We State The Obvious, Because That's What We Do

This whole "blogging" thing has, perhaps, met its match in the form of Facebook updates. It's like a pithiness release valve, the status update; the pressure necessary to write a blog post just never materializes. And who suffers? Why, you, of course, the pithiness-starved, blog-reading public.

As Pure An Example Of Shark-Jumping As One Could Ever Hope For

Yes, I realize there is a dangling preposition in the title of this post. But there are more important things afoot. Like the fact that the president just won a Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not sure whether that means that he has jumped the shark or that the Nobel committee has jumped the shark, but I'm pretty sure I just saw a shadow flit across a dorsal fin, and so we can deduce that someone or something has, indeed, vaulted over it.

In a world where reasonable political discourse is the norm, this would be c-c-c-craaaazy stuff, but we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where Sarah Palin is considered to be a viable candidate for public office, and where people straight-facedly call the Fox channel "news," and where people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that the Congress' current healthcare reform bill contains "death panels" are considered serious analysts whose opinions on the subject of the day, which is often somehow Britney Spears-related (gah!), are to be carefully weighed before coming to any important conclusions about the state of the union.

So, in light of these things and others, I am going to attempt to help you help me get a grasp on the relative weirdness of this morning's central revelation through an intellectual exercise based around the following question:

{ahem}

Is the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama more or less shocking and embarrassing than the fact that his predecessor authorized and carried out a program of torturing civilians in secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe?

The Scrutiny of Defeat

From fresh-faced young Republican website rebuildtheparty.com:

"2008 made one thing clear: If allowed to go unchecked, the Democrats' structural advantages, including their use of the Internet, their more than 2-to-1 advantage with young voters, their discovery of a better grassroots model -- will be as big a threat to the future of the GOP as the toxic political environment we have faced the last few years [ed.- emphasis mine]."

Is that the best euphemism you've ever heard for "our party's control of the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, and the courts and the full flowering of our ideological agenda" or what? Oh Republicans, your attempts to skirt the issue of your incompetent governance in your explanations of your electoral defeat are priceless. Don't ever change.

Good Work America

To paraphrase the Economist, it's about time.

The Credit Crisis Explained (In Terms Of Sandwiches)

Maybe it's a little late, but if you're still confused, I have prepared the following explanation of the credit crisis in a manner near and dear to my own heart.

When you go to a baker to get your bread, the baker organizes all the ingredients, bakes a loaf, and takes your money in exchange for that loaf. You depend on his expertise. Similarly, when you buy a house, you depend on the expertise of the banker to "bake" you a mortgage. It's a unit, a commodity, created through the financial expertise of the banker. If you imagine that the entire pool of mortgages in the United States is 100 loaves of bread, here's what happened over the past several years:

First of all, keep in mind that not all mortgages failed; it was just around 6%. So imagine, if you will, that six out the hundred loaves of bread have gone bad. They're moldy, baked with melamine, full of weevils, whatever. Pick your poison, they've gone bad. It used to be that those six loaves could be readily identified as bad and avoided. Now, however, we have these financial instruments called "derivatives," which are created out of whole commodities like mortgages. The process of turning mortgages into derivatives is sort of like taking all hundred loaves and chopping them up. Some end up as slices for sandwiches, some end up as croutons in salads, some end up as crumbs for baking onto fish or chicken, some end up served with little spreads of cheese and salmon at weddings and piano recitals, some end up mixed into bread puddings, some was mixed with egg and made into French toast.

The important thing is, you can't really tell anymore which loaf the bread came from. There could be a sandwich made with one slice of good bread and one slice of bad bread, there could be good croutons and bad croutons in the same salad, you never know. So word got out that some of this bread was no good, and some people found bad bread in their meals, and then other folks started to wonder if any of this bad bread got into their meals as well. They stopped eating as much, and the value of meals made with bread was thrown into doubt. No one knew if these bread-based meals were worth eating or not, so the people who had them were afraid to eat them, and they certainly couldn't sell them or serve them to their families. So institutions with these derivatives on their books began to wonder about their financial health, but they couldn't unload the derivatives because their value was suspect.

At that point, even though only a small percentage of the bread/mortgages were bad, no bread/mortgage-based products were considered safe, and people stopped dealing with bread. This wreaked havoc on people's diets, and they started looking for alternatives to bread, for bread-free meals, just as investors fled to precious metals and government bonds (think of them as meat and soy-based dishes, the Atkins diet of the financial world; sure it looks fine in the short run, but eventually your kidneys will fall out in your underpants). People whose diets were almost entirely bread-based began to starve to death, like Indymac, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.

In that environment, no one knew who would get sick next, and how much bad bread had already been eaten, so people with a stake in the health of the populace started to get wary. Health insurers found that too many people were getting sick or were at risk of getting sick for their business model to work. Large insurers, such as AIG, were threatened with failure because not only had they invested in bread, but they had offered insurance policies to people with high-bread diets. Some bread was found in meals that had been exported and sold overseas, and some bread was known to be in frozen TV dinners, socked away in freezers somewhere, ready to rear its ugly head at some undetermined future date, without warning.

Even non-traditional operators had insurance-like stakes in the health of others. The "credit-default swap" market was akin to one person taking on responsibility for the health of ten, twenty, maybe thirty other people. It was like a day-care operation, where one person guaranteed the health of other people's investments for a small fee. But it wasn't just one day-care, it was as if a whole neighborhood had a rotating playgroup arrangement, where everyone's kids would go to a different person's house on different days of the week, at different times of day, so that in some fashion, everybody was responsible for everybody else's kids. And they were all feeding them bread-based snacks, not knowing if some of those snacks contained bad bread. Naturally, people began immediately trying to pull their kids out of day-care, and refusing to offer day-care to other kids, and trying to stow all their bread-based foods in the back of the fridge where no one could see them. This caused the basic machinations of daily life to freeze up, and ruined many good restaurant chains, grocery stores, and bakeries. Some kids couldn't be found, because no one remembered whose house they were supposed to be at and when, some kids showed up at day-care to find the doors locked, it was a mess, because no one had been keeping track of the schedule.

And the reason it's so hard to fix is that you would have to have a health inspector go through every item of bread-based food in every single person's refrigerator to determine if part of the six bad loaves had gotten into the food. And there's just not enough health inspectors, or day-care regulators, because in the mid-nineties the number of health inspectors was cut as part of a program to make more bread (mortgages) available to more people. And starting this century, the rules governing day-care centers (credit-default swaps) were completely thrown out courtesy of a late-night last-minute addendum to an appropriations bill by Sen. Phil Gramm. And even those health inspectors that were on the job were encouraged not to work very hard by the Bush administration, which was never really into health inspections to begin with, and didn't see the value in boosting the Health & Human Services (federal regulators') budget. They believed that kids were perfectly capable of getting to day-care on their own, and the kids that couldn't deserved to be abducted or left to die out in the cold after school, in a sort of market-based natural selection.

So now that the whole system has been thrown into chaos, the feds are working with the bakers and grocery store owners and the neighborhood playgroups to try to identify where the bad bread is, so that they can confidently assure a large amount of people that their specific sandwiches are safe to eat. Legislators are attempting to throw more light onto the day-care schedule and sort out where everyone's kids are and whether or not they're sick from moldy bread consumption. Everyone is probably going to have to throw out some sandwiches, and some good sandwiches are going to get thrown out with the bad ones, just to be safe. Eventually, however, more bread will be baked, and so long as that bread is baked to a high standard, and if the health inspector is there, watching the guy at the deli as he cuts up the bread to make sandwiches, fewer bad loaves will make their way into the market, and the value of any given sandwich or bread pudding will return to its normal level.

Which is important to the health of the nation.

You've Gotta Score Points If You Want To Win

Am I the only person who has noticed that Wolf Blitzer talks about politics the way John Madden talks about football? Just repeating the most inane, almost surreally didactic explanations as though the archangel had just whispered in his ear?

An Inconvenient Truth

Republicans, please. If you're going to insist on referring to Obama as "emperor," you might want to make mention of the fact that the most imperial thing about his potential presidency is the scope of executive power that Bush and Cheney are feverishly amassing for him.

It might not win you points with the dead-enders, but it will go a little ways toward making you sound less ridiculous. Assuming you're into that.

(I'll take my thanks in the form of all-caps blog comments.)