This is a verbatim copy of a long, fantastic post on the SomethingAwful forums explaining the steps that led us through the era of subprime mortgages and the selling of mortgage backed securities to the current crisis. Forums user razzledazzle says:
It’s ridiculous to blame the crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act or ACORN or whatever. The central thesis seems to be that the government forced lenders to give loans to risky customers, when in fact lenders chose to give loans to risky customers because there was a vast amount of profit to be made. (Reasonable people can differ on whether the CRA is good policy in principle and in practice, but that’s really besides the point here.)
The Republicans have voted against the bailout bill en masse, causing it to fail 205-228. As of right now, there is no bailout bill in place, and the only solution House Republicans have in return is “lower taxes”. Earlier in the weekend, Minority Leader Boehner was promising the House Republicans would vote for the bailout and ensure the markets stayed steady.
The Dow is down 550 points and sinking.
We are fucked.
The Republicans voted against this not because it’s a bad bill (it’s not great but a truly great bill would not pass with Republicans anyways - as I said, their proposal is to erase the fucking capital gains tax which failing institutions wouldn’t be paying anyways), but so they could sit back and say “HEY GUYS WE VOTED AGAINST IT” in case it didn’t work. Or so they could have something to run against and try to win seats in November. House leadership on both sides wanted it to pass - Republicans who voted against it wanted it to pass. They just wanted to seem like the white knights fighting against this Bush/Democrat bill.
Basically, Republicans played petty election politics and are causing our economy to tank. This is why I’m not a fucking Republican. They have the audacity to put election politics above the good of the nation. A paraphrase of what McCain despicably and inaccurately says about Obama in regards to Iraq, they’d rather lose an economy than win an election.
Oh and this just in - Republicans are trying to blame the bill’s failure on Nancy Pelosi. Fuck these motherfuckers. I don’t know what else to say. This is amazing in its utter lack of foresight and seriousness.
So now about a month and a half ago I bought a bike, a ‘92 GSX1100G bought off of the wonderful craigslist. I never thought I’d be interested in riding, say, three months ago. Part of the reason was that I wanted to learn to be a little bit of a mechanic rather than just throwing my hands in the air when something happens in the car or bike or whatever. But there’s just something invigorating about riding versus driving. When you ride, you’re really connected. Part of this is not being walled in behind the steel and glass of the car. But part of it is that because you need to be so much more attentive while driving, you don’t suddenly end up home forgetting all of the little things along the way that took you there by getting lost in your radio or cell phone or whatever. But you’re really just there, man. It’s great. I’ve put a probably four or five hundred miles on already just going for nightly rides.
Unfortunately, it’s starting to get cold - now for the first time I understand feeling jealous of people who live where it’s sunny all year. In a few weeks, I’ll need to garage the bike until probably April or May of next year. Seriously, that sucks. Although it’ll give me time and motivation to do big bike projects - we’re going to take the entire thing apart piece by piece and clean/fix up everything so that it runs like new when it’s let out in the spring. That’s an exciting thought.
So, that’s been my past few months. Politics and motorcycles. The other part of the plan is that the motorcycle should go well with photography. I’ve definitely fallen off with my photography hobby, but I think it’s because I’m really only interested in taking photos when it’s something new. Like on vacations and that sort of thing. It’s tough to force myself out driving to cover the same areas in Syracuse again and again. So with the bike, that’ll encourage me to take more vacations and I’ll bring the camera in tow. Those are two damn good reasons to get out of the house.
Oh Sarah, poor lying and power-hungry Sarah. Debate it all you want, but here’s the truth: McCain is sunk. I’ll bet anything on it that picking her just sealed the deal - Nov 4th, Obama will be selected the next President of the United States, and it’ll be by a wide margin.
It’s awesome. It’s also made me realize that a lot of people say a lot of things a lot better than I ever can (a lot).
If you’ve been watching –>that way–> then you’d see that i’ve been sharing blog posts daily from my RSS subscriptions. So you can subscribe to my shared items that I cull from the dozens of blogs I subscribe to. If I were to subscribe to someone else’s RSS digest, you can see how it can also get pretty meta pretty quickly.
So if anyone out there is curious at all as to what I’m reading, check it out. It’s typically a lot of stuff from lefty blogs and news and videogame sites and science and that sort of thing. Do it.
Manyotherblogs (and Keith Olbermann last night) have covered this, but hey it’s a blog so I get to point it out too. John McCain fumbled a question on the surge, saying that it was the cause for the Sunni/Anbar Awakening, when in fact the Awakening was happening months before the surge occurred and the surge was only taking place in Baghdad, nowhere near the Anbar province where the Awakening was happening. So basically they are two separate entities, yet McCain was trying to link them - another display of his mastery of foreign policy.
But the big news here is that CBS purposefully edited out his answer to the question. Not the question entirely, mind you; they showed Katie Couric asking the question and basically cut and pasted another of McCain’s answers as if he was giving a different answer than the one he actually gave! Honestly I wouldn’t have quite blown up if it was just the question getting cut. But seriously… lying for the man to pretend that he didn’t give a completely wrong answer? As much as John McCain likes to pretend that it’s actually Obama whom the press loves, the press would never cover up an error like this on Obama’s part. In fact, if you’ve been watching the news lately, you’d see that they are positively salivating at the chance to catch Obama making a gaffe on his overseas trip.
The whole situation of McCain accusing Obama of being the media darling is summed up nicely by Mark Halperin:
This is like Britney Spears complaining that the hype around Miley Cyrus far exceeds her talent.
EDIT:
I’m updating this with text of the questions and responses, both the uncut version and the CBS-aired version with the cut parts bolded.
Original question and answer:
Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?
McCain: I don’t know how you respond to something that is as– such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn’t make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed.
Edited version (with stock video of “the troops” to cover the splice, might I add):
Katie Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?
McCain: Sen. Obama has indicated that by his failure to acknowledge the success of the surge, that he would rather lose a war than lose a campaign. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn’t make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed.
This is the best post I’ve ever seen detailing why complementary and alternative medicine is more or less complete bunk when compared with actual, studied medical science. Dr Novella goes through the list and explains the main problems with each of the more prominent on-the-cusp-of-acceptance treatment modalities, including chiropractic, acupuncture, and homeopathy, and details how they “bait and switch” their victims.
A quick clip from the conclusion:
All of these modalities fall under an artificial category - so called “complementary and alternative” medicine (CAM) or “integrative” medicine that was created as the ultimate bait and switch.
The deception is largely two-fold. The first is to include modalities within this false category that are legitimate, like nutrition, exercise, physical therapy, relaxation, etc., - and then claim that these legitimize the entire category of CAM, even the far-out stuff like homeopathy. This is just a higher-order version of including physical therapy modalities within the umbrella of chiropractic, for example.
…
The second kind of deception created by the category of CAM is in the language used itself - “complementary” and “integrative.” What, exactly, are CAM modalities integrating? On close examination it is quite clear - the movement is an effort to mix unscientific, disproved, and dubious modalities into scientific medicine. The bait is that CAM offers legitimate alternatives, the switch is that it primarily promotes treatments that don’t work or are at best untested and highly implausible.
If there were truth in marketing then we would have the Office of Implausible Medicine, the Journal of Bad Medical Science, the Center for Rejected Therapies, and the Institute of Dubious Medical Claims - all under the umbrella of unscientific medicine. It used to be called, even more simply, “health fraud.”
If you’ve got the time to sit down and read it, particularly if you don’t know much about the subject or if you just want to bone up a bit, I can’t recommend this post (and the rest of the blog as well, in addition to Steve’s other blog NeuroLogica) enough.
