That outlier in Colorado is Saguache County…Which appears to be a data entry error, that has been corrected in later versions of the NY Times map tool.
Year: 2008
Blue Eggs and Ham
I’m Matthew Saroff, and I approve this breakfast.
Rat…Ship
House Minority Whip whip Roy Blunt is stepping down from his position at the end of this congress.
My guess is that there is some connection between his stepping down and his son stepping down as Missouri governor.
Election Updates
It’s confirmed Obama wins North Carolina.
Sen. Gordon Smith concedes to Jeff Merkley, +1 Dem Senator.
Kratovil is looking better. They are not through all the votes, but the margin has gone from 900 to 1800 votes.
Things are not looking good for Burner though, with the gap between her and Reichert growing.
Obama Cabinet Update
Bob Rubin does not want to serve as treasury secretary, which I see as a good thing.
The last thing we need is another Wall Street insider handling this.
Rahmbo is in as chief of staff. Rahm Emanuel has accepted Obama’s offer that he be chief of staff.
I hate his politics, but like his partisanship, and the fact that he is a hard ass. As gatekeeper to the resident, I think that he will make it harder for people bleating about bipartisanship to get face time with the president elect.
One development that surprises me is that Barney Frank is strongly pushing for Sheila Bair, currend FDIC chair, to have a role. She did a good job with IndyMac, but she’s a Bushie.
Got to Use the 3d Printer at Work
Well, I got to use the 3d printer for the first time at work.
Nothing major, just some wells for some tubes to sit in to see if we can adapt a device to a different configuration.
It’s king of neat. The machine puts out 2 resins, one is water soluble, and is used to create the initial base on the plate where the other permanent resin, PE I believe, is extruded from the print head in very fine lines.
I’m making something about the size of about a sandwich, and it takes 13 hours to make it.
Unfortunately, the capabilities of a cell phone camera and camcorder do not really capture enough detail to show this as it appears in person.
It’s wicked cool to watch.
Video below:
Economics Update
Jeebus! The Bank of England cut it’s benchmark interest rate 150 basis points (1.5%)…To 3%.
That’s not strong action, that is TEOTWAWKI panic.
The ECB and the Swiss central bank also cut rates, by 50 basis points…The central banks think that we are in end of the world territory.
As further evidence, we have the ECB’s president saying that there may be more rate cuts.
This from an institution that’s only charter is to fight inflation.
Not surprisingly, all these rate cuts had the effect of sending the Dollar and Yen skyrocketing.
Meanwhile, jobless claims dropped a bit, but only through “Jedi Mind Trick” statistics:
The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits fell by 4,000 last week to 481,000, ….
The department revised up its estimate for jobless claims in the prior week to 485,000 from a previously reported 479,000.
So comparing initial estimates, it went up by 2,000, but after the “correction”, it was down by 4000.
In any case, the number sucks, and continuing unemployment claims are the highest that they have been since 1983, when unemployment topped 10%.
It won’t help that retail sales fell to their lowest levels in at least 39 years…..It may be longer, but they only started collecting the statistics in 1969!
Interest rates on interbank lending trending down, but considering all the interest rate cuts, that is pretty unavoidable.
I think that it is more significant that credit card companies were unable to sell bonds at all for the first time since 1993, and when you consider that they charge something north of 20% on carried balances, that is ugly.
BTW, y friends the monoliner bond insurers are back again, with Moody’s cutting Ambac to ‘Baa1’.
It should surprise no one that with massive indications of a deep recession, and the dollar up, oil fell again to $60.77/bbl.
Sanity in European Immigration
It looks like there are increasing voices in the Euro-Parliament suggesting heightened penalties on employers who hire illegals.
Criminalizing the immigrants is not the way to go, and it does not work. Instead, go after the people who hire illegals.
What This Means
This graph, from The Big Picture, means some combination of the following items:
- The economy of the past 18 years has sucked so badly that people have increasingly given up looking up.
- The basic unemployment number has been screwed with by administrations on both sides of the aisle, and significantly understates the unemployment rate.
- That the economy has shifted significantly in the past 2 decades, and high levels of long term unemployment are the norm.
My money is mostly on number 2, though reverse Robin Hood is part of it.
Short term solution is more aid to the long term unemployed. The long term solution is fixing the BLS data, and creating a more just society.
Truth be told, I’m surprised that the divergence did not occur around 1983, when Reagan and His Evil Minions™ screwed with the unemployment numbers with things like counting active duty military as a part of the workforce, to keep the unemployment number below 10.
Check out Daniel Gross in Slate, who argues that the normal unemployment numbers are complete crap.
HooCoodANode*
It appears that the Federal Reserve’s entry into the commercial market is not encouraging private actors to reenter the market.
When no one wants to lend commercial paper, and the US government steps in and lends at below market rates, it tends to drives the private players out.
*Who Could A Knowed
Update on Lieberman
It looks like Reid told him that his committee chairmanship was toast.
Considering the fact that he has slammed the party’s nominee and refused to use his position as head of the Homeland Security committee to pursue legitimate issues against Bush and His Evil Minions&trade, I think that Reid is being too magnanimous.
It goes without saying that Lieberman with investigatory powers will spend his time trying to inflict injury to the Democrats who rejected him in the primary by harassing Obama.
It Now Appears that the McCain Campaign Was Even More Fracked Up Than We Knew
It appears that the McCain and Palin were waging war on one another.
Considering some of the stories that I’ve heard, the war is ongoing.
Time to buy more popcorn.
Ralph Nader Should Be Excluded from Polite Society
And quite honestly, any orgs that remain tied to him should be excluded from offices of political figures…..Here he calls Barack Obama an Uncle Tom on, of course, Fox news.
He may be the only person in Washington, DC more smarmily sanctimonious than Joe Lieberman.
More Circular Firing Squad
Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to McCain for years, got fired a week before election day.
It appears that he was leaking stuff to the press that dissed his fellow campaign members to the apparrent benefit of Palin:
One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading “disinformation” about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.
“He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain’s campaign message,” said one of the aides.
And I thought that Hillary’s campaign team was dysfunctional.
I’d rather have Mark Penn on my side than any of these guys….I can’t fracking believe that I just said that.
Russian Missiles to Kalaningrad
The Russians legitimately see the BMD system in Poland as a threat, and they are taking what they see as appropriate action. (See also here)
This was foreseeable. It’s natural for the Russians to see the system as a direct challenge, particularly since the location of the interceptors and radar are better more suited to protecting Europe from Russia than from Iran, which is the putative reason for the installation in the first place.
It’s also a challenge to Obama, which complicates things, because it makes it harder for him to do the smart thing, which is to relocate the installation further south or cancel it completely.
I’m Just Not Into You That Way, Anymore…
Said the cheerleader to her calculus tutor at the end of the semester.
I think that this is an accurate summary of the meeting between Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman scheduled for tomorrow.
I don’t know if he should be kicked out of the caucus, but damn, he should not be chairman of anything.
Election Updates
Democratic stronghold Multnomah County (Portland) is among the last of the counties to finish up, and now it looks like Merkley has defeated Smith for the Oregon Senate, according to the Oregonian analysis.
In Georgia, it looks like there will be a runoff for the senate. It will be a long shot, but Chambliss is a human stain, and it’s the only election, at least until Ted Stevens gets kicked out of the Senate.
In CO-4, Marilyn Musgrave lost to Betsey Markey which hopefully puts an end to the explosions of bigotry that have eminated from Musgrave in her attempts to protect us from “Te Gay”.
In New York, the state Republican party is in the wilderness for at least a decade. They lost the state senate, and in an increasingly Democratic state, this means that they will be unable to Gerrymander themselves into viability as they have over the past two decades.
Please, redistrict now in New York.
In MD-1 it’s still to close to call, with Frank Kratovil ahead of Fred Flintstone the Antedeluvian Andrew Harris by less than 1000 votes, 160,915 to 160,000, with 25,539 absentee ballots returned so far, 11,371 Dem, 10,924 Rep, and 3,244 ind.
But Kratovil does appear to be in the lead, even if he has not locked it up yet.
Burner-Reichert, WA-08, is still too close to call.
In the Minnesota senate, the margin is around 400 votes, which calls for a mandatory runoff, but of course, Coleman is telling Franken that the right thing to do for the country is to give up….What a weasel.
Wasilla Hillbillies Looting Neiman Marcus from Coast to Coast
That’s got to be the quote of the campaign.
The circular firing squad has begun.
Our Broken Defense Budgets
A paper by the Center for Defense Information, “The Other Meltdown: Little to Show for Huge Defense Budgets.”
Money quote:
Perhaps you need a short review. America’s defense budget is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any point since the end of World War II. However, our Army has fewer combat divisions than at any point in that period, our Navy has fewer combat ships and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft.
Go read.
Why I Read Rich Toscano
Because he takes some complex issues and makes them eqasily understood.
Case in point, credit default swaps, which he likens to highly profitable unregulated flood insurance companies during a decade of drought.
Go read.