Nov 24th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Endgame
I’ll make this week disappear:
— Awesome ad from a New Orleans mayoral candidate.
— Charles Diez shot a cyclist in the head and will serve just 120 days in prison for it.
— David Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House.
— Getting the story right on Chicago parking meters.
— The case for optimism about the civic consequences of the decline of newspapers.
— Obama has leverage to use over Netanyahu, but will he use it?
— Chinese banks need more capital.
A friend of mine was foolishly comparing Lady Gaga favorably to David Bowie earlier today. Engaging in that dispute eventually led me to Kashmir’s “The Cynic” which features some Bowie vocals—definitely a lesser Bowie work, but far better than any Gaga out there.
41 Responses to “Endgame”
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November 24th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
— Obama has leverage to use over Netanyahu, but will he use it?
No.
November 24th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Dammit, Jasper, you beat me!
November 24th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
The Felix Salmon piece on Chicago parking meters is not credible and willfully ignores or glosses over several critical aspects of the deal.
I urge you to read the three-piece feature in the Chicago Reader, beginning here:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/fail-parking-meters-lease-deal/Content?oid=1098561
November 24th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Why does Salmon believe that hiring McKinsey to recommend job cuts at $1000 an hour is sound management? It’s usually a ruse whereby McKinsey pays a portion of that back in campaign cash and nice contracts for a lawmaker’s family members, and the lawmaker uses the consultant’s report as cover to cut funding to his political rival’s patronage machine. Hardly a model of good government.
On the Chicago meter thing, Daley is like Henry VIII: he can ransack the country’s accumulated wealth in order to spend while he’s in control, and his heirs will clean up the mess. He’ll probably get away with it.
November 24th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
On the Chicago meter thing, Daley is like Henry VIII: he can ransack the country’s accumulated wealth in order to spend while he’s in control, and his heirs will clean up the mess. He’ll probably get away with it.
Hmm, I’d go with Charles II over Henry VIII, with Hizzoner the First as James, thus allowing for an interregnum.
Unfortunately, that leaves Charles I with nowhere to go, but the point of this analogy is that no earthy power will remove Chicago from hereditary Daley rule.
Btw, Matt, this friend of yours, he is now an ex-friend, yes?
Because friends don’t let friends go Gaga.
November 24th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Yea? well im at the pixies show right now matt. whaachu think aboot that suckah?
November 24th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Gee, the Financial Times, another Israel bashing piece of shit from Great Britain, right up there with the fucking Guardian and the fucking BBC.
November 24th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
That’s a hell of an ad.
November 24th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Re Charles Diaz
About what one would expect from white trash country. There’s nothing South of the Occoquan but wall to wall white trash.
November 24th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Gee, the Financial Times, another Israel bashing piece of shit from Great Britain, right up there with the fucking Guardian and the fucking BBC.
LOL. Is that supposed to be an insult? Here’s a short list of American media outlets which are inferior to the BBC.
November 24th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
On the other hand, the surgeon who deliberately injured two bicyclists in L.A. got convicted of several felonies and is facing up to 10 years in prison:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cyclist3-2009nov03,0,761131.story
November 24th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Nice ad, but the promise of a 40% cut in the murder rate just screams juking the stats.
November 24th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Damn, Jasper (#1) beat me to the obvious answer.
November 24th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Clark: “juking the stats”
Someone’s seen The Wire.
Anyway, check out James Perry’s site. He’s a progressive, and the real deal. He’s apparently Melissa Harris Lacewell’s SO, which makes me all political-nerd-warm-fuzzy inside.
November 24th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Lady Gaga is underrated (at least on this blog) but she’s no David Bowie.
November 24th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
“Underrated”???
Child, please.
Lady Gaga is completely ripping off Dale Bozzio’s schtick. Badly. It continues to mystify me how everyone is buying it.
November 24th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
China’s banks have been on an orgy of lending for commercial and real estate projects for a decade. Rapid credit expansion defines booms. There are no other kind. Their banks had to be bailed out to the tune of about 400 billion US several years ago. I guess they could afford it.
China’s banks and government budgets are opaque, along with their monetary position because their monetary unit, the RNB is not set by any market. It’s value in relation to the dollar dictated. and through that its relation to all other currencies.
China’s monetary growth has been spectacular and achieved via its large trade surplus with the US. Chinese firms get paid in dollars and exchange some of them for RNB to use at home. The dollars accumulate with the central bank and then get spent on buying US Treasury and agency debt. You will note that these dollars do double duty. They pay the companies then come back to the Treasury. This is money creation turbo charged. In a more rational system the exchange transaction would be sterilized. Meaning the RNB’s given in exchange for dollars would in turn be purchased with those dollars by the central bank on the forex market so the transaction would balance on a ledger sheet. Instead the Chinese central bank just prints the money. Everyone wins as perhaps $2 trillion of those dollars came back here to keep interest rates down by supporting the Treasury market and in general keeping financial system liquidity high.
Everyone wins except that the units of value, RNB’s and dollars, have no rational basis. No market setting their prices, aka values. The thing that drives the gold bugs hard money people insane. One does not need to be a hard money ideolog to appreciate that the ephemeral nature of all this money renders much of the macro economic discussion an academic exercise. Within the bounds of an informal ad hoc system they make some sense but that system has no inherent stability.
November 24th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Lady Gaga is completely ripping off Dale Bozzio’s schtick. Badly.
Except that the music sounds totally different. Gaga is ripping off (in a good sense) various things, but Missing Persons isn’t one of them.
For that matter, her fashion thing isn’t really coming from there either.
Re Charles Diaz
About what one would expect from white trash country. There’s nothing South of the Occoquan but wall to wall white trash.
This is just trolling crap, but it is maybe worth noting that Asheville is not somewhere you would expect to be hostile to cyclists.
November 24th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I think the ad is awful unless people are touting it as a so bad it’s good thing.
November 24th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Gee, yet another starlet who chooses to throw her conciderable singing talent out the window and commodify her sexuality by appealing to the basest impulses of young American men and women. “I want to take a ride on your disco st*ck” indeed. The penchant of Hollywood for encouraging young women like Ms. Gaga to degrade themselves is truly impressive.
We may be a step or two above the moral and cultural free-fall of contemporary British young culture, but with Ms. Gaga and Mr. Timberlake in the vanguard, we are headed there very rapidly indeed. We need, we most direly need, a respite from the cesspit.
November 24th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
If Hector hates it that much, how bad could it be?
November 24th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Also, Lady Gaga has about as much in common with Dale Bozzio as she does with Steve Martin. Which isn’t nothing! But it isn’t much.
November 24th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
I’m sorry, I’m not sure I’m comfortable voting for a candidate whose resume LEADS with “I was an eagle scout!”
November 24th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
The pixies were unbelievably good. also as far as he shes go lady gaga is pretty fugly IMO. hector, your thoughts?
November 24th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
The cyclist wasn’t “shot in the head” so much as “shot at the head” — the bullet went through his helmet. 120 days is pretty weak, though that’s the incarceration portion of a sentence that was mostly suspended because of no previous criminal record and various mitigating factors. Still, it’s a classic Southern cycling incident, esp. in a city like Asheville where culture clash is standard fare — he saw a guy cycling with his kid on a four-lane road, and took it as a personal affront.
As for La Gaga, she’s great. And as her SNL set shows, she could be a winning cabaret piano bar artist in NYC with her eyes shut.
November 24th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Nick,
I lived in Asheville for six years, until 2007. It’s actually not that surprising that this kind of thing would happen there. The town hosts the culture wars in microcosm. You’ve got your progressive, pro-cyclist, pagan, vegan, etc. crowd, and you’ve got your Southern Baptist, I hate all these wierdos crowd. The two clash sometimes, many times, all the time. It just usually doesn’t involve gunshots. And I still can’t believe that fucker only got four months! For shooting someone in the head! What more is there to say! He shot someone in the fucking head! Silly me, I thought that was just something you could not do and get away with, but I guess I was wrong.
November 24th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
So basically he’s only getting four months because he has bad aim.
November 25th, 2009 at 1:03 am
The ad was good, but I think I only caught two of the five changes he said he would make.
November 25th, 2009 at 1:26 am
Wish James was running for Mayor of Oakland to replace the dead-brained fool we got now.
November 25th, 2009 at 2:22 am
The Chicago parking meter deal was…not ideal.
I recommend this article for starters.
November 25th, 2009 at 2:47 am
OTOH, which was also a plot point on the wire, it is much more difficult to juke the stats wrt murder than it is with most other other crimes; it’s hard to debate calling it something else when you find a body or bodies stored in abandoned rowhouses.
Not impossible – you can decide to count the murder as this year or the previous year depending on whether you counting when the inicident occured or when the crime was discovered – but it will get tallied in the end, and with a lot less fudging then armed robbery, assualt and battery, or something similar
November 25th, 2009 at 5:25 am
My guess is that the judge has too often been victimized by ahole cyclists like those two losers in Asheville.
Seriously, two cyclists ride side by side on a four lane highway with a three year old child on the back?
The State needs to intervene, take the child from his styoner parents, and charge the latter with child abuse.
Four years in lockup for endangering sounds about right for the dumbos.
Hell they should get four years just for their spandex crimes against humanity.
November 25th, 2009 at 5:39 am
The FT piece says:
Well, sorry but this is bullshit. Zionists don’t mind condemnations and votes, it only helps them whip up hysteria and hatred. Victimization complex is a vital part of their ideology.
The only way to get rid of them would be to actually follow thru and introduce some sort of economic sanctions. And that is not likely to happen; this president seems way too weak for that.
November 25th, 2009 at 8:22 am
The cyclist wasn’t “shot in the head” so much as “shot at the head” — the bullet went through his helmet. 120 days is pretty weak, though that’s the incarceration portion of a sentence that was mostly suspended because of no previous criminal record and various mitigating factors.
Well, that was part of it, but the biggest factor was that the jury wouldn’t indict for attempted murder 1 and so the State was left with simple assault, one of those charges that leaves a lot of discretion with the sentencing authority
November 25th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Wingnuts are such infants. The existence of people who aren’t like them is enough to make them feel victimized, and justified in committing violent acts.
November 25th, 2009 at 8:33 am
The Perry ad is OK until he leads with being an Eagle Scout. Seriously, if you’re an adult and that’s what you lead with, you’re doomed.
November 25th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Someone please buy Hector a dictionary so he can look up the meaning of the word “degrade”. It is not the opposite of conform.
She takes risks with her image, and potentially turns off whole groups of people. It wouldn’t work to the extent that it has without any talent. I kind of doubt the music has staying power, but it’s extremely current and fun to listen to. Her vocal abilities aren’t to be completely dismissed either. Whenever I’ve seen her live, I have been impressed.
If you haven’t seen the video of a pre-Fame gaga:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM51qOpwcIM&feature=rec-LGOUT-exp_fresh+div-HM
November 25th, 2009 at 10:16 am
My guess is that the judge has too often been victimized by ahole cyclists like those two losers in Asheville.
“Victimized”? What do you mean by that, exactly?
Cyclists annoy me sometimes, but it really takes a certain mentality to claim victimization by them — a mentality that, funnily enough, nutwingers like ChooChoo constantly claim to discern on the left.
November 25th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Two Goldman Sachs board members and a partridge in a pear tree.
For the business side of last night’s State Dinner:
http://peureport.blogspot.com/2009/11/business-side-of-state-dinners.html
November 25th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Charles Diez shot a cyclist in the head and will serve just 120 days in prison for it.
“Convicted of a crime I didn’t even commit. Hah! Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry? Do they?”
November 25th, 2009 at 11:59 am
WINGNUT TRAINING TEST
First, say the following in as convincing a voice as possible:
“The liberal nanny state wants to tell you how to live, how to raise your children, and curtail your freedom! Liberals encourage a culture of victimization! No more slaps on the wrist for violent criminals!”
Second, say the following in as convincing a voice as possible.
“A North Carolina man got 120 days for shooting a bicyclist in the head because he felt it was unsafe for the bicyclist to ride with a child in the bicycle’s child seat. My guess is that the judge has too often been victimized by ahole cyclists like those two losers in Asheville… The State needs to intervene, take the child from his styoner parents, and charge the latter with child abuse. Four years in lockup for endangering sounds about right for the dumbos. Hell they should get four years just for their spandex crimes against humanity.”
Repeat until you can move from one quote to the other without a twinge of cognitive dissonance. (If you don’t know what cognitive dissonance is, good for you! Only the liberal egghead elite knows things like that.)