A Second Hand Conjecture

The Federal Reserve has for a long time eschewed increasing the money supply directly, and instead has manipulated credit to affect the economy and control inflation. This has led to three important things which are in my opinion at the root of this crisis.

• Asset price inflation (at least initially) as opposed to broader price inflation.
• A massive increase in leverage (debt to magnify returns) throughout the financial system and our economy.
• A massive increase in the size of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy. Since it is built on leverage, financial sector compensation has soared and led to concentration of wealth in financial hands.

The last fascinates me, as a sector which should be a relatively small part of the economy functioning as intermediaries has through leverage achieved profits (a redistribution of wealth from the rest of our citizenry) far from the size their intermediary function can possibly justify. These intermediaries for example accounted for about a third of the market capitalization of the S&P 500 before they crashed and burned. How do the intermediaries deserve a market cap that amounts to around half of those for whom they intermediate?

The answer is increased leverage. I’ll address this in more detail later, but the Federal Reserve has finally decided to expand the monetary base, which has consistently grown at a very slow, or non existent rate. From David Merkel:

Check out the very far left side of the graph and look at the vertical takeoff.

David fills us in on the details:

Look at the H.4.1 report.  We may have finally hit the panic phase of monetary policy, where the Fed increases the monetary base dramatically.  They are pumping the “high-powered” money into loans:

• $20 billion for Primary credit
• $80 billion for Primary dealer and other broker-dealer credit
• $70 billion for Asset-backed commercial paper money market mutual fund liquidity facility
• $40 billion for Other credit extensions
• $80 billion for Other Federal Reserve assets
• -$20 billion netting out other entries

Making it an increase of roughly $270 billion from last week’s average to Wednesday’s daily balance.  Astounding.

In general, the increases are not being pumped into the banks, but into specialized programs to add liquidity to the lending markets.  Now, I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating.  What happens if the Fed takes losses on lending programs.  It reduces the seniorage profits that they pay to the Treasury, which means the Treasury has to tax or borrow that much more.  The Fed isn’t magic; it’s a quasi-extension of the US Government in a fiat currency environment.  It’s balance sheet is tied to the US Treasury.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism is correct.  The US is no longer a AAA credit, particularly if you measure in terms of future purchasing power of US dollars.  I’ve felt that for years, though, with all of the unfunded future promises that the US Government has made with Medicare, Social Security, etc.  The credit of the US Government hinges on foreign creditors (like OPEC and China) to keep it going.  What will they offer them? The national parks?

True, all true, but possibly if they are going to provide monetary stimulus this might be a better way than cutting rates, now and in the future.

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I was not in favor of the Paulson plan if you haven’t caught that yet. Still, the pitiful display from our congress today set a recent low.

First, faced with an unpopular and contentious bill which she feels for the good of the nation must be passed, we get a partisan and divisive speech from Nancy Pelosi:

Pelosi had said that the $700 billion price tag of the measure “is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush Administration’s failed economic policies — policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system.”

Pure horse hockey. More importantly, if Pelosi believes her rhetoric about the importance of this bill the poor judgment, lack of leadership and inability to understand the importance of statesmanship in a crisis should be grounds for immediate dismissal from her post.

Then, we get this pathetic response from the Republican leadership:

“I do believe that we could have gotten there today had it not been for this partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said, adding that Pelosi “poisoned” the GOP conference.

Deputy Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) held up a copy of Pelosi’s floor speech at a press conference and said she had “failed to listen and to lead” on the issue.

The Speaker had blasted the Bush administration in her speech and Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) asserted that some GOP lawmakers, who had reluctantly agreed to support the bill, might have changed their minds following Pelosi’s remarks.

“Might” have effected them? What whining. If it is false it shows the same tin ear that Pelosi demonstrated. If it is true it is even worse. Either way, did it not occur to them how petty it would look in a moment of crisis?

If these congressman or women really didn’t support the bill and were going to vote for it anyway, the idea that they would change their votes because Pelosi was her normal clueless self is enough to deprive them of my vote forever.  It is even more damning if they thought the bill was necessary and voted against it due to her behavior.

This is a disgrace.

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If they did, then they wouldn’t have banned short selling. People may have noticed that the ban hasn’t helped, and today we see one of the real costs.

See, when markets collapse like today, short sellers dive into the market to cover their short positions, in these times they are often the only ones buying. They aren’t there today, and the market has lost one of its stabilizers.

Frankly, this whole affair has been drenched in idiocy.

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doesn’t look like it’s going to pass the House floor.

Update: It failed.

The vote was 207-226 against the measure, with one member not voting, half an hour after voting began. Voting remains open even though the “official” time has expired for casting a ballot.

There was broad bipartisan opposition to the measure, with 95 Democrats and 133 Republicans voting against the bill. Republicans voted more than 2-1 to oppose the bill.

Update 2x: The gavel hasn’t fallen yet and already 2 people have changed their vote to ‘yes’, possibly feeling pressure from the large losses in the DOW after the rejection. Supposedly the Dems are trying to get 4-10 R’s to switch their vote to ‘yes’ and then a huge number of Dem’s will change theirs to ‘yes’ as well. Similar to the strategy that the GOP had with NAFTA in the 90s of getting a good number of Democrats to vote for it to cover themselves politically against any populist blowback.

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Larry Summers and Mark Thoma argue that if done right the bailout will mean we can solve this crisis and still have everything we want, tax cuts, health care spending and all kinds of other goodies. Larry argues:

Just as a family that goes on a $500,000 vacation is $500,000 poorer but a family that buys a $500,000 home is only poorer if it overpays, the impact of the $700bn programme on the fiscal position depends on how it is deployed and how the economy performs. The American experience with financial support programmes is somewhat encouraging. The Chrysler bail-out, President Bill Clinton’s emergency loans to Mexico, and the Depression-era support programmes for housing and financial sectors all ultimately made profits for taxpayers…

Maybe, but Alex Tabarrok finds this optimism a bit ironic:

Does this sound familiar? I can hear it now. A vacation sir is consumption but a home, ah a home, that’s investment. Investments pay off. Just look at the American experience. Rising home prices! Never a downturn. Isn’t that encouraging? Hell, at prices like these you can hardly afford not to buy. Yes sir, a home that’s a wise investment. And that makes you sir, a wise investor. And a wise investor, well a wise investor can certainly afford a nice vacation.

How the economy performs isn’t really the issue as much as the housing market. Chrysler was bailed out at a cyclical low, we are not at a cyclical low in housing, we aren’t even at a cyclical average. We aren’t even close.

Nor was Chrysler such a rousing success anyway. The bailout of Detroit only postponed the pain for the American auto industry and kept them from either going out of business or becoming better, if probably somewhat smaller organizations, and the costs to us all will eventually be pretty damn high. That isn’t even factoring in cementing the idea of “too big to fail” in corporate America. That encourages larger organizations rather than more profitable ones to be created.

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China space mission article hits Web before launch

A news story describing a successful launch of China’s long-awaited space mission and including detailed dialogue between astronauts launched on the Internet Thursday, hours before the rocket had even left the ground.

The country’s official news agency Xinhua posted the article on its Web site Thursday, and remained there for much of the day before it was taken down.

Excepts:

“After this order, signal lights all were switched on, various data show up on rows of screens, hundreds of technicians staring at the screens, without missing any slightest changes …

‘One minute to go!’this claim

‘Changjiang No.1 found the target!’…

“The firm voice of the controller broke the silence of the whole ship. Now, the target is captured 12 seconds ahead of the predicted time …

‘The air pressure in the cabin is normal!’

“Ten minutes later, the ship disappears below the horizon. Warm clapping and excited cheering breaks the night sky, echoing across the silent Pacific Ocean.”

Is anyone really surprised? Hopefully the technician who made the mistake is still healthy.

UPDATE: This story doesn’t inspire any confidence in this claim.

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Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had a crisis that has caused the need for a large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US.  If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Franklin Raines, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January.  You may know him as the Chief Economic Advisor for Senator Obama’s presidential campaign, and the former head of Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2006.

Let me assure you that this transaction is 100% safe.  Mr. Raines is completely trustworthy with your money.  His record speaks for itself.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of friend so the funds can be transferred.  Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to [email protected] so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully

Henry “Hank” Paulson

Minister of Treasury

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It is not so much,
And Time stands alone for a moment.
Fall begins.

Cascade Falls, West Virginia

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Outside the Beltway
“It’s quite possible, though, that we’ve simply created a culture that values sparing hurt feelings over individual freedom of expression.”

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Stop the ACLU
“but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self-interest.”

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Courtesy of Alex Taborrak

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Continuing the discussion on tonight’s podcast, one of the recurring themes of much of the commentary on our current financial crisis is that the cause is too much deregulation. Possibly there is some truth to this, though the evidence is rather vague. The most disturbing figure in all this is Barney Frank.

“We need stricter standards on loans.”

Except, the problem here wasn’t lack of regulation, but that the regulations were not enforced, or fraud, by lenders, brokers and their clients. More laws doesn’t help. This was also a failure of long standing, not new. I would suggest simplifying and increased enforcement would be a better option.
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Ross Douthat

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Isn’t it interesting that those who tend to believe in the paranormal are also those who tend to believe the big lie of the liberal left?

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Brutally Honest
The drumbeat – the phenomenon of the big lie. 

It’s the drumbeat of the left. It is political, philosophical, theological, and social. It pervades every activity. It is post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day. It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world. It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism.

I often wonder why, what I consider to be the rational and logical arguments of conservatism, don’t fare well against the drumbeat.  This author posits that man’s nature is selfish and arrogant.

The power-hungry arrogance of human beings seems to be the force that underlies the events carrying us forward to the final chapter.

Dennis Prager talks about man’s need for security.  I have heard him say that but I am unable to cite a reference.

If you believe the polls and most recent elections, we are split 50/50.  Half of us believe the big lie, half of us not.

Western culture, culminating in the great American experiment, has been perverted.

…

Generally, these perversions are manifested in bigger government, more laws, more bureaucracy, more regulations, more taxes, and government controlled redistribution of wealth, more collectivism, less individualism, and less freedom. We all hear it constantly from leftist politicians as they add their part to the drumbeat:  government must do more to ensure Americans avoid the consequences of their choices.  We all know the song, sung to the cheers of the unthinking throngs who would give up their very humanity for the promise of a free lunch. These are the joys of cultural Marxism.

Unthinking throngs – I love the word sheeple. 

How did this great experiment get to a 50/50 split?

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Washington Post
This is not good news for consumers.  Reminds me of Phil Gramm’s “whiners” comment.  “Wall Street has lived beyond its means, but so has Washington. Both did so, in part, because consumers and voters on Main Street wanted it that way. They craved cheap credit to spend on imported goods, and they resisted tough tax and spending decisions. That, too, must change, lest this generation’s costly excesses end up crushing opportunities for its children and grandchildren.”

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Instapundit
Bill Whittle talks about McCain and Palin and their stand against a Legion of Narcissists and a Confederacy of Despair – the Liberal Left.

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You know, I’m a little tired of all of the snide comparisons of Ike and Katrina, in particular the comparisons of New Orleanians to Houstonians. Why is there almost no news coverage of Ike’s aftermath vs. that of Katrina? For the same reason there’s no coverage of the aftermath of Gustav in New Orleans: in terms of the relative strengths of the storms at US landfall, the size of their relative storm surges and scope of the damage done, Ike and Gustav just don’t compare to Katrina.

Following Katrina, at this point New Orleans had been maybe 50% dewatered. We were at about 1200 dead, even though a far higher percentage had evacuated for Katrina, a monster category 5 storm that was so powerful it damaged pipelines laying on the the freaking bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Ike made landfall barely rated a Category three, and was even weaker by the time it got to Houston, while Katrina made landfall a Category five with New Orleans experiencing sustained Category three winds. But of course the big destroyer in a hurricane is the water, and while in 2005 New Orleans drowned, two weeks ago Houston, and even Galveston, did not.

Although I am a native of New Orleans, I’ve been in Texas so long that I consider myself a Texan, and a proud one at that. Houston is doing a great job dealing with the aftermath of Ike, as is the state. Texas learned an enormous amount from Rita. But the main reason southeast Texans are responding better to Ike than New Orleanians did to Katrina is because we didn’t go through anything remotely like New Orleanians suffered through, and still suffers; not even close.

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The hedge fund industry is feeling gloomy, and so is Mayfair.

Meanwhile our government is considering following London’s lead and making their lives even more difficult, by banning short selling for a while. Yep, Fannie would have been just fine with mismatched liabilities, toxic assets and corrupt accounting mixed in with 40-1 leverage if nobody had been selling their stock, which is really all a short sale is.

This is crazy, and likely to lead to a much worse environment for both investing and the smooth functioning of capital markets, which are supposed to over time allocate capital. They are not supposed to lead to higher returns regardless of the worth of a company.

Wealth is not created out of thin air, it is supposed to be connected to the actual income stream a company can produce over time.

Market corrections are what keep wealth from being a product of a mere price we would like for assets, which is awfully disappointing to those who want wealth to be a casino where the house always loses, the drinks are free and the girls (or young men) always accommodating. (more…)

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American Digest

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Vox Popoli

The executive class is not, for the most part, capitalist, it can be more accurately understood as a sort of pirates union that is loosely allied in common cause against the capitalists who actually own the companies that they are systematically pillaging under the guise of “managing” them. Until this distinction between executives and owners is properly understood by the American people, the irresponsible rape-and-pillage will continue to the detriment of the shareholders, the employees, the economy and even the government.

Interesting view of the executive class.  Seems they are about as useless as the current political class.  Easy access to Other People’s Money (I heard Sarah Palin call it OPM the other night on Hannity) is at the root of both the executive and political failings.

Vox Day argues this is not “a reflection of the free market” and that government intervention has allowed this.

Their power is the result of government interference in the free markets

I can see this as a micro argument but it seems to me that, at a macro view, this is the free market at work.  “They” will take what they can get away with – what the market will bear.  Government interference is part of what defines the current “market”.  When the shareholders decide this is no longer acceptable, they will influence the market to change.

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The keyboardist for Pink Floyd, responsible for the texture of the bands surreal sound, passed away on Monday.

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Today the Fed went to the Treasury and asked for a line of credit. You know, the lender of last resort has had to turn to our Treasury to protect their balance sheet.

Want to see something weird. and look at the treasury market. In the bond world, a 1% move is huge. So check out what has happened in the US Treasury market. Especially the 13 week Treasury bill. It’s yield collapsed by over 97.67% today.

Astounding, truly astounding.

My father who invested (and very successfully) through the late sixties/early seventies nifty fifty era, the bear market of 72-74, the market low in 1981 and Black Monday in 1987 says this is the most incredible market in all of his experience. It certainly eclipses anything I have seen from 1980 forward.

Update: Courtesy of Eddie Elfenbein:

At one point today, the yield on the three-month Treasury bill (^IRX) hit 0.01%!!

One Freakin Bip!!

This means that the risk-free rate is now in direct competition with the underside of your mattress.

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Sarah Palin’s personal email account gets hacked by an anonymous operative and Farhad Manjoo blames Palin for “Rovian tactics.” Indifference to irony isn’t a new thing in Palin reporting, but there’s a certain amusement about the event in liberal circles which is amusing in itself. That is, if you have the imagination to picture the apoplectic indignation at ‘Republican dirty tricks’ that would have ensued had Joe Biden’s email account been compromised.

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Who jumped first in South Ossetia has become a bit of a information war between Georgia and Russia. Today, the Georgian government went a ways toward resolving it by releasing recordings of intercepted radio traffic preceding the Russian invasion. The tapes seem to demonstrate that elements of the Russian invasion force had entered Georgian territory twenty hours before the Georgian army responded.

(more…)

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Like so many others, Elizabeth Johnson is out for that Palin look.
Sarah always has such choice footwear…and eyewear retailers are getting explicit in their advertising.
In case you were curious, this is where you end up when your anti-Palin hysteria finally hits rock bottom.
Finally, the sad sight of an ideologically indoctrinated childhood, at an anti-Palin protest in Alaska.

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Who would win in a head-to-head contest of the Veeps for the presidency? Palin, according to Rasmussen, by 47%-44%.

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Had the radio on driving to get coffee. Rush Limbaugh was denouncing sexism and patriarchal privilege. McCain ad comes on pitching expanding embryonic stem cell research. Boy, haven’t things changed in the Republican party? For the better, says me.

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Hey guys. I’m still here and everything is fine. Had a small leak in my ceiling but otherwise no damage. Got power and water back Sunday, but there are still 1.5 million without, including my mother and sisters. Gas is scarce and as soon as a station gets a shipment in there’s lines down the street. I’ll upload some pictures I took in a later update.

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Senior Democrats gave a conference call briefing to their top outside donors last week. Things are pretty grim according to them. Obama had once signaled that he didn’t want support from 527 type PACs, but with his support eroding rapidly in most swing states that’s changed.

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The Strata Sphere

When governments allow unreasonable panic to set in and the mob rule to take
over the rule of law – even in the slow motion case of a trial like this – they have lost control.

The rule of law is based on the fundamental premise of a jury of our peers and the theory of the rational man.  What happens when the propaganda of a big lie causes the rational man to become irrational?

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Impact Lab
“A new long-range energy transmission experiment opens the possibility of sending solar energy from space to earth.”

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Astute Bloggers
Who would have thought that Skype was a bad thing?  “Taliban fighters targeting British troops in Afghanistan are using the latest ‘internet phones’ to evade detection by MI6, security sources said last night.”

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Stop the ACLU
“Dontcha ya hate it when Old Media outlets beat up on other Old Media outlets?”

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Say Anything
“A pretty sad commentary if you ask me.”

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Commentary
“More complacency will only feed Russia’s ambitions.”

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There’s a teenage sexual revolution underway in Chile, that is animated by the emergence of a rebellious new generation of kids born after the 1988 referendum and democratic transition. A generation with no memory of the moral strictures of a conservative dictatorship. One of the bar games, called poneco, invites kids to kiss as many random people as possible. Seventeen year old Michele Bravo: “We are not the children of the dictatorship; we are the children of the democracy.”

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Photos of Russian kids mounting a street protest against the banning of South Park by the state. This is no small or meaningless act.

As daily experience, one of the worst aspects of living under a repressive fascist regime is how utterly boring it is. It is a horrible experience to be a teenager in a society where every radio station plays only opera, and every television show is a boring panegyric to the wisdom of the regime.

This is an intrinsic hostility to youthful enthusiasms too. In more than one way fascism can be described as a permanent war conducted by the state on the innate liberality and frivolousness of youth. Under fascism, something as light-hearted as South Park becomes “extremist propaganda” because the fascist is altogether incapable of understanding the necessary playfulness of entertainment. He feels the driving necessity to infect everything with deep political significance.

It is by such a course that the abolition of free expression induces the characteristically pervasive and perverse boredom of its societies. This does not only affect youth either, as a society robs itself of its own vitality by repressing its youth’s enthusiasm.

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For two weeks, as John McCain’s national polls first rose above Obama and then solidified there, Democrats protested that the popular vote was irrelevant. Look to the state polls said they, in a sensible but amusingly opportunistic argument for the electoral college (for those of us who recall the venom of 2000). Alas, this was a comfort built upon something of an illusion, given that few state polls were available after the Republican convention. That’s begun to change of course, and for the first time Rasmussen has given McCain a slim electoral college advantage.

(more…)

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(Houston Chronicle)

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Instapundit
“Senate Democrats promised more open government.  This is not it.”

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The Chronicles of the Conspiracy
“What does it say about our nation that it has become political suicide to state
the good news that our economy is not in recession?”

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IBD
Perhaps we are making progress.

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Scroll down for the updates.

Well Hurricane Ike is heading my way. The center is projected to hit west of Houston, but a Freeport landfall would be the worst case for Houston, as it would entail a huge storm surge and we’d get the dreaded northeast quadrant of the Hurricane. I’ll be heading up to north Houston today to my family’s house, and will try to take some pictures with my new found camera (funny story). In the meantime you can see some webcams of Port Aransas and Galveston here.

Now one interesting thing about Ike right now is that the eye pressure dropped quite a bit last night to it’s current 945 mb. This low pressure is equivalent to a strong cat 3/4 ‘cane, however the wind speed hasn’t picked up accordingly and it’s still at a cat 2.

Right now I’m making a list of things to do when/if the power goes out. A couple of books definitely. A game of drunken Risk brings back college memories. The most lamentable part of this whole ordeal however is the postponement of the UT/Arkansas game to Sept 27th, and the possiblity of missing college football this Saturday. Hopefully you were used to not hearing from me on the weekends becaues of football, so you won’t miss me now if power does go out.

Update 1pm: I’m still in southwest Houston at my apt, and it’s a little windy now, like a light breeze though even a light breeze isn’t very common to Houston. Still sunny and partly cloudy. I’m busy charging up everything I can and trying to eat everything in my freezer.

Update 8pm Sept 12th: Up at my family’s house now in NW Houston. Ike is still a few miles away from Galveston, but we’ve seen the storm surge flooding the island all day. Anyone staying there is making a huge mistake. I’m pretty far north up here, so I think the worst part is going to be the part where I lose power, and how long it takes to get power back. It’s been getting more and more windy all day here, as I watch the clouds streak across the sky towards the south west. Kind of reminded me of the path of the beam in the Dark Tower series if you’ve read that. And of course wind itself is kind of anomalous for Houston. I spent 10 years in Corpus Christi and it was about this windy all the time. Been in Houston for another decade and it’s just never windy much at all, just a nice, calm thick humid air. Ike’s eyewall has been shrinking right up until the very end as it approaches the coast. It’s 1 mph below a Cat 3 hurricane and it’s wind is going to be very powerful over a very wide range. The newscasters are saying tropical storm force winds all the way north up here for the next 20-24 hours pretty much. I’ll try to update some more until power goes out. After that I have 2 cell phone batteries that can hopefully last until power is back. We’ll see.

Images after the break

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Tim Reid travels to Mount Clemens, Macomb County Michigan, to talk to white working class female voters. Macomb County should be core Democratic blue country, but it was here that Stanley Greenberg first identified the “Reagan Democrats” of the 1980s, and Reid thinks we just might be seeing the ground shift once again:

The Times spoke to dozens of women here – perhaps the key demographic in this election – in an area that is 88 per cent white, has one of the highest unemployment and home repossession rates in the country, and will play a big role in determining who wins Michigan in November. It is a crucial swing state that no Republican has won since 1988 but where Mr Obama is particularly vulnerable. Nearly all said that they were still undecided. Yet the disturbing fact for Mr Obama was how many said that they had been leaning towards him – until Mrs Palin entered the race.
(The Times)

Read on>>

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Boy, this was an awfully interesting exchange. Democratic strategist Mark Penn, absurdly invited by Brian Goldsmith to argue the press has been soft on Sarah Palin, instead slams the media for counterproductively biased and vindictive coverage:

(more…)

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According to a new Associated Press poll 46% of the public thinks Barack Obama is too inexperienced for the presidency, and only 36% say the same of Governor Palin. So much for that line of attack.

In contrast with both, a staggering 80% feel Senator McCain has the right experience for the job. An almost unbelievable contrast of opinion in a presidential election.

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Obama’s “new” tactic to regain the initiative in the election is to portray McCain as out of touch with ordinary Americans. Hmm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t this the old tactic? Patrician wife, seven houses, price of milk, Salvatore Ferragamo footwear and so forth. I seem to remember that being the heart of their complaint for months. And didn’t it, you know, fail?

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neatorama
“We live in a capitalist society,” she tells us. “Why shouldn’t I be
allowed to capitalize on my virginity?”  Is this a hoax or just free markets?

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From Craigs List, though it has since been removed:

H/T- Alphaville

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Redstate
“And I will love her despite her flaws, instead of hating her despite her greatness. It is the very least I owe to those who perished to wake up a foolish, foolish young man.”

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