Moral Hazard Is For The Little People

The US Senate, a wholly owned subsidiary of the banking industry:

On the same day that the White House announced that overextended Chrysler would go into a “quick” bankruptcy—its loans rewritten by a judge to emerge for life another day—Senators defeated a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to rewrite home loans.

The vote on a so-called “cramdown” proposal, which President Obama supported during the presidential campaign, was 45-51 despite support from the president and the endorsement of one large bank, Citigroup. Read more on Citigroup’s endorsement of the plan HERE. The mortgage restructuring proposal needed 60 votes to pass so it didn’t even come close to passing. Several Democrats, including the newest Democrat, Sen. Arlen Specter of PA, opposed cramdown.

***

Durbin said on the Senate floor that in negotiations, the banking industry argued that restructuring primary home loans—secondary home loans and luxury loans for items like yachts can already be restructured by a bankruptcy judge—would create a moral hazard in this country.

“Senator, you don’t understand the moral hazard here,” Durbin paraphrased the banking argument. “People have to be held responsible for their wrongdoing. If you make a mistake, darn it, you’ve got to pay the price. that’s what America is all about.”

“Really, Mr. Banker on wall street? that’s what America is all about?” he railed.

“What price did wall street pay for their miserable decisions, creating rotten portfolios, destroying the credit of America and its businesses?” Durbin said of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout Congress passed, and Durbin supported in the waning days of the Bush administration. “Oh, (the bankers) paid a pretty heavy price. Hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money sent to them to bail them out and put them back in business, even to fund executive bonuses for those guilty of mismanagement. Moral hazard, huh? How can they argue that with a straight face? They do.”

The roll call vote is here, and if you missed it, Glenn had a good post up on Durbin and the banking industry earlier.

Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo

Went out to dinner with my parents, who are in town on their way to Baltimore (pronounced Ballmer, tyvm) for my mother’s 50th High School Reunion, and on the way home heard about this story on NPR about scientists discovering that there are animals besides humans who can dance to a musical beat:

Two famous parrots and a bevy of YouTube videos have now convinced scientists that people aren’t the only ones who can groove to a musical beat.

Dancing has long been thought to be uniquely human. Toddlers will spontaneously bob along with music, but you never see dogs or cats listen to a tune and tap their tails in time.

So a couple of years ago, a neurobiologist named Aniruddh Patel was astonished when someone e-mailed him a link to a YouTube video of a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys.

“I said, you know, this is much more than just a cute pet trick. This is potentially scientifically very important,” recalls Patel, who studies music and the brain at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego.

I can’t find a way to embed the NPR videos, so you will have to go to their site to watch their videos. However, there is this offering of Snowball in action from youtube:

Apparently, Snowball’s favorite band is the Backstreet Boyz, so while he can dance, there is no accounting for taste.

At any rate, this is a rather long-winded way of just expressing how much I like NPR. For pennies of the federal budget, almost anywhere you go in the country, you can tune in to high-quality broadcasts for free. It is cheap entertainment, it is informative, and I simply can’t imagine driving without NPR.

I never really understood conservative opposition to funding for the arts and funding for public radio and television when I was a Republican, and I still don’t now. If somebody was willing to do what NPR does for a profit, they would. But they don’t, and it would be a cultural disaster if we were to some day lose NPR.

Maybe I’m different than most people in my love for radio, as I got my FCC license when I was fourteen, dj’d for a while at the local college station, and wanted nothing more than to work in radio as an adult, so I have always loved it. But to me, there really isn’t anything better than NPR. I have really slacked at donating and am going to make a point to support it more in the future.

/babble

Hats ass backwards

Pretty good stuff from Michael Steele toay:

“You wear your hat one way. You like to wear it, you know, kind of cocked to the left, you know, because that’s cool out West,” Steele said. “In the Midwest, you guys like to wear it a little bit to the right. In the South, you guys like to wear the brim straight ahead. Now, the Northeast, I wear my hat backwards, you know, because that’s how we roll in the Northeast.”

He left out wearing hats made of tin foil.

Keep looking forward

More rule-breaking that shouldn’t be punished:

A former Justice Department grant-making administrator violated federal ethics and procurement rules in awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in sole source contracts to ideologically favored companies and individuals, the department’s inspector general concluded today.

The administrator, J. Robert Flores, was a political appointee during former president George Bush’s administration who left his post after the inauguration in January. The department’s public integrity section declined to pursue civil or criminal charges against Flores after ethics watchdogs forwarded their findings, investigators said.

The report issued this morning culminates a nearly two-year investigation into alleged irregularities with grants awarded by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention during the Bush administration.

You know the drill: we can’t look backwards, there’s so much else on our plate right now we don’t have time to think about this, this is not time for partisan vengeance, blah blah blah.

Please Stop Being So Damned Stupid

If you want to point to a gaffe, look at this:

A spokesman for Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said Wednesday night that Franks believes the border should be closed right now except in critical cases or situations involving emergency personnel.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said all options should be considered to end the crisis involving swine flu, “including closing the border if it would prevent further transmission of the deadly virus.”

In a twitter message early Wednesday, McCain wrote “I said to Napolitano, ‘We need to be prepared to close the border with Mexico if the swine flu outbreak escalates further.’”

Yeah. That makes sense:

The alarm level, raised to 4 from 3, is at its highest since the warning system was adopted in 2005, and the virus has been confirmed in the U.K., Mexico, the U.S., Canada and Spain. The emphasis for health officials worldwide should be treating patients and strengthening preparations for outbreaks, said Keiji Fukuda, assistant director-general for health security and environment. The Geneva-based WHO isn’t recommending travel restrictions.

How come the Mexican Olympic swim team never wins any gold medals, what with their ability to swim to the UK and Spain in several days while suffering from the flu? Republicans are just completely lost when the solution to any problem is not “cut taxes” or “commence bombing.”

Nobody Tell Joe Biden How Twitter Works

I really don’t see how this is terrible advice:

Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that he would not recommend taking any commercial flight or riding in a subway car “at this point” because swine flu virus can spread “in confined places.” A little more than one hour later, Biden rushed out a statement backing off.

“I would tell members of my family — and I have — I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Biden said on NBC’s “Today” show.. “It’s not that it’s going to Mexico. It’s [that] you’re in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft. That’s me. …

“So, from my perspective, what it relates to is mitigation. If you’re out in the middle of a field when someone sneezes, that’s one thing. If you’re in a closed aircraft or closed container or closed car or closed classroom, it’s a different thing.”

I understand they are trying to calm the public and tamp down the hysteria, and that Joe’s message is at odds with the big O’s statements, but I’m not sure that what he said is all that silly or stupid. If I were in a subway car and people were hacking and wheezing, I sure as hell would GTFO and find a new way to travel in the short term.

Title of this post stolen shamelessly from the comments.

Excellent Gentlemen

From the artists in our midst open thread, this band:

Long time readers will know that this is right in my wheelhouse as far as music goes. As I said in the comments, I haven’t been this excited about a band since Dag.

By the way, I’m not feeling the politics thing today, so bear with me.

Open Thread

Have at it.

Exit stage right

Predictably enough, the Spector defection has given rise to a lot of speculating about the future of the Republican party. Getting down to brass tacks, Steve Benen finds yet another poll indicating that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Republicans is at a historic low.

Also predictably, Adam Nagourney lets the Meet the Press wing of the party have the last word in the debate over what to do next. In fairness, Huckleberry Hound makes a lot of sense when he says:

Do you really believe that we lost 18-to-34-year-olds by 19 percent, or we lost Hispanic voters, because we are not conservative enough? No. This is a ridiculous line of thought.

That’s the real bottom line. Unless the Republican finds a way to clone Lou Dobbs on a mass scale, and quickly, there just won’t be enough cranky white bastards to build a coalition around. Of course, that’s not really relevant to a party that doesn’t think it’s becoming less popular, just that their audience is being more selective. Meghan McCain can talk all she wants to about loosening up on social issues, but here’s the stark reality (from Ben Smith and Jon Martin):

The party will be shaped most clearly, however, when its presidential hopefuls begin their early state pilgrimages after the 2010 midterms. And they’re unlikely to emerge convinced that courting gay and Hispanic voters, in particular, is politically saleable within their parties.

“John McCain found out the hard way that being where he was not an asset,” Reed recalled of last year’s presidential primary, noting that the eventual nominee either shifted or downplayed some of his unpopular stances, including on immigration.

A presidential candidate’s arrival in an Iowa or South Carolina, Reed noted with a chuckle, offers “what I like to refer to as ‘a dramatically clarifying experience.’”

Expect to see a lot of hot air from “wise moderates” like Lindsay Graham and Olympia Snowe as the Republican party exits stage right. It’s Ralph Reed’s party, they’re just living in it.

Cliff May Declares That America Tortured The Crap Out Of People

Paraphrasing Cliff May on Jon Stewart, sincerely and not in the satirical ‘shorter’ style:

The so-called “torture memos” are actually anti-torture documents. They accomplish this because they establish a bright, shining line that we must not, under any circumstances, cross.

Emptywheel captured this key point from Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memo.

...where authorized, it may be used for two “sessions” per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

Needless to say, waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month broke even the insane guidelines of Stephen Bradbury’s memo. Id est, even according to Cliff f*cking May America went too far.

What ever. I am so sick of these people. My uncle declared the other day that we should not prosecute torture because it would “tear the country apart”, and he was confident that America would never torture again. If prosecuting torture would ‘tear the country apart’, that pretty much takes for granted that a lot of people think that America should use torture.

Thus, the next time someone to the crazyward of Obama wins office torture will come right back. Every country always faces one existential threat or another. The only meager chance we have is if future George W. dumbasses think that the next guy might prosecute them for it.

Anyhow, here’s the vid.

Artists In Our Midst

It occurred to me that besides Laura W. (whose ads are prominently on display) and August J. Pollak, there are a number of artists who frequent this website. Let’s have a roll call, and put your links to your wares in the comments. The best way to support the arts is not more funding for the NEA, but for buying art that you like.

Let’s help our own.

Presser Open Thread

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

Hoot Smalley and Other Such Things

This album artwork was emailed to me to commemorate Michelle Bachmann’s latest round of nonsense:

If you don’t understand, read this.

Once We Take Out the Judean People’s Front

Bradley Smith might be on to something here:

Now that Specter’s gone, we can turn to the real enemy – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe! Then the only thing between us and victory will be Graham, Lugar, McCain, Murkowski, Grassley, Hatch, and some of the RINOs in the House. And the Governors, like Crist and Douglas and Lingle and anyone not named Palin or Jindal. And the Supreme Court Justices like the radical Kennedy. But time is on our side. If we get small enough, voters will finally see true conservatism, and then we’ll have to win.

Go read Red State and Hot Air and other “conservative” bloggers and tell me Smith’s sarcasm is wrong.

*** Update ***

The anti-Snowe movement gains momentum:

But while she wants the Republican party to be accepting of her positions on the other issues, she seems to forget that often she doesn’t even pass the “litmus test” of core economic issues. She, like Specter, voted for the stimulus bill package.

I don’t understand well all the consequences of Specter’s defection to the other side, but it seems to me that no matter how painful it might be, that’s probably what the Republican party needs.

She’s a witch!

Shorter Byron York

Sure, polls say Obama and his agenda are wildly popular and enthusiastically supported by the public, but if you don’t count black people, you could say Obama and his agenda are merely really popular.

They just can’t help themselves.

(via email)

*** Update ***

I officially retire from “shorter” posts and will leave it to the masters. I just suck at them.