing read this, but actually, just read that, people, it's nothing you don't sort of know about the crisis but it's horrifying nonetheless. There are parts of California where people who have been paying their mortgages for three and four years have been simultaneously watching their balances and monthly payments balloon while the values of their houses shrink to less than half their balances. It's insane. And anyone who buys, even to a teensy degree, the notion that "people without jobs were getting houses" and that's what got us here, ughhhhh.

MEGAN: Well, but, rich white people don't do things like that! The Wall Street Journal is biased! Of course it was the minorities! How can Ann Coulter be wrong??!!

MOE: What actually happened was people, in particular Hispanic people, were signing on to mortgages with such hair-raisingly exploitative terms it makes no sense in any fractionally-logical universe that anyone would extend such a loan. If not for the fact that none of the mortgage lenders actually every had to keep track of who they were lending to or whether they were paying!

MEGAN: Well, and the fact that some brokers weren't exactly good at things like "disclosure" and "layman's terms" and "honesty" and "integrity."

MOE: Yeah but forget honesty and integrity, I'm talking logical working capitalism here. I am a cynic, I am a skeptic, I sometimes call myself a Marxist, but the more I read about it the level of corruption and internal destructiveness allowed by the current system is actually astonishing.

MEGAN: Well, but ask Adam Smith, the basis of capitalism was supposed to be honesty and integrity. Without it, of course the system doesn't function. You can't have a functional market economy if it's all a zero-sum game of fucking over the other guy with every transaction, and trying to minimize the amount you get fucked over. People do business with one another assuming that they will get what they pay for, and that they will be paid. If that goes away, there's no longer an incentive to do honest business and it just devolves into chaos.

MOE: Well that's the invisible hand. Adam Smith never anticipated the credit default swap is one problem. And here's another thing: I really hate it when Republicans — notably Larry Lindsey, who I talked to the other day and is otherwise a stand-up guy — say stuff like "Don't buy stuff you don't understand…" A bigger part of this crisis — AIG — is that none of the SELLERS of this stuff understood what they were SELLING. In many cases the buyers knew better. And McCain — at the end of the day, he didn't need to pander to the base, which is what has been so sad about this. But better I suppose. It's almost as if their inane resurrection of Reagan era code words and talking points was in the cards all along, so we could sort of definitively put it all to bed. Although they are still screaming about socialism on CNBC.

MEGAN: If no one bought things they didn't understand, no one would invest their 401k's in the stock market in the first place.

MOE: What % of the Latin vote is going for Obama this time around?

MEGAN: McCain's numbers are down in the high teens, so I think 70-80 percent.

MEGAN: The Latino community isn't so keen on the Republican's "kick them all out" immigration policy.

MOE: That wasn't McCain's policy, poor guy. Too bad he couldn't remind any of them of that!

MEGAN: He could've reminded them of that, only he had to pander to the base that feels differently, so he pandered and then couldn't pivot.

MOE: Oh here's something about the strategic importance of Hispanic voters. And, not to belabor but the stock market was not the problem here. The stock market is like tic tac toe compared to the securities that caused this.

MEGAN: Well, but the point I was making was not whether stocks were the problem, it's that it was a stupid point. People buy stuff every day they don't understand.

MOE: Hispanics and youngs really got in at the tail end of this debt Ponzi. No, it's a stupid point, but it also has no validity whatsoever.

According to the expert lady, "Women view a house as the ultimate self-improvement, lifestyle-transformation design project." So yeah, really like shoes. But I think there's a lot more commitment vs. fear-of-commitment crap that goes into this decision. Dudes like liquidity in their investments and the rush of playing the market etc. etc. Women like to invest in crap that seems solid and reliable. (In lieu of anything else that is solid and reliable.) As a homeowning friend of mine put it, "I broke up with my BF and was just like, 'Fuck it, I don't need a man to do this.'" But oyyyyy, when you're paying $4000 a month to "own" a place you could rent for $1250, why do you need to do it? It's like "settling" for a bartender high school dropout with pubic lice and pledging to have anal sex with him every night for the next twenty years, and giving him the option to renegotiate for additional blowjobs if women still find him attractive in three years. Like, you know? I know it's a long shot, but you actually might have better luck in a few years if you just spend the money on drinking and index funds.

"Welcome To My Mortgage Hell" [Glamour]

MEGAN: So, do you want to start with the slideshow of hotness that is Obama's personal aide? I mean, the article's nice, blah blah blah, but really, I think its purpose should just be to allow us to ooh and ahh over the dude.
MOE: Dude the hottest dude today is the Marine on the fucking front page of the Times and I fucking CAN'T FIND IT ONLINE.
MEGAN: This guy?
MOE: It should go with this story…do you see a picture there? Mine's not loading. I may have to scan. To support the troops, you know. Did you get through any of the New Yorker piece I sent on Fadl vs. Zawahiri?
MOE: And yeah, that guy! He just defeated the Taliban or something!
MEGAN: By the way, for the amusement of all, by Gchat banner ad is now this: "Dictionary.com Word of the Day - ribald: characterized by, or given to, vulgar humor."

MEGAN: Well, I think in the grand tradition of good friends, it's a great thing that you and I have very different taste in men. You can have your Marine, and I'll take the aide and we can both be happy!
MEGAN: Though I think we can all agree that any ladyboner can most easily be killed with this, which greeted me on the top of the New Yorker's site when I went to look for that article.
MOE: How was your weekend? I'm trying to think of some ribald conversations that transpired but 1. I don't really know what constitutes "ribald" when I just volunteered my fear that I had genital warts and 2. I actually ended up having a weirdly serious drunk conversation with a friend about God, and how he thought the Left was going to reclaim Jesus, and then I read half this piece about the jihad movement's ongoing internal debate over just how violent they really need to be and…uh…got a sunburn. Through a pair of black jeans.
MOE: It's…um…
MOE: Not Timid, that shot.
MEGAN: Yes. Not Timid is a good way of phrasing it.
MEGAN: Um, my weekend? Pretty relaxing, not much happened, you know, just had this little piece published in a minor news outlet.
MOE: So what's the deal? Do you want to read about Roger Stone while I examine the future of jihad?
MEGAN: I mean, want is probably a strong word since the article starts in a swinger club and one is thus forced to consider the thought of that man fucking, but yes, I'll do it as I think I'll garner more of an understanding out of that than the jihadist piece before coffee.
MOE: In the meantime China's not forcing fines or abortions on anyone who decides to get pregnant after losing kids to the earthquake. (To be fair: China stopped forcing abortions three years ago, I think, but it still happens sometimes?) Bill Clinton said a lot of idiotic things about how there's some vast elitist conspiracy to cover up the fact that Hillary is the inevitable next president and McCain asked Obama to visit Iraq with him, which I think is an excellent idea since he's not exactly safe here, as Hillary so saliently pointed out the other day.
MEGAN: Ok, well, now, my gag reflex has woken me up.

Not long ago, Stone went to the Ink Monkey tattoo shop in Venice Beach and had a portrait of Nixon’s face applied to his back, right below the neck. “Women love it,” Stone said.

Ummm, we're all women, right? Because I think we can all give this a resounding thumbs down.
MEGAN: Also, by the way, the fact that Reps Anna Eshoo and George Miller endorsed Obama really just means that Nancy wants to because obviously they only do what they're told. And while that phrase sort of pisses me off, I also sort of wish that Pelosi was that steely and puppeteery because then she might get more shit done.
MOE: Oh Jesus at this point any Democrat who endorses Obama should just not bother me with their headlines. I'm trying to focus on the brotherhood here. Also dude I have to get that pic of that marine who is totally hot
MEGAN: I'll need it, too, to wash the Roger Stone stench out from under my nostrils.
MEGAN: Things like this quote, from a Democratic strategist:

He once said to me, ‘Are you black? Are you Hispanic? Are you gay?’ When I said no, he said, ‘Then why the fuck are you a Democrat? You should be with us.’

This guy should be denied all access to pussy, seriously. Pussy boycott.

MOE: Um, someone in my house whose name will go unmentioned is eating one of your Christmas cookies.
MOE: That's neither here nor there.
MEGAN: The pumpkin ones, or the nutmeg ones?

MOE: Lawrence Wright describing the changes in Cairo since he taught English there in the seventies reminds…me of China without the economic growth:

When I lived in Cairo, the population was about six million. Now it is three times that size. The unbearable congestion reflects the ungoverned quality of life in the city; pedestrians plunge into the anarchic traffic, their faces masked by fright or resignation. The virtual absence of any attempt to impose order—in the form of street lights or crosswalks—is characteristic of a government that has no sense of obligation to its people and seeks only to protect itself.

One day during my visit, I went to Cairo University, whose buildings are practically crumbling from neglect. There are nearly two hundred thousand students, a good many more than there were when Zawahiri and Fadl studied there. Although the campus was quiet, the mood of the students was troubled, if subdued. Their professors had been on strike because of low pay; in Cairo’s poorer neighborhoods, riots had broken out over the cost of bread, and, in a middle-class area, residents had marched against pollution. The government’s response to the desperation had been to round up eight hundred members of the Muslim Brotherhood and throw them in jail.

MEGAN: Is it a bad thing that I snorted at the last sentence? Because if it is, I don't wanna me good.
MOE: I was going to blockquote another paragpraph but that feels lazy so I'm gonna summarize: Egyptians, like a lot of Middle Easterners, were psyched about 9/11 bc they thought it would force Americans to reexamine their support of their corrupt autocratic regimes and help eke out a middle path that embraced neither the status quo nor Islamism. Sadly that did not happen. Turns out we are not so good with "middle paths." Oh and btw Iran has nukes it's a grave and serious and urgent threat!
MEGAN: Oooh, way to bury the good tidbits! So, Charlie Black who is the Big Bad Lobbyist in McCain's camp, until very recently worked for the firm that Stone helped found, which was bought by the firm that Mark Penn helps run.

“So what that means is that Mark Penn is Charlie Black’s boss,” Stone told me. “And they said I was sleazy.”

MEGAN: Ha, the Egyptians thought that having he crap bombed out of us would make us re-examine our support of corrupt and autocratic regimes? I guess their knowledge of history is at least as bad as most Americans'.

MOE: Holy shit. Okay, so the Lawrence Wright story profiles some of the jihadist movement's foremost dissenters, namely a doctor named Sayman Imam Al-Sharif aka Dr. Fadl who met Ayman al-Zawahiri in med school in 1968 — hey! another awesome thing that happened that year, alert the boomer era hagiographers — but became estranged from him in the nineties and went off to practice medicine in Yemen and last May tried to call the whole thing off in a letter to a newspaper.
MEGAN: Oh, so, he's like an idealist? One Op Ed can stop a jihad or something?


9:45 AM
MEGAN: Pen is mightier than the sword?
MOE: Etc. etc. ... well, I guess he is like the William F. Buckley of Jihad, you know? The intellectual center of the movement apparently. And so he had a lot of followers. One was a guy named Karam Zuhdy. The rift sort of began in the nineties and Zawahiri tried to preempt it by holding a mass shooting in Novemeber 1997 in the ruins of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple and 62 people died. ANYWAY, Zudhy and his pals would minister to prisoners and try to get them to first renounce terrorism, then extremism, etc…gradually try and reform them etc. etc.
MOE: Most poignant passage so far:

Many of these Islamists had fantasized that they would be hailed as heroes by their society; instead, they were isolated and rejected. Now Karam Zuhdy and other imprisoned leaders were asking the radicals to accept that they had been deluded from the beginning. It was an overwhelming spiritual defeat. “We began going from prison to prison,” Ahmed recalled. “Those boys would see their leaders giving them the new conception of the revisions.” Ahmed recalls that many of the prisoners were angry. “They would say, ‘You’ve been deceiving us for eighteen years! Why didn’t you say this before?’ ”

Despite such objections, the imprisoned members of the Islamic Group largely accepted the leaders’ new position. Ahmed says that he was initially skeptical of the prisoners’ apparent repentance, which looked like a ploy for better treatment; however, several of the participants in the discussions had already been sentenced to death and were wearing the red clothing that identifies a prisoner as a condemned man. They had nothing to gain. Ahmed says that one of these prisoners told him, “I’m not offering these revisions for Mubarak! I don’t care about this government. What is important is that I killed people—Copts, innocent persons—and before I meet God I should declare my sins.” Then the man burst into tears.

MEGAN: Wait, so, like, there's Reconciliation in Islam, too?
MEGAN: Also, it's sort of heartwarming that they learned that killing people is bad, though!
MOE: Yeah well if they can get the memo maybe even someone like Doug Feith could reject his old…haha no.

MEGAN: Wait! Wait! Maybe the secret is that you have to go to prison? Because I could be down on running that experiment with good ol' Dougie.

MOE: I got till 10:30 incidentally and scanned that picture and I'm pretty sure not even I expected that 30% of the auto sales in California are made with home equity loans…especially since it would appear that California also holds claim to the market with the highest average price-to-rent ratio, a pretty good barometer of how inflated a real estate market is. A place in East Bay, California costs — or cost past tense, anyway — 51 times its annual rent. 42.5 in San Jose. That is, just for the record, insane.
MEGAN: Yeah, my sister lives out there and in Palo Alto these cute little bungalows that are barely bigger than my condo or your apartment are, like, $1 million and people rent them out and I don't see how you'd have the money to pay that kind of rent and not buy the place.

MEGAN: On the other hand, 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the Earth.
MEGAN: Oh, hey, btw, weren't you asked what happened to Aung San Suu Kyi last week? The junta's decided to extend her detention by another year despite laws there that you can't be detained without trial for more than 5 years. Apparently, her being free while they're fucking up the country more is a bad thing.

• New York City police arrested Al Sharpton, Sean Bell's fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, and hundreds of other protesters today for staging prayer sessions at the exits of Manhattan in protest over the acquittal of the cops that shot Mr. Bell. Because, obviously, inconveniencing others to protest the loss of life means you should spend time at Rikers. Why did they have to make me like Al Sharpton? [NY Times]
  
• Hillary's staying in the race despite the hellishly long odds, hoping that Barack will fuck it up and she can convince the superdelegates to anoint her the candidate. [NY Times]
  
• To that end, she had an unannounced meeting in Washington with many of them behind closed doors. There's nothing sketchy-looking about that to the average voter though. [The Atlantic]

• And, goddammit, I find myself agreeing with Bush's threat to veto the "Democratic" housing crisis bill because it's a huge giveaway to shady mortgage lenders at the expense of taxpayers. Yes, that's right, the Republican butt-buddy of industry is criticizing the Champion-of-the-Little-Guy Party for their giveaways to industry. What the hell is happening in the world today? [Washington Post]
• I mean, a Bush Administration flunkie may actually testify before Congress about some shit they pulled! [Washington Post]
• But we resumed ritualized state-sanctioned murder last night. [NY Times]
• The death toll in Burma is likely to rise, and the junta doesn't give a shit about the people anyway so they're procrastinating on letting aid workers in. [Washington Post]
• Lebanon's having violent protests again. [LA Times]
• People are making souvenirs for Jenna Bush's wedding to sell to tourists. Fucking Marriage Industrial Complex. [Fox News]
• Oh, and our government is spending money to try to catch illegal immigrants trying to leave the United States. [LA Times]
• Not that any of that will stop conservatives from being happier by rationalizing away inequality. [LiveScience.com]
• Guess the rest of us will just have to stay frustrated and fatigued. [Reuters]