Opening day

Today, my beloved Cubbies begin their annual 162 game exercise in futility. There are signs, however, that this year’s team may actually make a run. We have some pitching, a pretty solid defense, and a couple of big bats. On paper, this is as talented a team as Wrigley Field has seen in quite some time and it should go without saying (but won’t) that the last time the Cubs won the series was 1908. We have had a one hundred year drought. We are due.

Now, as any good Cubs fans knows, none of that matters. The Bartman/Gonzales disaster a few years back should remind everyone that the Billy Goat curse is still upon the North Side team.

But maybe, just maybe, this will be our year. That is why we watch.

And if the Cubs fall short in 2008, (all together now), There Is Always Next Year.

The regulatory head fake

There are three simple maxims that pretty well encapsulate the economic policies of the Bush Administration.

1. Tax cuts are sacrosanct.
2. Deregulation is always good, no matter the consequences to the consumer or the economy.
3. The freer the market, the better.

So, to anyone hoping for some sort of meaningful reform happening on W’s watch, I have a bridge to sell you. Secretary Paulson is merely trying to conjure the illusion of reform without doing anything to upset, meaning reign in, Wall Street. Because that would be bad.

The upshot of this new plan is that a bunch of regulatory agencies will merge (remember how well the work with FEMA during Katrina?), there will be additional requirements in licensing mortgage brokers, etc., but absolutely nothing in this scheme would prevent another Bear Sterns collapse. And make no mistake; that is the point. This is political chicanery. We are supposed to watch the wand in Paulson’s left hand while the right does nothing at all.

This job is not for everyone

So J.’s preschool is on Spring Break and I decided to spend the week at home with him while also trying to keep up with work. Suffice it to say, I have been a little busy, hence the light (non) posting. But I must say that I have a whole new respect for the stay at home parents out there. Y’all are domestic badasses and my new heroes. This gig is tough.

Unhappy Anniversary

Five years ago today, President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, initiating one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history. I don’t know what else to say about that.

Today’s required reading

E. J. Dionne has a fantastic piece in the WaPo today, in which he calls out the conservative hypocrites that demand, on the one hand, laissez-faire economic policy from the government while on the other, insisting that the Fed bail out institutions like Bears Stearns.

But in the enthusiasm for deregulation that took root in the late 1970s, flowered in the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the second Bush years, we forgot the lesson that government needs to keep a careful watch on what capitalists do. Of course, some deregulation can be salutary, and the market system is, on balance, a wondrous instrument -- when it works. But the free market is just that: an instrument, not a principle.

In 1996, back when he was a Republican senator from Maine, William Cohen told me: "We have been saying for so long that government is the enemy. Government is the enemy until you need a friend."

So now the bailouts begin, and Wall Street usefully might feel a bit of gratitude, perhaps by being willing to have the wealthy foot some of the bill or to acknowledge that while its denizens were getting rich, a lot of Americans were losing jobs and health insurance. I'm waiting.

That could be a long wait indeed.

Uh oh

You know it is going to be a rough day in the markets when MarketWatch leads with a recap of the NYSE circuit breaker rules.

Hold onto your hats kiddies.

Like father, like son

It looks like this Bush will close out his Presidency with a recessionary economy as well.

BOCA RATON, Florida (Reuters) - The United States is in a recession that could be "substantially more severe" than recent ones, National Bureau of Economic Research President Martin Feldstein said on Friday.

"The situation is very bad, the situation is getting worse, and the risks are that it could get very bad," Feldstein said in a speech at the Futures Industry Association meeting in Boca Raton, Florida.

"There's no doubt that this year and next year are going to be very difficult years."

Batten down the hatches mates, rough seas ahead.

I don’t get it

Struggling Chrysler is taking a corporate-wide mandatory two-week vacation, presumably to save money on salaries, etc. but the official explanation is puzzling.

Chrysler says the shutdown should help it boost productivity and efficiency.

That company must be doing a lot of things wrong if doing nothing is a boost to productivity.

This must have been quite the scene

From the AP:

MUNICH, Germany - Police say a woman was stopped at Munich airport after baggage control handlers found the skeleton of her brother sealed in a plastic bag in her luggage.

As it turns out, the woman had a legit reason for toting around her sibling's corpse but how freaked out must the baggage screener have been.

Bag full of clothes, bag full of clothes, bag full of clothes, bag full of, of, of – HOLY SHIT, IS THAT WHAT I THINK IT IS?

Late night fodder

Putting aside the questions of whether or not Spitzer’s adultery scandal hurts the Clinton campaign and if so how much, you have to feel for Hillary when she opened the WaPo this morning to see this:

This certainly is not the way Clinton's strategists would have mapped out this week on the campaign trail. They want voters to be thinking about that 3 a.m. phone call in terms of who is ready to handle a crisis in the White House, not in terms of where an unfaithful husband might be catting around town [Ed. note – Ouch!]. And, sure enough, the late-night comedians wasted little time linking the Spitzer case to the Clintons. Jay Leno joked Monday night that Spitzer's scandal "means Hillary Clinton is now only the second angriest woman in the state of New York." David Letterman offered a Top 10 List of excuses Spitzer might cite, including the No. 1 excuse: "I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago."

Day-um. That has got to hurt.

(Not sure who to credit because this has been linked by everyone from everywhere)

That is just pure, concentrated evil

Ann Coulter was Bob Novak’s date to the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington this past weekend. That much condensed wickedness confined in so little a space may well generate its own gravity.

Elk carcass

Go to Amazon and read the comments.

Being somewhat a connoisseur of carcasses, I was at first dismayed at the mode of dress for this carcass, all trussed up in clean netting, defatted and with the tendons and ligiments removed, a form of carcass redacto absurdum run amok.

This is a damn riot.

(hat tip to The Sneeze)

More Spitzer

August Pollack on Governor Fuckhead – absolutely.

But I have a question. How in the world do jokers like Spitzer, Larry Craig, David Vitter, etc., guys that go way beyond just having the normal affair, get their wives to go on TV with them for their big “I didn’t do it” speech or the inevitable confessional press conference? Did you see the expression on the face of Spitzer’s poor wife during his admission? Folks, that is what mortified looks like.

I am dead serious when I say that if my wife ever caught me spending thousands of dollars for high-priced call girls, no one would ever find my body and you can bet your ass that she would not standing nobly by while I publically humiliated her before the media. No fucking chance. The only way I could safely get her on stage for that kind of “event” is sedated and strapped to a gurney, Hannibal Lector style.

Uh oh

Yesterday, Paul Krugman put on his economist hat and proceeded to scare the hell out of me. This is not a fellow prone to hyperbole or Chicken Little-ism. So when he ends a column on the perilous state of our financial markets thusly,

Nobody wants to put taxpayers on the hook for the financial industry’s follies; we can all hope that, in the end, a bailout won’t be necessary. But hope is not a plan.

you know some pretty bad and potentially very expensive shit is about to go down. Energy costs are high and rising, the housing market is still in freefall, banks are getting wobbly, and even Federal Reserve Bank Presidents are sounding spooked. When well respected economists like Krugman start talking bailout in that kind of environment, we are deep in the weeds. Now all of this may turn itself around, a point Krugman concedes, but from his estimable point of view, things look pretty grim right now and prospect of improvement very much in doubt. Yikes.

Hookers?!?!?!?!

So New York’s Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer, a man whose entire professional reputation has been built upon prosecuting corruption, gets busted for frequenting prostitutes. This guy was supposed to be squeaky clean; the ultimate Boy Scout cum crime fighter. I would have sooner believed that Liberace was straight than Spitzer was banging hookers. And sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

The reverse Midas touch

Oil hit $107 a barrel, setting a new inflation-adjusted record. Remember when the Iraq War was going to stabilize the Middle East and dramatically lower oil prices. I swear to God, sometimes I think George Bush is the Manchurian Candidate from ExxonMobil.

My new favorite band

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Aggrolites, an LA-based reggae quintet with a dash of funk and a heaping pile of soul. This is what reggae would sound like if Curtis Mayfield wrote the arraignment and Wilson Pickett fronted the band - some marvelous stuff.

Delegates

Starpower asked in Comments that I take a crack at explaining the Democratic Party’s insanely complicated delegate allocation scheme and to be honest, I am not sure that I am up to the task. The last time I took a hard look at any of this stuff was over a dozen years ago, studying for my degree in Political Science. But what the Hell, here goes.

Rule number one; the method used to distribute delegates is at the discretion of each state and the respective state parties. Beyond federal Voting Rights standards, there are very few uniform guidelines governing the conduct these contests and most of those laws regulate registration, ballot access and the like. The national parties lay down some rules regarding the schedule but that and some basic Constitutional guarantees notwithstanding, this stuff is wide open. Most states choose to hold primaries (basically a simple, straight vote), a few other caucus (which really is a bunch of people standing around debating for a while and then voting). And then there is Texas, which has a hybrid, first a primary and then a caucus.

Rule number two; states distribute their delegates either winner take all or proportionally to the percentage of the vote a candidate receives. This would seem pretty straight forward except some states require a candidate to meet some minimum threshold to begin accumulating delegates. Another wrinkle to this; if a state distributes proportionally, the delegates themselves can be chosen by any number methods. Some states appoint delegates at the precinct level, others by congressional district, others still state wide, and a few, like Texas, some combination thereof.

Rule number three; open versus closed events. In most states, one can only participate in a Party’s primary or caucus if one is a Party member. There are a few exceptions, like Virginia, which holds an open primary and one can choose either a Democratic or Republican ballot at the polling place.

Rule number four; pledged and unpledged or “super” delegates. The point of these caucuses and primaries is to allocate “pledged” delegates to the campaigns. Pledged delegates are, in theory, bound to the campaign to which they are pledged for the first round of voting at the national party conventions. I say in theory because the folks are not actually bound (meaning legally or otherwise compelled) to vote for their pledged candidate. Pledged delegates rarely deviate but given the potential for weirdness in this year’s Democratic contest, that point is worth noting.

Both major parties employ unpledged delegates as well. These people are typically elected officials, members of the House, Senate, governors, or party higher-ups who are free to support whomever they choose. The Parties use the unpledged delegates as means of exercising some control over choosing the nominee or as most party officials will argue, to ensure that no unfit or unqualified loony wins the nomination. They call it a safeguard, I call it elitism but that is an argument for another day. Anyway, as a proportion of the Republican delegates, the unpledged are not terribly significant. For the Democrats, however, the unpledged super-delegates represent 20+ percent of the total delegate population. In a typical year, that would hardly matter as the Party usually has a nominee by Super Tuesday. It goes without saying that this is not a typical year.

With the close race between Clinton and Obama, combined with the exclusion of the delegates from Michigan and Florida for violating National Party rules (Sidebar: boy do those state parties look dumb), neither candidate will collect enough pledged delegates to win the nomination outright. This is why the supers are getting so much attention; they can throw this thing either way and are not really accountable to anyone.

Now, conventional wisdom says that the supers will get behind whoever has the pledged delegate lead when the last race is completed. I tend to agree with that. Hillary has almost no chance to catch Obama in pledged delegates. For her to win, she needs a majority of the supers to overturn, without good cause mind you, the will of the people. If that happens and Barack Obama is denied the nomination, the Party will split and Democrats will have lost the black vote for a generation. I cannot believe that the Party leadership would let that happen, but then again, we are talking about the Dems. If anyone has the potential to fuck up this situation, it is the Democratic Party.

So there you have it Star, I hope that helps and preemptive apologies to everyone if I got something wrong.

A tough night for Obama

You have to hand it to the Clinton campaign. They got their people out in droves and kept Hillary viable until Pennsylvania. I had hoped, as with everyone in the Obama camp, that he could have knocked her out last night. Unfortunately, that was not to be. As things stand now, Hillary gained about a dozen delegates with another dozen or so outstanding. Obama still comes out with a 100 or so delegate lead and friendly contests in Wyoming and Mississippi on the horizon. Not a bad place to be considering that Hillary is running out of states to make up the difference. And while her victory is still mathematically plausible, it is a long shot, fast approaching impossible. I am keeping the faith.

These people suck at Foreign Policy

Dear Lord, please deliver us from incompetent dumbasses that view foreign affairs as game of Risk. Condi Rice, Elliot Abrams, and George Fucking Bush have no idea what they are doing, unless starting and losing civil wars is some sort strategy. With this crowd, who knows?

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired [ed. note – um, naturally], resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Really, this is all too predictable if one examines the neo-con record of accomplishment (or lack thereof). Not satisfied with wretched state of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Administration decides to bungle some stupid cloak and dagger shit in Palestine. Ugh. At every turn, these morons make exactly the wrong decision.

(hat tip to Atrios)