“Finance People Laugh For No Reason”

Good.

What’s a good onomatopoeia for coughing?

smoke, originally uploaded by jasonstimpel.

Gaawwf. Hoof hoof. I don’t know.

The greatest president in our country’s history showed up via Air Force 1 to make a wildly emotional speech and then round up all the Jewish folks to send them to the front lines of the forest fires… without water or shovels, in hopes that they would all burn to death.

That’s pretty uncalled for and not very humorous. Sorry.

But there’s a comment on this thing: “Bush’s Visit To Redding Stirs JFK Memories”

thinker45 wrote:

Comparing this looser to JFK is completely inappropriate and is the height of Hubris! You of the media seem to fawn over ANYTHING that this administration does, even if it’s taken the US down the drain in terms of the economy, people dying for oil, the unconstitutionality of most of bush’s actions, or other things that are too numerous to mention. JFK??? Are you kidding? JFK LOVED this country and RESPECTED the Constitution, and everything that entails…..whereas this present bozo, this grinning looser considers the Constitution “just a piece of paper”. If you want to draw comparisons, then try Hitler—bush most closely looks more like THAT than JFK!

7/18/2008 2:17 PM PDT on news10.net

What a looser. The Constitution is parchment, not paper, Mr or Mrs quotes. Is Bush really comparable to Hitler? I’ve been hearing this a lot.

And what’s the deal with the article claiming that “JFK chose Redding to establish himself as an environmentalist.” ? He was inaugurating the completion of Whiskeytown Dam. Conservation is mentioned in his speech, but I don’t know if dams are part of the “environmentalist” deal. So JFK was a big evironmentalist, now.

What’s a good onomatopoeia for farting?

Jonathan Richman — Summer Feelin’

Breaking news: Surfer chick dresses nicely

And she’s a computer geek.

Another reason why time machines should be top priority and not this global warming business. I’m talking to you Al Gore.

Horses in the hood

Feel good story of the day: Horses in the hood

More Fannie Mae

From Slate:

Curious passage in Paul Krugman’s half-defense of Fannie Mae today:

But here’s the thing: Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble.

Partly that’s because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t.

Huh? Does Krugman not know that Fannie Mae was a huge buyer of subprime mortgages, including mortgages from Angelo Mozilo’s Countrywide? David Smith’s eerily prescient AHI blog noted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reportedly bought $35 billion in subprimes in the first quarter of 2007 alone.

On his blog, Krugman casts the Fannie problem in ideological terms:

What you need to know here is that the right — the WSJ editorial page, Heritage, etc. — hates, hates, hates Fannie and Freddie. Why? Because they don’t want quasi-public entities competing with Angelo Mozilo.

“Huh?” again. Conn Carroll responds:

The problem is that Fannie was Countrywide’s No. 1 enabler. … When he was CEO of Fannie, former Barack Obama campaign adviser Jim Johnson worked personally with Mozilo to streamline the two companies’ business relationship.

Could Mozilo have done his subprime thing without Johnson and Fannie Mae as a backup to purchase his junky mortgages?

Fannie Mae corruption

I don’t follow it close enough, but this post at The Volokh Conspiracy opens a can of worms. Ugly.

Jamie Gorelick’s ties to Fannie Mae and What She’s Doing Now– In reading this article about Crony Capitalism at Fannie Mae (tip to Instapundit), I noticed that Jamie Gorelick was one of the Fannie executives who benefited from inflated bonuses based on Enron-style accounting. She was Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae from 1997 to 2003 (Fannie’s fraudulent accounting scheme was made public in 2004).

This is the same Jamie Gorelick who was Deputy Attorney General in the mid 1990s and was reported to have been the author of the Clinton Administration’s WALL against sharing intelligence data between foreign and domestic agencies. Without the policies instituted by Gorelick still in place in 2001, officials might have learned more about the 9/11 attacks before the planes hit the buildings.

Read the arguments in the comments.

J.S. Bach — Passacaglia BWV 582/1 ; Karl Richter organ

Judy Henske — Wade In The Water

More stupid music coming your way.

I like her moves. Sassy. Could you imagine working the acreage with your mule, Dirty-Faced Jack, right there by your log-mud-adobe-log hut, and hearing her call you to supper? I’d like to listen to her sing over an old-fashioned telephone line. I’d like to eat okra, green beans, sweet potato pie, some slow cooked something-or-other, gravy, corn on the cob, butter, biscuits and drink a cold glass of milk. Get some hot apple pie with some cheddar cheese on top with a nice cup of coffee. Maybe hand-roll a cigarette, too. Listen to your kids jabber on. Watch the sun set on the horizon there. Maybe some cool evening breeze. Piss in the front yard. No.

Middle of the Road — Sacramento (A Wonderful Town)