The Big Picture: Oil Curtain Meets Domino Theory

We're off on the road to Morocco
This camel is tough on the spine
Where they're going, why we're going, how can we be sure?
I'll lay you 8 to 5 we'll meet Dorothy Lamour

Living under a rock and listening to swing music isn't a bad way to go. Get yourself some root beer, a tall glass and vanilla ice cream, drop in a couple scoops and let it fizz. Put on some WWII-era classics like Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" or Jimmy McHugh's "Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer." Garand-damn-teed, you'll start feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in no time. It's way more scientific than scientology, more meditative than meditation, and takes even less effort than Methodism. But sometimes a rock just isn't thick enough, or worse, is equipped with a wireless network.

Empires do not sensibly retreat or reduce expenditures, but follow a repeating, well-established pattern of symptoms:

"One symptom is widespread public concern over cultural and economic decay, with its many corollaries. The second is a growing religious fervor, church-state relationship, or crusading insistence. Next comes a rising commitment to faith as opposed to reason and a corollary downplaying of science. Fourth, we often find a considerable popular anticipation of a millenial time frame: an epochal battle, emergence of an antichrist, or belief in an imminent second coming or Armageddon. Last, these empires are prone to a hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach, often pursuing abstract international missions that the nation can no longer afford, economically or politically."

Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy

The West's inflatable, indispensable clown punching bag, Moammar Qaddafi, has fled from Libya. The largest tribes there, ones sitting on petroleum reserves which make their dust storm farm one of the world's 10 largest oil exporters, called for his departure. Said tribal chieftains also threatened to cut off oil exports to whoever was responsible machine-gunning protestors, by which they mean said West. From there it has devolved to civil war, and oil and gas exports from Libya have stopped. Germany, Italy, and China are sending warships. Add this to the 20 or so other South Vietnam-type US-funded regimes that are coming down, and I'm frantically searching the living room for back issues of People magazine. I'm hoping to find one from no later than 1996.

Regimes in Tunisia, Algiers, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Iran are either toppled or teetered by waves of revolt ignited by skyrocketing food prices and no prospects. Bahrain, home of the US 5th Fleet, also looks like it's toast, and I've probably forgotten a few others like Oman. Food protests are now spreading across India and China. (Note: The Federal Reserve Bank is a primary cause of the rampant commodities inflation after a massive and continuing policy of money supply creation. The conversion of this money supply to things of actual value is known as Gresham's Law.) Saudi Arabia's sclerotic sheikhs won't last the summer, and the bin Laden family, the country's largest employer, is poised to serve as kingmaker.

In other news, Obama's State Department seems bumblingly oblivious, and it even continues to insist a CIA assassin caught red-handed in Pakistan should enjoy diplomatic immunity, effectively ending a crucial alliance over one thug's incarceration. Obama's minions appear to be consuming far more powerful anti-depressants than root beer floats, and they grasp neither the simplest repeats in pattern of outcomes, nor the enormity of their scale. This President has instead chosen to frame the collapse of dictators hand-picked by the US, skillful enforcers who have provided decades of brutal stability and oil exports, as healthy "democratic reform." This must be a lot like watching a man being torn to death by pit bulls and hearing him repeat, "I really love dogs! I really love dogs!" Yes, maybe the earth is just going through one big fit of democracy right now. Maybe the new Mid-East governments will only put up a few Twitter feeds and Facebook group pages while we continue to pump out all their remaining oil.

As Vincent commented on the earlier Oil Curtain piece, the Muslim Brotherhood seems well positioned to take over in Egypt and elsewhere. The structures of the current host nations for these mutinies simply don't favor near-term reform by any democratic process, and the global economic system is now rapidly destabilizing. Whereas the Koran was conceived as a road map for social justice, stability, equity, and charity, the precise improvements desired by the protestors. What is more likely to win: parliamentary democracy, or shared authoritarian tradition? While the Muslim Brotherhood isn't driving the bus yet, they and the chimerical "al Qaeda" can position themselves near the steering wheel and ready themselves to provide governing bodies with practical reach, or what I call waste management services. Whoever can keep the streets clear of garbage in these countries will end up running them, and the mosques are already organized by neighborhood. At minimum, religious thought leaders will have powerful seats at the bargaining tables, ones not well disposed to US, UK, or NATO interests as currently configured.

Whatever political spots you choose to sport, I think we can agree that Domino Theory, when applied to the cradle of crude, sounds expensive. My spots are known, and if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, I may ask, "What did the state of Israel have against that tree?" But the problems in these forests and deserts are far bigger than Israel, and even I can't pin 2010's 70+% increase in the price of wheat on one hyper-paranoid enterprise in deviousness. In fact, purely from a stress level perspective, it's a great time to not be an Israeli. (When asked a couple weeks ago what effect the revolts in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt are having on the collective psyche of America's land-based aircraft carrier in the Mid-East, Hassaf, the considerate former citizen of Jerusalem replied immediately, "Hysterical fear.") The UK, and later the US, went to extraordinary pains to arrange Israel and the Mid-East just the way it was circa November 2010. That arrangement is gone.

Sucking vanilla ice cream and root beer up a straw to the tunes of Glenn Miller means you choose not to experience hysterical fear. But it doesn't stop you from pondering the effects of your fellow citizens paying $5 per gallon gasoline this year. That roughly equates to oil at $150/bbl. Every 1 penny increase in the price of gasoline means 1 billion consumer dollars is removed from the US economy. $5 gasoline means a gross domestic product reduced in the neighborhood of 10-15%. At the micro level, many people already have to make choices between getting to work or eating well, or between eating and freezing. At the macro level, $5 gasoline is the sword of hyperinflation and the shield of demand destruction beating each other to smithereens. $5 gasoline may not even be possible, as $125 per barrel oil might take out the whole global economy before that happens. Like it did in 2008. One way or the other, oil is going to be a lot harder to get out of the Mid-East, and I'm frantically searching my living room for copies of People Magazine, hoping to find some from no later than 1996.

Empires don't reduce and they don't retreat borne on reason's wings. Empires collapse. Don Quixote was written by Cervantes many years after the effective fall of the Spanish Empire, one that was based on the most bloodthirsty forms of gold extraction, silver collection, and which was increasingly subject to the dictates of a religion completely disconnected from all semblance of sensible statecraft. In other words, it was just like this one. But at least the Alzheimer's-riddled old Don had some windmills to tilt at. The United States now devotes 54% of its annual budget to paying for current and previous wars. Offer this empire solutions, offer it alternatives, and it declines. It doesn't believe in windmills, it thinks they're only for wooden clog-wearing wusses. It doesn't want solar panels, rather the internal revenue service gives businesses tax breaks for using oil and gas. The empire's government is going to shut down this next month, its credit rating should have been cut in 2008, and public workers are beginning to strike across its states. Federal, state, and municipal debt are at a higher level than when they were singing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me) at the end of 1945.

NATO is going to invade Libya unless someone kills its punching bag clown over the next few days. Once again, that sounds expensive. So here's a rhetorical question, and a serious one, meaning I don't know the answer: what do you think it would take for the US to give up control over Saudi Arabia's oil?

South Carolina Legislature Rethinks Socialism, Taps Stimulus $$

The state legislature in South Carolina acted Wednesday to send millions of dollars in benefits to the unemployed, reports Yvonne Wenger of the Post and Courier. The state legislature acted to correct an "oversight" that prevented the use of stimulus funds, Wenger reports, extending benefits for five months. About 113,000 residents have exhausted their benefits so far this year.

Has The US Housing Market Bottomed?

Lord Wife and I drove back yesterday AM from dropping Running Boy (age 5-1/2) and Mr. Grunt-n-Grab (age 11 months) at their respective stations. We were listening to National Public Radio since it was finally being safe to go back. NPR recently directed its longest-ever local fund drive, ending it only after resorting to stories like "How My Cello Wound Up in Poland."

While we crossed under the freeway, a young reporter quoted a disappointing housing starts report from September. She then invited a Subject Matter Expert from Columbia University onto her segment, and it went like this:

NPR Reporter asks the Expert questions, he fluently rattles off data, we draw closer to home. Reporter asks another question, Expert begins to deliver a matter-of-fact, dismal interpretation of housing market prospects. NPR Reporter suddenly interrupts to say, "I'm sorry--I have to cut you off now."

Lord Wife and I looked at each other with arched brows. Rookie reporter surprised by a vet producer, and-or a "Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella" reporting policy becoming painfully obvious? Not 100% sure, but in context it seemed like an openly Pravda Moment on NPR.

The Main Stream Media has by consensus already called the bottom on the real estate market, often citing a stabilization or drop in the rate of foreclosures. On the surface, that's very comforting data. As a homeowner, I certainly don't want to see more of my remaining equity go up in smoke. But...I also have to face facts, which involves objectively thinking about whether there is cause for being perky, and if so, what it is. This in turn means remembering how bankers think, which is to say, they greatly prefer not to.

In short, at some point banks stop foreclosing on properties in hard-hit locales, so I strongly suspect a lowering foreclosure rate is a false-positive indicator. This local tendency may have become a national reality. Either way, aggregate stabilization is being impacted by banks not wanting to take on properties that won't find buyers quickly. Apart from further driving down a bank's on-hand portfolio value, foreclosure costs and hassle factors are high. From the lender's perspective, a property must re-sell in a reasonable time. It must be appealing enough that someone will bid significant cash for it at a sheriff's auction.

There's an unspoken truth here that banks and real estate professionals are keenly aware of: houses do not go up in value. Unless maintained and updated, their value goes down. This is far more true for a McMansion 5 miles from Microsoft than for a grimy hovel in Detroit: if the McMansion sits unoccupied for two years without regular (and to the bank, bothersome) maintenance, its value plummets. The Detroit hovel is a walk-away, and for the attractive McMansion, everything hinges on how fast it can be re-sold. The bulk of properties are in between those extremes, but they're still subject to the same pressures. The more properties that sit empty, the more reluctant banks are to take on more.

A much stronger indicator for measuring "the bottom" would be to track the number of foreclosure filings compared to the number later sold at auction, observing percentage, time to sale, and foreclosure/auction price ratios. But that data isn't tracked officially. Even that data would fail to measure when someone walks away and the bank simply doesn't bother to file foreclosure. Walk-aways by both borrower and lender have already become common in some of the most depressed markets, as described in this local article from Dayton, Ohio:

In some instances, lenders don’t even bother to file a foreclosure. Figures by RealtyTrac released this week show foreclosure filings in the greater Dayton area are down almost 21 percent.

John Carter, housing inspector with the city of Dayton, finds the decline in foreclosures “very scary,” because houses are continuing to go vacant.

For every 100 houses that he orders boarded up, he said, 40 to 50 properties have a mortgage but no foreclosure filed. When he contacts the banks, they sometimes tell him they have no plans to foreclose.

“That makes it look like the foreclosure numbers are going down, but in actuality the banks are not even starting foreclosure,” Carter said. “So there’s no number to track now.”

I'm not trying to stop anyone from buying or selling a home, rather have pointed out basic problems with the Party Line's reasoning. At best, there are wide blind spots in the metrics being used by top prognosticators, the market really has bottomed, and we got lucky. Yet it seems more likely it has not, and officials are trying to talk the market up while looking through their binoculars backwards. These are mostly the same folks who told everybody you can't get hurt buying a home.

Calling the bottom is generally less important than having cash to put on a porch rail. Just as with previous Recession/Depressions, there are major opportunities for people willing to convert paper into property, and it's hard to think of a safer long-term investment in this environment than free and clear ownership of real estate.

Party Differences & Driving Influences

Bush one hour before his TARP speech:

In the theater, the president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.

Excerpted from Matt Latimer's upcoming "insider" book about the Bush presidency.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Chuck Grassley's Debt and Deficit Dragon
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

The Grassley Knoll

For a man who sweetens his corn flakes with lead shavings, Iowa's Senator Chuck Grassley has sure overachieved.

Long serving as a general benchmark for lowered public discourse, a recent Senate presentation outlining his position against health care reform is a modern classic, and a strong hint at his Party's future messaging style. There's no describing it, really, but the clip above is narrated by The Most Trusted Man in America (an incredulous Jon Stewart) and must be seen to be believed. You are going to laugh...and then you'll wonder, "Couldn't they at least have spelled 'Sur Taxalot' correctly?" I mean, Grassley's top donors are all health care companies, so you'd think they'd demand better.

(h/t to Lord Wife and Daunting Ideas)

Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again

WASHINGTON—After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

Tired of hearing the grim truth about their economic future, Americans demanded that the bald-faced lies resume immediately, particularly whenever politicians feel the need to divulge another terrifying problem with Wall Street, the housing market, or any one of a hundred other ticking time bombs everyone was better off not knowing about.

In addition, citizens are requesting that the phrase, "It will only get worse before it gets better," be permanently replaced with, "Things are going great. Enjoy yourselves."

"I thought I wanted a new era of transparency and accountability, but honestly, I just can't handle it," Ohio resident Nathan Pletcher said. "All I ever hear about now is how my retirement has been pushed back 15 years and how I won't be able to afford my daughter's tuition when she grows up."

"From now on, just tell me the bullshit I want to hear," Pletcher added. "Tell me my savings are okay, everybody has a job, and we're No. 1 again. Please, just lie to my face."

Via The Onion...

Texas Governor Threatens To Secede From Union

This just happens to be what I wished for when I blew out that last birthday candle. Thank you Birthday Fairy!!

This move by Governor Rick Perry dovetails beautifully with the Dungeons and Day Jobs State's ad campaign: Texas...It's Like A Whole Other Country.

Umm, exactly. Houston we have a problem. Maybe America really is a failed experiment when your Constitutionally protected right to be a murderous hypernational boob-tard hits critical mass and people are walking in to places and opening up with automatic weapons fire already, a depressingly common event in the past 30 days, is it really so bad if we let them go? And if it does really happen, do not say it can't, it would be like having Uganda or Mexico right next door, except they would give those bastards in the UN a what-fur by not showing up to their "wimpy commie-fests."

Evil Day Bob Job, a blogger who happens to be the #1 hit if you entered "f*%@ texas" into a Google search, proposes the next tourist ad:

So, when you're looking for scorpions, poisonous snakes, scorching heat and human rights abuses, don't go all the way to Mexico! You can get all that and more right here in Texas! "It's Like A Whole Other Country That Was Founded By Your Abusive Brother-In-Law Next Door."

I can't wait to not go, and I'm scared to google-image the same phrase.

Note: Be afraid, be afraid, do not image-search that phrase unless Safe Search is set to "China."

This Is Outrageous! They're Starting To Fight Back...

h/t to Cat in the Bag

All The News That Eventually Gets Printed

An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes. "They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

And then this:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, "the Jews."

From the prologue of Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's curious relations with the Middle East. (And hat tip to Jesus at Church and Empire, right margin.)

"As God As My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly"

Keith Olbermann grokked to the Sarah Palin turkey rendering interview on his show tonight, and used a clip from the great old WKRP in Cincinnati "Turkey Drop" classic. Here is Les Nessman reporting the original, live.

Raisin' Some Hell For 2012

Video #1 is a strange paen to Sarah Palin by a PAC called "Ethnic Cleansing for America." (Ok, just kidding. Sort of.)

In video #2, we have the Palinator doing a folksy, quite charming interview in front of a slaughterhouse for turkeys, in which turkeys...are being slaughtered...right behind her. A special touch when the turkey farmer, while draining out their blood, stares vacantly at the camera.

I'm sure you've seen these through your various real or fake nooz outlets, but I just need to embed these for posterity, and note that once upon a time, people, even Americans, would look at themselves and say, "Whoa, I can't put that on teevee because it'd look like, ahh, I'm an ignominious twit."

Also, I wish noticed that Presidential hopeful Mike Hukabee, the republican governor of the Land o' Goshen, already kicked off his 2012 campaign in Iowa.

Fox News Finally Figures It Out

Hello, intrepid fair-n-balanced nooze peoples over at Fox. Congratulations, you finally put down your porn manga comics long enough to read Obama's books, only to find--surprise!--he's always been a Marxist. Yep, he comes right out and says it, too, ha-ha, so guess what, capitalist-pig running-dog byotches? It's 1917 all over again. Too bad you didn't do some, you know, journalism a little earlier because then you would've had time to flee the country like Russian nobility and take refuge in Shanghai or Lhasa or someplace else safe from communism.

Now you'll have to endure years of horrible harshness in an Air America Concentration Camp, forced to listen to old clips of Al Franken at his most nasal and Jeanene Garafolo after her third bong hit. For twenty-four hours a day. Remember, you can always choose to end the suffering early, right? From Fox Nooz:

Obama's affinity for Marxists began when he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully," the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."

Obama's interest in leftist politics continued after he transferred to Columbia University in New York. He lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for what he called "the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union."

After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama spent a year working for a consulting firm and then went to work for what he described as "a Ralph Nader offshoot" in Harlem.

"In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of Black Panther fame, speak at Columbia," Obama wrote in "Dreams," which he published in 1995. "At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature."

Obama supporters point out that plenty of Americans flirt with radical ideologies in college, only to join the political mainstream later in life. But Obama, who made a point of noting how "carefully" he chose his friends in college, also chose to launch his political career in the Chicago living room of Ayers, a domestic terrorist who in 2002 proclaimed: "I am a Marxist."

PS--I haven't decided what to buy with all the money Obama Hood will take away from you and give to me. So I desperately need your help. What was your favoritest rich-people thing ever, I mean, that thing you'll most miss when your re-educated asses are waiting in line for a public bus?

Nine Oldsters Booted Out Of Nursing Home

"They somehow got it into their heads to celebrate the 90th birthday of one of the women with a kind of sex party," said Miss Helterford. "This may sound harmless or amusing to some people, but Scarborough has a reputation to uphold. We cannot tolerate that kind of conduct."

Mental note: do not end up in a facility named "Scarborough."

(via Cat in the Bag, who have been on a bit of a graphics roll.)

The Case For A McCain-Palin Presidency

If Barack Obama is elected, 25% of the country is going to have a gigantic freak-out, arming their preachers with .50 cals and their lawyers with rocket-propelled grenades. Hell, they're already filing lawsuits on early voting, lining up the post-election objects to burn in protest, and making death threats in advance. In their private moments you can almost hear them wistfully ask, "Can a President be impeached for spending too much time in the gym?" For yea, verily, black terrorism will stalk throughout their lands, and it will all be extremely annoying, and horribly, hysterically bad. I mean for the period of at least 4 years when 25% of the population and 50% of the volume continually threaten to secede and publicly long for the good old days of Slick Willie.

But what if McCain and his odalisque Basemonger got elected through, I dunno, the Diebold Effect, or the weird vendetta someone upstairs continues to hold against America? What would actually happen then?

75% of the country would have a gigantic freak-out, arming their preachers with .50 cals and their lawyers with rocket-propelled grenades. Now, to my anarcho-syndicalist little brain, that might just be a good thing. It's high time for another Constitutional Civil War to set a few things straight. Like for example this confusion over the public trust and commercial contracts our elected representatives and judges have been having, oh, ever since Eisenhower (and he woulda known) warned us over becoming hostage to the Military Industrial Complex that's steadily poisoning and robbing and killing everybody. I take that back--actually, there's no longer any confusion, because there is no public (9/11, Katrina, Galveston, collapsing bridges, medical billing systems, collapsing cranes, and whatever you do, don't think of a Major Earthquake) trust anymore. Public trust is so far gone, the Bush Administration is getting dragged kicking and screaming like an angry drunken conservative socialist back into its yawning dead vacuum.

A McCain presidency would be totally unacceptable right from the word "Aaawwwgggghhh!" First off, his Cabinet wouldn't even wait to be formed before starting to tear itself apart. These execrable fools hate each other, they hate McCain (who hates everybody), they hate Palin (who hates nearly everybody), they hate liberals, they hate themselves, and hate means never having to say You're Sorry. In fact his campaign is busy tearing itself apart right now, making Hillary Clinton staffers finally seem like they were re-enacting the Summer of Love. However, the wrack and ruin would be really cool to watch, and I would cackle daily with the same destructive glee you can only experience when irrevocably breaking something very expensive, like sending a rock through an old but still functioning vacuum tube TV set at the town dump, or setting fire to one of those quaint covered bridges they insist on still having in New England. Because that's just what it would be like, only with a government.

But there's an even better, more awesome thing a McCain presidency has going for it. How do I put this...what if Marvin Gaye had it wrong? What if war is the answer?? People, and I don't just mean any people, I mean soldier- and spook-type people, would damned fast be wondering who they had to kill to cut this avuncular, ongoing, surreal disaster short. And it would just get more "interesting" from there on out. According to my handy actuarial chart on geriatric subcutaneous melanomas, McCain has at least a 50% chance of announcing his cancer is back in the next 3 years, that it's inoperable, and he's handing the reins of this busted-down scalp-hunting party over to the aforementioned Basemonger, she who believes North America will be ruled by a supernatural Christian entity named Seth. Which would mean, of course, that's it, bye-bye, the end, no more country. We'd have the Un-tied States of America. We'd hold this thing, this big and chaotic but very determined and process-oriented thing...and we'd call it The Big Do-Over.

Now, maybe I'm wrong here, but I think that would bring a whole lot of folks together. Jefferson said the tree of liberty needed to be nourished with blood every now and again, and our Little Shop of Horrors growth has never been so parched. Sure, McCain-Palin might mean bringing on a military coup, but is that not a compelling alternative by comparison? Not to mention, coups have worked out pretty well for a lot of South American and even a few European countries. This may be a little risky, but everything has risk, you know, like mowing the lawn has risk, like buying money market mutual funds, shopping for baby formula. Sky-diving.

Risk, schmisk. We're probably screwed one way or the other, and the fact is it's still not too late to unleash the cleansing powers of a good old fashioned leap into the abyss, and I sure as hell know my country well enough to know it doesn't want sanity--like how "McCain's just too liberal" for some of my classmates and kin to vote for, ha-ha-ha, speaking of sanity, but go ahead, you can do it if I can, wussies--vote McCain. C'mon, it'll be like bungee-jumping an entire nation! Vote for Big Do-Over! Vote for Civil War II!

McCain Lawyer Urges New York Times To Investigate Obama Drug Use

Cindy McCain's lawyer, John Dowd, complained about the New York Time's factual coverage, threatened a libel suit, and accused them of not digging enough into Obama's youthful drug use and his failure to rescue ancestral Kenya from poverty:

It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus, there is a terrific lack of balance here.

What Dowd apparently doesn't recall is that the New York Times, like other news outlets in the country, had already chased the Obama drug story for juicy details, and a Times investigative pieces reported what anyone who has read "Dreams From My Father" would suspect: if anything, Obama overstated the drug use in his books.

The Toledo Strangler Strikes Again

Look at this heartwarming photo from the Toledo Blade. Some nice blonde girl is “welling up with tears” because she can’t breathe anymore! Someday when she is old and gray, she will tell her grandchildren, “I once had the privilege of being choked to death by America’s first black president.” How many transient hookers have met with the same tragic end? [The Toledo Blade: a largely non-gay publication]

(mostly via Wonkette)

Piper Palin Flashes The Victory Sign

(Click on the picture to enlarge.)

National 'Punch Out A Bank CEO Day': More Rays Of Hope

An unnamed Lehman Brothers employee punched Dick Fuld, reptile-CEO of the failed Lehman Bros. investment bank, in the face while he was working out in the employee gym. Thereby knocking him unconscious. Fuld, better known as the guy who went in front of Congress after getting $60 million in bonuses this year to whine, "Mmmwhere's my bailout??"

Via the Telegraph UK:

Mr Fuld, who has been testifying on the financial crisis before the US House Oversight Committee, was attacked on a Sunday shortly after it was announced that the banking giant was bankrupt.

Following rumours that the incident had occurred, Vicki Ward, a US journalist, said "two very senior sources - one incredibly senior source" had confirmed it to her. "He went to the gym after ... Lehman was announced as going under," she told CNBC. "He was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold.

"And frankly after having watched [Mr Fuld's testimony to the committee], I'd have done the same too."

"I thought he was shameless ... I thought it was appalling. He blamed everyone ... He blamed everybody but himself."

Could this be the beginning of a trend? Pretty much anyone in the country could make a compelling self-defense case. (The complex of buildings above the title is a pic of Fuld's modest dwelling.)

McCain Campaign Takes Credit For Bailout Bill...Which, Ahhhm...Didn't Happen

Steve Schmidt, John McCain's campaign manager, exhibits his wares fully on yesterday's Press the Meat. He was, of course, joined by a plethora of Pug-bots repeating the same woefully ass-to-mouth, sequaciously inept, Chickens-Before-They're-Hatched Talking Points. Hahahahaa! Lewz-zers! But oh Jeebus what if these grasping Podsnappian dimwits, er, dot dot dot. Courtesy of the elegaic Empty Wheel, and via ThinkProgress:

“[T]his bill would not have been agreed to had it not been for John McCain. … But, you know, this is a bipartisan accomplishment, a bipartisan success. And if people want to get something done in Washington, they just watch John McCain.” — Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, 9/29/08

“Earlier in the week, when Senator McCain came back to Washington, there had been no deal reached. … What Senator McCain was able to do was to help bring all the parties to the table, including the House Republicans.” — Senior adviser Steve Schmidt, 9/28/08

“But here are the facts, and I’m not overselling anything. The fact is that the House Republicans were not in the mix at all. John didn’t phone this one in. He came and actually did something. … You can’t phone something like this in. Thank God John came back.” — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), 9/28/08

“Before John McCain suspended his campaign yesterday, the situation that we’re looking at today looked very different then. After he showed leadership and called for bipartisanship, for us to partisanship aside and tackle this solution head on, here we are.” — Spokesman Tucker Bounds, 9/25/08

Great work, McCain!!

Update: Meanwhile, McCain's hiding in the front of the Straight No Talk Express trying to figure out what he can say about this.

"After bragging today about his role in shaping the economic bailout package, Sen. John McCain has made no statement to the press since the defeat of the bill, in part at the hands of House Republicans. McCain boarded his Straight Talk Air charter plane a few minutes ago, but the plane has not taken off yet. McCain is in the front of the plane, separated from reporters by a brown curtain."

The McCain Prescription For America's Health Care

Here's what John McCain wrote in the new issue of Contingencies, the exciting bi-monthly magazine for the American Academy of Actuaries:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Available in a .pdf file, John's plan, Better Care at Lower Cost for Every American, explains that the Liberian Medical Model (LMM) offers a promising roadmap to innovation. Liberia's health care system is completely free of state regulation, so innovative products are naturally super-abundant. Also, outcomes-based witch doctors are the backbone of the compelling system, and these doctors compete so vigorously they sometimes kill each other, eating the deceased medicine man's brain in order to capture his healing powers.

LMM is far more cost-effective than the current US health care system, is even better at customer service, and might duplicate the last decade's banking industry miracles. Sign us up, John!