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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Notes From The Island of Bizarre 

...John McCain has said that Barack Obama wants to raise taxes on the middle class, a claim that has been disproved by all reputable analysts. John McCain has said that Barack Obama has close ties to former terrorist Bill Ayers, a claim that does not withstand even the most simple scrutiny. John McCain has said that Barack Obama supported the proposition of teaching sex education to kindergarteners, a claim that is almost obscene in the degree of its intentional misrepresentation of an effort to teach young children how to avoid sexual predators. John McCain has said that Barack Obama "snubbed" wounded US troops while in Germany last summer, a claim that even military spokesmen wouldn't substantiate.

Today John McCain said that Barack Obama will say anything to win...

It's going to be a loooong twelve days...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:21 PM 0 comments

How To Be An Economic JEANYOUS 

...the path you take to becoming Ra, Sun-god of Economopolis, Creator of all Worlds and He Who Must Be Obeyed, is quite simple: hold fast to a clean, clear belief in the enlightened economic self-interest of financial corporations unfettered by several millenia of human proof to the contrary, and steadfastly refuse to accept the repeated warnings of other lesser beings that rampant leveraged investment in any sort of rapidly-growing speculative market is destined to result in a popped bubble...

This must be the road map to status of Supreme Economic Being, because it worked so spectacularly well for Allan Greenspan. Well, at least until today...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:50 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The NIght I Almost Got My 15 Minutes Of Fame 

...so I was just sitting here screwing around on the Intertubes with the TV on over my shoulder tonight when, suddenly, Stephen Colbert started to talk about his renewed pride at having rediscovered his long-lost "son" Stephen Jr out here in the "t'aint" state of Oregon. He even showed a picture of his newly rediscovered son perched on a tree in Oregon. I began shouting at Mrs Jack K. to drop what she is doing to "come watch this", and we sat on the bed watching Colbert's heart-tugging story...

I, of course, hung on every word to see if my meaningless little name would be mentioned; Mrs. Jack K. was interested because she is a wildlife biologist who deals with management of bald eagle habitat and was in fact the source for both the story and picture that I relied on for the...er...basics of this post revealing the discovery of the somewhat long-lost Stephen Jr. Knowing, courtesy of Sitemeter, that a couple of Colbert fan sites had linked to my silly, snarky little post, I thought this might be my one moment of meaningless fame...

Sadly, for my shriveled, battered ego, it wasn't to be. No mention of where the story of the discovery of the prodigal eagle son came from. Too bad. For a moment there, I was almost somebody...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:40 PM 0 comments

Monday, October 20, 2008

The Tragedy Of Allowing Right-Brainers To Stack The Firewoood 

...a vote for John McCain will Stop. This. Madness!

Posted by: Jack K. / 9:14 PM 0 comments

Dialing For Rubles The Straight Talk Way 

...oh, how embarrassing it must be for the ol' Maverick and his campaign minions to have to explain just exactly how it came to pass that Russia's U.N. Ambassador received a campaign fund-raising letter. Given McCain's strident saber rattling that harkens back to the most fondly remembered days of the Cold War that is the formative backstory of John McCain's life, it would be passably strange just on the face of the matter to think that his campaign would send a fund raising letter to the Russian consulate in New York. The campaign's quote is priceless:
"It was an error in the mailing list."

Oh, I daresay. On the other hand - speaking as a person who first started his college career as a journalism before darker urges captured my soul - there is a certain lack of exploration of the "who/what/when/where/why/how" format lurking behind the face of this story. Let's think about a couple of those questions:

A) How does one end up accidentally having an address list that contains the address of the Russian Consulate in New York City? What demographic fits the Russian Consulate in New York City such that it should earn a place on a Republican mailing list? Have they given before? Has someone at the Russian Consulate in New York City expressed some interest in the McCain campaign on his website, perhaps signed up for more information? More specifically, how exactly would the name of the Russian Ambassador to the UN actually come to be on this marvelous campaign fund raising mailing list? Could it be possible that the DEA or the BATF (closed circuit to that latter agency: Gordon Liddy is a good friend of John McCain; consider yourself warned) should swing by Huggy Bear's campaign headquarters, given the extreme unlikelihood nobody who's straight would ever be capable of such a bizarre mistake?

2) And so just what, exactly, is the postmark on that silly envelope containing McCain's fund raising letter? Do the employees at the Russian Consulate in New York City not pick up the mail more than every month or so? Do they spend so much of their time hanging out near pumpkin patches waiting for communiques from Obama to be deposited in that one specially hollowed-out drop point specimen that they aren't able to swing by the Post Office to gather up all those backlogged bundles of junk mail flyers and political contribution requests that apparently are plaguing God knows how many UN envoys? This is a serious question; the McCain campaign isn't supposed to have been asking for campaign contributions for the last month and a half from anybody, much less from McCain's own reborn incarnation of the "Evil Empire". Are we just hearing rather late in the game that McCain's campaign "screwed up", or is there a campaign financing violation going on here? Is the McCain campaign violating campaign financing laws regarding fund-raising as well as laws regarding accepting donations from foreign entities?

It would be irresponsible not to speculate...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:46 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Where I Predict Tomorrow's McCain Talking Point Today 

...the fundamental premise of the ol' Maverick POW Straight-Talker's campaign against Barack Obama has all along been that Obama was a shifty character of flowing rhetoric but with little experience and a host of questionable - if not dangerous - personal connections. Now that Colin Powell has caused the far right to join with the far left in the conviction that Powell is a simple tool of....well....somebody else with his endorsement of Obama, tomorrow's new Huggy Bear talking point is going to be the one he trotted out for a test drive today:
John McCain suggested that his Democratic rival Barack Obama’s record-shattering fundraising haul will lead to scandal in their presidential race and future races, and he hinted that there may already be funny business going on with Obama’s legions of small donors.

The McCain campaign, dating back to last spring when he had clinched the Republican nomination, has mostly been all about what was wrong with Barack Obama rather than what was right about McCain. The fact that the polls demonstrated a close race until the recent financial meltdown probably said more about the lingering fondness that the MSM had for McCain than any particular policy advantage on Huggy Bear's part, given that Huggy found himself sitting on the wrong side of the table when just about every pre-meltdown issue one might care to mention forced itself onto the public stage...

Given today's announcement of the breathtaking fund-raising efforts by the Obama campaign last month, coupled with the high-value news of Powell's endorsement live on national TV this morning, it's gonna be time for the ol' Maverick to get back on the road with the only real campaign strategy he's had all year (as opposed to the voter-suppression strategy of the Republican party, which would be on-going regardless of the Democratic nominee). It's all he knows anymore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:48 PM 0 comments

The Unseen Side Of Subprime Lending 

...while all the talk during the ongoing trainwreck in the US financial sector has been about the impact of subprime loans for home purchases, there are other areas in the business world where somewhat casual lending practices are leading to troubled times for the companies that engaged in such practices. Take, for example, Harley-Davidson...

H-D's problem stems from a combination of interest in getting butts onto the saddles of its iconic machines and a desire to make its financial subsidiary a meaningful component of its profit stream. At first glance the idea of having an in-house banker to - one way or another - capture the profit from loans made to purchase its products makes perfect sense; everybody from the cited blue-chipper Caterpillar to auto companies have been doing the same thing for years (I'm a car-geek gearhead that has purchased an embarrassingly large number of cars over the last thirty years, many of which - including the sporty little Mazda that is the latest addition to my fleet - were financed by an in-house entity). Unfortunately for H-D, some of the folks who wanted to buy their own copy of The Great American Motorcycle (and, to be honest, who amongst us who have ever been a motorcycle owner and rider wouldn't want to own a Hog?) probably weren't actually in position to do so in the rather tenuous economic environment that we've been in for a few years now, and those chickens have started crawling back onto the roost...

There is an upside for Harley-Davidson's financial arm, though:
A bright spot for HDFS is the particularly strong resale market for used Harleys just now, according to recent data from the National Automobile Dealers Assn. That reduces the severity of loan losses if HDFS is forced to repossess motorcycles. "The good thing about Harleys is they don't decline wildly in value," says Barnett, the Texas dealer.

OK, so it's not much, but it's something....
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:47 PM 0 comments

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