Blogito, Ergo Sum - 8 May 2009

The jobless rate goes up but so does the stock market. Some banks are weak and others are strong, so what’s new? What interested me was that Wells Fargo has 26% of the loans out in the form of credit cards, where they are earning 18% or more and can hardly lose any money when they borrow at practically zero.

Having written that and finding nothing much of interest in the news, I decided to read Paul Krugman for a change. I usually don’t, but, hey, I feel like I ought to read something in the NYT, after all. So I came to this:

What we’re really seeing here is a decision on the part of President Obama and his officials to muddle through the financial crisis, hoping that the banks can earn their way back to health.

It’s a strategy that might work. After all, right now the banks are lending at high interest rates, while paying virtually no interest on their (government-insured) deposits. Given enough time, the banks could be flush again.

Here’s some great Liberal thinking in the New York Times editorial, arguing that we really need to DO SOMETHING NOW about “climate change”, by which they mean only warming when they rather carelessly say...

My emphasis added, of course, because if the truth is that no one knows then that means the Republicans have as good a chance of being correct as anyone else does. Oh. Um. Well, no...we didn’t mean that...we meant that we know and they don’t...no, wait...

What they meant was bankrupting the economy was a reasonable risk to take. They obviously do not know that the earth has been warmer in the past with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and life has flourished! It’s truly amazing how many people do not know that.

Howard Kurtz has this take on the Perez Hilton trashing of Carrie Prejean’s respectful answer to his question:

Meanwhile, I absolutely cannot believe what Jim Beck, national director of the Christian Coalition, said to Jane Velez-Mitchell on HLN:

"Make no mistake about it: The homosexual mafia has aimed their guns at Carrie Prejean. There's no doubt about it . . .

"Perez Hilton should be spanked, and not the kind of spanking he would like. He asked the question. She was respectful in her answer. How dare he take offense? How dare he get his panties in a knot and be offended?"

Good thing I believe in free speech, because these remarks are as condescendingly anti-gay as anything I've ever heard on television.

I may be wrong, but I think you might be hearing a lot more anti-gay talk as a result of Hilton’s outrageous behavior which is FAR more offensive to a good many neutral people than what Beck or Prejean said. Are we to take the position that it is quite okay for gays to be offensive if they feel so inclined?

It should be crystal clear that Hilton had an objective far beyond his role as an impartial judge in a competition and I think his partiality should have stripped him of his role and reversed all of his votes.

Kurtz would like us to believe in free speech, but since he is upset over mere condescension then it’s difficult to imagine him really standing up for something he found to be really offensive. Penchants for spanking and cross-dressing are hardly restricted to the gay community and telling someone not to get their panties in a not (or knickers in a twist) is hardly uniquely anti-gay except in Howard’s imagination. Howard should check the bunch in his own panties.

I've been chronicling the question of whether the president might consider a gay nominee, and the New Republic's Richard Just says it could be an effective ju-jitsu move:

"Nominating a lesbian to the court would put conservatives in a politically awkward position. As the gay rights battle has come to center more and more on the specific question of marriage, conservatives have frequently insisted that they are not anti-gay, just opposed to gays getting married. Conservatives are attached to this distinction because they know that, without it, they end up looking like bigots. But if they decide to make an issue of a Supreme Court nominee's sexual orientation, they would effectively be conceding that this distinction was a lie."

Liberal Logic. Using this line of thought , then, it would mean that the Republicans, in order to prove they are not bigots, much accept ANY gay nominee...even a Harriet Meyers equivalent. If the nominee is gay then qualification is no longer a valid issue for debate?

You have to give Specter credit for eliciting a lot of drama while getting his committee chairmanship consolation prize:

Mr. Specter previously presided as the Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican and held high seniority on Senate Appropriations and Veterans' Affairs committees. In his re-election campaign, he was expected to argue that his seniority makes him indispensable to Pennsylvania voters.

Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, said he did not double-cross Mr. Specter and the seniority issue will be settled by the caucus in 2011.

"I'm not talking any more about it," Mr. Reid said. "I've explained and re-explained and the re-explaining is over with."

Besides which, I run the risk of committing a Bidenism if I say more. A Bidenism is an uncomfortably true statement best left unsaid.

Mr. Specter's first week on the other side of the aisle included voting against President Obama's plan to help struggling homeowners by allowing bankruptcy judges to lower their mortgage payments.

He also reportedly riled Democrats by saying he supports Republican Norm Coleman over Democrat Al Franken in Minnesota's contested senate race.

It should be fun to watch the Democrats assign their committee chairs in 2011. Why wait? Well, politicians always like to wait and see if a problem might not go away without them having to get involved and put their names on anything. Specter just might not be around in 2011.

On the thorniest of political issues, President Obama has embraced the enforcement-first position on immigration that he criticized during last year's presidential campaign, and he now says he can't move forward with the type of comprehensive bill he wants until voters are convinced that the borders can be enforced.

Having already backed off his pledge to have an immigration bill this year, Mr. Obama boosted his commitment to enforcement in the budget released Thursday. The spending blueprint calls for extra money to build an employee-verification system and to pay for more personnel and equipment to patrol the border.

This security-first stance is not unlike that of President George W. Bush, Bush Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who said their immigration bill failed in 2007 because voters didn't trust the government to be serious about enforcement.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Saturday: "Some have argued that in the global economic recession we should reduce defense spending to ease the pressure on the budget. But the government believes the opposite to be true. In a period of global instability Australia must invest in a strong, capable and well resourced defense force."

For a nation of over 300 million people and as important as we are to so many other people in the world, our armed forces aren’t really all that large.

On March 19, after hearing the testimony of GOP lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh about ACORN's many misdeeds, Conyers said the allegations were "a pretty serious matter."

Heidelbaugh testified the nonprofit group violated a host of tax, campaign finance, and other laws. She said the presidential campaign of Barack Obama sent ACORN its "maxed out donor list" and asked two of the avowedly nonpartisan group's employees "to reach out to the maxed out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN." ...

(On May 4) in Nevada, Secretary of State Ross Miller and Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto dropped a bombshell. ACORN and two former senior ACORN employees in the state, they announced, had been charged with a total of 39 felony counts related to voter registrations.

... "Based on my review of the information regarding the complaints against ACORN, I have concluded that a hearing on this matter appears unwarranted at this time," Conyers said in a statement aired that night (May 4) on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight."

When on Wednesday this reporter asked Conyers spokesman Jonathan Godfrey to explain the decision not to move forward with a probe, he declined to do so and instead emailed the same statement that was aired on CNN earlier in the week. ...

Conyers, who received a 100% rating from ACORN in its 2006 legislative scorecard, ... spoke at the group's national convention last June 22.

Well, I’ve been suitably titillated by the notion of the Prejean topless shots that I did a little surfing, but all I could find was apparently the first one, which I must say did not exactly turn me into a charged-up sex maniac. Pretty tame stuff, if you ask me, as some of the bathing suit shots show more of her breasts than this allegedly topless one does.