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As some of you may recall, back on February 4th I put up a post which began:
It’s February 4th, assholes. Do you still actually think the city garbage men are going to pick up your Christmas tree?
Why mention it again, lo these many months later? Yes, I’m afraid so:
It’s February 4th, assholes. Do you still actually think the city garbage men are going to pick up your Christmas tree?
Let’s see… there have been about ten or twelve garbage pick-ups since New Years, and for some darned reason they’ve ignored your discarded tree every time. Oh wait—I know: it’s because they don’t pick up Christmas trees! Read the rest of this entry »
Peter Gammons (Flickr/Trev Stair)
Sagely baseball writer Peter Gammons, asked by MLB Network analyst and former big-league pitcher Mitch Williams whether he will now vote for Mark McGwire’s induction into the Hall of Fame:
I think it’s going to be hard now to vote for Mark. I reserve the right to change my mind. I voted for him this time because, you know, he never was suspended… but once you’ve admitted [to using steriods], I believe that… I mean, you guys know how hard it is to be a Major League player. The Hall of Fame is an honor, not a statistical right. I really do look at it that way, and for [you] and all the people we know that did not use any performance-enhancing drugs, I find it hard to vote for him.
What’s going to be fascinating to me–and I hope it doesn’t impact–but I think there are going to be some people that just because writers say, “My eyes tell me he must have done steroids,” that there are going to be one to five people that were innocent that don’t make the Hall of Fame because of the people that did cheat. And that really breaks my heart, knowing how hard all of you worked to get where you are.
Another day, another eighty-five billion dollars. If you’ve had your back turned, or your earbuds in, or you’ve been transfixed by Sarah Palin’s boobs the last week or two you may not have noticed the Federal Reserve opening its checkbook. $85 billion for insurance behemoth AIG, $70 billion more to feed into the market so that credit won’t totally evaporate, and last week’s credit lines of up to $100 billion each to bail out mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Congratulations, fellow taxpayers – for the low, low price of $350 billion we are now the proud owners of three huge, insolvent companies.
If you’re wondering how this is a good investment, the answer is, it’s not. It’s not so much an investment as it is a protection shakedown. We propped up three massive entities with over a quarter of a trillion dollars in ballast to prevent them from toppling over and squashing us all. So what do we do with our still-unsquashed selves now?
Hell, I don’t know. Consult somebody smarter than I am – namely, former U.S. Department of Labor Secretary, current U.C. Berkeley Professor of Public Policy, frequent economic commentator for NPR, CNBC and other such outlets, Robert Reich. Fortunately for my purposes, Dr. Reich also keeps a blog (newly added here to the C&B blogroll), whereupon he posted about this spate of bailouts back on Monday, while AIG still teetered. The crux:
What to do? Not to socialize capitalism with bailouts and subsidies that put taxpayers at risk… the best way to rebuild trust is through regulations that require financial players to stand behind their promises and tell the truth, along with strict oversight to make sure they do.
We tell poor nations they have to make their financial markets transparent before capital will flow to them. Now it’s our turn.
Read his entire post here.
If this is your first visit to C&B you may be wondering, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he have a blog?” It’s a fair question, so I’ve dedicated an entire page to answering it: check out About.
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