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Another Koda Update

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For those of you who don’t get to read Balloon Juice on the weekends, Koda finally got to Pittsburgh on Friday night, and she’s doing just great in her new home, reports GEG:

These are from yesterday when things started calming down a bit and Koda got to meet John’s daughter Kaitlyn. Otis [the Golden] is still a bit POed at this young usurper, but there have been no real fights, just some growling and grumbling. Even when she stole his treat last night and ate his breakfast this morning. He’s such a sweetie and he just came whining to us like a teenager with a toddler for a sister who keeps taking his things and messing them up. She slept in our bed last night and that is only possible because she is the best leaper I’ve ever seen because our bed is so high that when I sit on the edge of it, my feet don’t touch the floor and I’m about 5’6”. And she did it from a standing position, no running start. She’s amazingly smart.

I wish I had had enough light this morning to catch her first snow adventure. She rolled and jumped and simply was overjoyed about it. It was funny. If it sticks, I’ll try to get some tonight.

And here’s a note from Jenna, which I’ve already forwarded to everyone who contacted me directly:

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Open Thread: Dr. Carson Has A TV Show to Sell

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I’m gonna disagree with DougJ about Ben Carson — he’s not the next Herman Cain, he’s the next Newt Gingrich. I bookmarked this Washington Post article last night:

BALTIMORE — The voice mail greeting at Benjamin Carson’s Johns Hopkins Hospital office, where he is the director of pediatric neurosurgery, stretches for almost eight minutes…

Carson’s voice mail greeting, which has been growing in 20-second increments for almost two decades, reflects the many identities that he has added through the years. The list includes world renowned neurosurgeon, author, speaker, inner-city folk hero, role model to evangelical Christians and, most recently, rising conservative political star.

His latest brush with fame followed the prayer breakfast speech in which he criticized the president’s health-care overhaul, called for a flat tax and warned that the enforcers of political correctness had put a dangerous “muzzle” on debate in the country. To the delight of conservatives, Carson delivered the address with a stone-faced President Obama sitting a few yards away.

Within days of his remarks, Carson was being touted as a possible presidential candidate by the Wall Street Journal. He got one of the most enthusiastic receptions at the recently held Conservative Political Action Conference, where he stoked speculation that he may, just may, be willing to run for president.

After a several-day onslaught from fans and the media, many wanting to know his potential political plans, Carson has eased away from suggestions he may have his eyes on the White House. The 61-year-old doctor now says the likelihood of a presidential run is “incredibly small.” What he really wants is a second career in television when he retires from Johns Hopkins later this year…

Remember, the WaPo tends to interpret politics in business terms — politics is the money product of its company town, so they don’t have the NYT‘s airy philosopher-king approach to every new idea and/or candidate. I’m sure Dr. Carson is a very godly man, and it’s totally coincidental that the God he worships seems to agree with everything Dr. Carson says. The GOP’s latest Great Not-Obama Hope doesn’t want to run for President, but he might just settle for being chosen Prophet-King, if enough people ask him nicely…

Seriously, Carson’s been on the bookmongering/motivational-speaking circuit for some years already, and the Republican clown-car primaries during the 2012 campaign made it clear that GOP voters are starved for quality entertainment “uplift” at which to throw their money. He’s not as — what’s the polite phrasing? charismatic? — as the Giant Albino Amphibian, but on the other hand, the odds of him having a stream of sexual & financial peccadillos to amuse the sneering Dems are a lot lower. Quite possibly the Koch brothers or Foster ‘Aspirin’ Friess could be persuaded to fund, if not a talk show, at least a Glenn-Beck-style performance tour with state-of-the-art technology and top-of-the-scale amenities, just to demonstrate they’ve found One of the Good Ones. Much nicer, for a little retirement jaunt, than an RV tour of Walmart parking lots.

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Siamese dream

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There’s nothing funnier than Republicans’ attempts to appeal to mooching low-information voters — be they welfare kings or strapping young sluts — by getting behind absurd (but invariably “well-spoken”) black, Latino, women etc. candidates. You see, women just want to vote for women, the blahs just want to vote for other blahs. Liberals are the real hypocrites because they liked Hillary Clinton but not Sarah Palin. And party of Lincoln. Blacks should vote Republican because they hate teh ghey. Latinos are natural Republicans because they start businesses. I forget why women are really conservatives, but there’s some reason, maybe something to do with security moms.

Ben Carson is my favorite conservative great black hope in a while.

Overnight, he was embraced by conservatives including those at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which proclaimed, “Ben Carson for President” — a suggestion Dr. Carson helped feed at a high-profile gathering last weekend, the Conservative Political Action Conference. He was interrupted by sustained cheers when he coyly said, “Let’s just say if you magically put me in the White House…”

Herman Cain was funny, but he was just a standard issue Galtian guy who happened to be black. Ben Carson used to be on Charlie Rose, speaking very seriously about this and that. He’s separated Siamese twins but he doesn’t believe in evolution.

I hope we’ll be seeing more of this guy, but I have my doubts.

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The Blue vs. The Orange

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John Boehner.  Orange Julius.  He’s the russet-colored boil on the ass of the body politic, if there ever was one.  Finally it looks like somebody on the D side across the Ohio river is going to take a shot at lancing him.

Middletown resident and Army veteran Andrew Hounshell said he will announce his candidacy April 5 to challenge Speaker of the House John Boehner for his congressional seat.

Hounshell stepped into the limelight this past September when he introduced President Barack Obama at a campaign stop in Cincinnati.

The vice president of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 1943 at AK Steel’s Middletown Works plant will hold a fundraiser at the Forest Hills Country Club, 791 Fourth Ave. in Middletown, where he will announce his run for the U.S. House of Representatives Ohio 8th District in 2014.

Howie Klein over at DWT has more, including Andrew’s essay on why this one-time Republican walked away from the party of cray-cray and joined the good guys.

Memories like mine can mold and shape a person’s voting patterns for a lifetime. Luckily for me, my thirties brought on a time of clarity. There wasn’t one particular event that turned on a light bulb, but rather a combination of many: college, union work, community work, my father relying on the VA for health care, my mother relying on her Social Security to survive, in-laws going without health insurance because they can’t afford it after my father in-law was laid-off from Delphi, having 3 children at one time (the list goes on and on). I realized that through policy, our elected officials do have a huge impact on our livelihood. Through cuts in Social Security, appointments to the NLRB, cuts to the VA, immigration reform (or lack thereof), tax loopholes for corporations, subsidies to oil companies, etc., our middle class has been eroded and we are not taking care of those who can no longer take care of themselves.

The Republicans I loved as a child, and I thought loved me back, were the very ones who were supporting this erosion. How could this be?

Andrew’s my age.  I too remember sending Reagan a get well card when I was 5 after he was shot.  It was a crappy drawing of the space shuttle Columbia, which being drawn by a 5-year old, looked more like a tube of toothpaste with two smaller booster rocket tubes attached to it.  I got a nifty thank you note from the White House.  ZandarMom voted for the guy, after all.

And like Reagan (not that he was super awesome or anything) those Republicans are long gone, replaced by their current insane iteration.  Like me, Hounshell figured out a long time ago that Republicans don’t give a damn about working class anyone and never will.  In Ohio, that still matters to an extent.

Does Hounshell have a shot against the Big Orange Machine?  Considering Boehner ran unopposed in 2012, I’m going to say Democrats have a better chance than they did last year, right?

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Put Your Pitchforks Down

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Here’s the nut of the Cyprus bank deal:

Laiki, or Cyprus Popular Bank, is to be closed. Its €4.2bn in deposits over €100,000 will be placed in a “bad bank” and could be wiped out entirely. Those with smaller deposits will see their accounts transferred to Bank of Cyprus.

The Cypriot government reportedly fought hard for Bank of Cyprus to be spared, but the island’s biggest bank will face huge restructuring. No bailout money will be used to the recapitalise it. Instead shareholders and bondholders will be hit. It is thought depositors with more than €100,000 at the bank will also be involved in the recapitalisation, and are expected to face losses of around 30%.

Getting the bank up to healthy EU-mandated capital levels will be made harder by the fact that Bank of Cyprus will inherit a €9bn debt Laiki had with the European Central Bank (ECB).

The bailout deal does not need approval from the Cypriot parliament because it has been achieved by restructuring the country’s two largest banks, rather than levying a new tax on citizens.

The €100,000 floor on deposit confiscation should keep people from beheading the current government.

I was trying to understand the difference between Cyprus and Iceland. Both countries had a bank bubble based on foreign debt/investment, but Iceland has its own currency, so during its crisis, it let three banks fail, gave money back to domestic depositors, engaged in a program of domestic debt relief, and let its currency plunge. It also tied up between $3-8 billion of foreign investment. Cyprus is in the Eurozone, so I guess the 30% haircut for (mainly foreign) depositors is the financial equivalent, for them, of Iceland’s currency devaluation, though “the market” didn’t do it. Domestic individual depositors are more-or-less being made whole, but as Atrios points out, some of the “big depositors” are operating accounts for domestic businesses. So the key difference is that domestic depositors don’t get as good a deal as Icelanders, and there’s no domestic debt relief involved? Maybe someone who knows more about this can tell us in the comments, because Iceland seemed to survive what appeared to be, at the time, a complete collapse of their financial system.

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Hollywood liberals

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I didn’t see Zero Dark Thirty. It’s the same reason I didn’t see Quantum of Solace or Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I just didn’t like the title. That, and I felt that after reading Andrew Sullivan blockquote Eli Lake’s reply to Matt Ygelsias’s argument that Megan McArdle was wrong to criticize Manohla Dargis’s review of the movie…I was just sick of the whole thing. Anyhoo, I thought this was interesting:

Zero Dark Thirty also twisted itself into knots, bent over backwards to make sure President Obama received as little credit as possible in this movie.

[….]

I’ve been in meetings where these kinds of political considerations overwhelmed the storytelling interest of a movie. It happens ALL THE TIME. When it doubt, Hollywood will ALWAYS @#$%^ out, even when it comes to having the back of a President they support. Hell, there’s money to be made.

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