The Enchanted Porkfist

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February 23, 2009

Subprime meltdown: the Newport angle.

The always readable American Caliban lives in (what was) one of America's epicenters of Insane Mortgage Mayhem. A recent, widely seen spew by a cable TV loudmouth inspired this response:

The problem, they say, is that "political pressure" forced lenders to make bad loans to those who didn't deserve them qualify. Many of these people were clearly n... ni... ne... NE'ER-DO-WELLS. Everyone knows those people can't keep a mortage. If the government had let these experienced bankers use their own judgment, none of this would have happened. So we definitely don't want to spend money—OUR money—helping these people out any more!

The subprime and alt-A mortgages were largely written by people I saw daily over the last decade, our famous local "Mortgage Bros." These guys bought leads from cold-call telemarketers and sold refinancing to anything with a pulse, lying constantly about the risks. They upsold every potential loan, pushed the limit with interest-only ARM on subprime and alt-A garbage loans. They had no reason to care if the bank ever got the money or if their customers kept their houses. They used the system as it was presented.

The idea that these were stolid, cautious men in pinstriped suits, sworn to the fiduciary duties of their banks, who were somehow forced by dashiki'd oppressors in the Federal bureaucracy into giving money away to the NE'ER-DO-WELLS would be funny were it not such a repulsive lie.

Make no mistake. The financial industry made loans that could not be paid, knowing they were bad loans. They pushed those loans hard on their customers. And they knowingly misled their customers into taking on impossible obligations. Thousands of these brokers committed criminal fraud.

If this was an attempt to redistribute wealth to the NE'ER-DO-WELLS, it backfired. The result was a lot of Harleys and speedboats and cocaine and blowjobs provided to the grinning, empty-souled asshole Fonzies of Orange County. If you don't want their customers to be saved from eviction, let's use the money to build them a very unpleasant jail.

mortgage bro's (slight return) (The American Caliban)

Giving the finger, gently, to creationists.

Nicholas J. Gotelli, professor of biology at the University of Vermont, responds to a plea from the Discovery Institute for a "debate" on his campus:

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren't members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals...

Finally, isn't it sort of pathetic that your large, well-funded institute must scrape around, panhandling for a seminar invitation at a little university in northern New England? Practicing scientists receive frequent invitations to speak in science departments around the world, often on controversial and novel topics. If creationists actually published some legitimate science, they would receive such invitations as well.

How to respond to requests to debate creationists (Pharyngula)

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Bees clean house.

On the morning after a recent rainstorm, I spotted this cleanup work going on. Does any other animal work as hard to have a tidy front porch?

In other news, the 'D' (for The Descendents) box should be on the hive by the end of the week. These bugs are multiplying fiercely.

February 19, 2009

Dog Pollock.

Via CO.

February 18, 2009

Monster in the garden.

In addition to uncovering the most frightening image ever captured of the former vice president, the NY Times has this:

Dick Cheney spent his final days as vice president making a furious last-ditch effort to secure a pardon for his onetime chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., leaving him at odds with former President George W. Bush on a matter of personal loyalty as the two moved on to private life, according to several former officials.

The officials said Tuesday that Mr. Cheney’s lobbying campaign on behalf of Mr. Libby was far more intense than previously known, with the vice president bringing it up in countless one-on-one conversations with the president. They said Mr. Bush was unyielding to the end, already frustrated by a deluge of last-minute pardon requests from other quarters.

The dispute underscored the raw feelings of Mr. Cheney and other supporters of Mr. Libby, who believed that he was mistreated by prosecutors and ill served by a president who, in their view, failed to return Mr. Libby’s loyalty and sacrifice.

"Aides Say No Pardon for Libby Irked Cheney" (NY Times)

February 13, 2009

The Republican war on Obama.

Andrew Sullivan has been collecting the best analyses of the GOP's mindless, rabid (Sullivan calls it "borderline autistic") partisanship since Obama took office, particularly regarding the economy. His main take:

The GOP Has Declared War On Obama. This much is now clear. Their clear and open intent is to do all they can, however they can, to sabotage the new administration (and the economy to boot). They want failure. Even now. Even after the last eight years. Even in a recession as steeply dangerous as this one. There are legitimate debates to be had; and then there is the cynicism and surrealism of total political war. We now should have even less doubt about what kind of people they are. And the mountain of partisan vitriol Obama will have to climb every day of the next four or eight years.

His collected quotes include Mark Murray:

With zero House Republicans voting for the stimulus -- and with just three Senate Republicans expected to vote for it later this afternoon -- it's worth noting that 28 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats voted for the final passage of Bush's big tax cut in 2001. (And remember, too, that Bush had barely won the presidential election the year before.) The size of that 2001 tax-cut package? $1.35 trillion.

Arlen Specter (R-PA):

"When I came back to the cloak room after coming to the agreement a week ago today, one of my colleagues said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' My Republican colleague said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' I said, 'Are you going to vote with me?' And he said, 'No, I might have a primary.' And I said, 'Well, you know very well I'm going to have a primary.' ... I think there are a lot of people in the Republican caucus who are glad to see this action taken without their fingerprints, without their participation."

Finally, Sullivan again:

The GOP has passed what amounts to a spending and tax-cutting and borrowing stimulus package every year since George W. Bush came to office. They have added tens of trillions to future liabilities and they turned a surplus into a trillion dollar deficit - all in a time of growth. They then pick the one moment when demand is collapsing in an alarming spiral to argue that fiscal conservatism is non-negotiable. I mean: seriously.

The bad faith and refusal to be accountable for their own conduct for the last eight years is simply inescapable. There is no reason for the GOP to have done what they have done for the last eight years and to say what they are saying now except pure, cynical partisanship, and a desire to wound and damage the new presidency. The rest is transparent cant.

February 12, 2009

We need a time-travel border fence.

I was very concerned to learn this morning that Ohio has a Republican congressman named Steve Austria.

Yes, that's right, Austria. Do you remember what Austria is? Yes! A foreign country! We have allowed a toothy-grinned, foreign-named mystery man to infiltrate the very heartland of our nation's governance! Our borders are unsecured!

I was reassured, however, to learn that this wily legislator from the land of Schwarzenegger is framing his passionate opposition to the $789 billion economic stimulus bill using the most effective rhetoric possible: totally insane revisionist history.

U.S. Rep. Steve Austria said he supports a scaled-down federal economic-stimulus proposal, but the Beavercreek Republican told The Dispatch editorial board that the huge influx of money into the economy could have a negative effect.

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."

Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.

Yes, not only was that nasty FDR a closet socialist, but a time-traveler as well. They're the worst kind.

Keep up the good work, Herr Austria.

Letterman interviews a mask.

I don't normally link to stuff that's quite this mass-media, but the combination of Joaquin Phoenix's entry into his Crispin Glover period and David Letterman's unparalleled ability to mine discomfort makes this required viewing.

February 10, 2009

Today in technology.

Via Boing Boing.

February 7, 2009

OK, now it works.

Seriously: I was sick of both the "David after the dentist" video and the Christian Bale audio rant within minutes.

But when they go together, not so much. Then it's very, very good.

Via Boing Boing.

February 4, 2009

On the death of movement conservatism.

Sam Tanenhaus has a monster essay in the current New Republic in which he looks at the history of modern conservatism from the late 17th century onward, and finds that its mutant offspring have managed to burn down the house they grew up in.

He starts by noting that after World War II, each political defeat for American conservatives contained the seeds of a future victory. That trend came to an end in recent years.

Today, the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive "culture war" waged against liberal "elites." That these precepts should have found their final, hapless defender in John McCain, who had resisted them for most of his long career, only confirms that movement doctrine retains an inflexible and suffocating grip on the GOP.

Tanenhaus then goes back to the beginning:

What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to its originator, Edmund Burke, who, in the late eighteenth century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the "organic" unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval. Burke's conservatism was based not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies. In his most celebrated writings, his denunciation of the French Revolution and its English champions, Burke did not seek to justify the ancien regime and its many inequities. Nor did he propose a counter-ideology. Instead he warned against the destabilizing perils of revolutionary politics, beginning with its totalizing nostrums.

One thing you have to deal with in this essay is a tendency toward bloated terminology like "totalizing nostrums." I'm going to make a bold guess that when Sam Tanenhaus' friends are asked to describe him, the words "funny" and "unpretentious" rarely appear. Bear with him anyway.

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America's pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare.

How did this happen? One reason is that the most intellectually sophisticated founders of postwar conservatism were in many instances ex-Marxists, who moved from left to right but remained persuaded that they were living in revolutionary times and so retained their absolutist fervor. In place of the Marxist dialectic they formulated a Manichaean politics of good and evil, still with us today, and their strategy was to build a movement based on organizing cultural antagonisms. Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy--"statist" social programs; "socialized medicine"; "big labor"; "activist" Supreme Court justices, the "media elite"; "tenured radicals" on university faculties; "experts" in and out of government...

The great tribune of this new polarity was Ronald Reagan, with his denunciations of "big government" and the Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" it supported and his devotion (with urging from [Irving] Kristol) to supply-side economics. The New Right was not only anti-Burkean. For all its populist enthusiasms, it reached back to the plutocratic Old Right of the Depression years, when businessmen had opposed federal assistance to the jobless because (as William E. Leuchtenburg summarized the argument in his book The Perils of Prosperity) "the suffering of the unemployed was not the product of an economic breakdown but was the direct result of their moral infirmity"...

The right, which for so long had deplored the politics of "class warfare," had become the most adept practitioners of that same politics. They had not only abandoned Burke. They had become inverse Marxists, placing loyalty to the movement--the Reagan Revolution--above their civic responsibilities. In 1995, the time of Gingrich's ascendancy, [William] Kristol buoyantly spelled out the terms of revanchist strategy: "American conservatism is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Though, inevitably, most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win votes. This movement is issue oriented. It will happily meld with the Republican party if the party is 'right' on the issues; if not, it will walk away." By this calculus, all the obligations flow in only one direction. Parties are accountable to movement purists, while purists incur no reciprocal debt. They determine the "right" position, and the party's job is to advance it. Kristol does not consider whether purists might be expected to maneuver at all or even to modify their views--for the good not only of the party but also the larger polity.

Kristol went on, in this essay, to extol the contributions of two movement subgroups, the neoconservatives and the evangelicals. It was of course this alliance that most fervently supported George W. Bush during his two terms and remains most loyal to him today...

In the end, movement conservatives got the war they wanted--both at home and abroad. It ended, at last, with the 2008 election, and the emergence of a president who seems more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right.

"Conservatism Is Dead" (Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic)

February 3, 2009

¡Mi perro es un pez!

This is an Argentinian spot for VW. Are you paying attention, U.S. agencies?

Via Andrew Sullivan.