Death Penalty repealed in New Mexico

In The Watchmen, Rorschach becomes a Dirty Harry-like vigilante after stumbling across a child killer who pleads guilty and pleads insanity and asks to be taken in to the authoritites in a mocking tone. No doubt some of the audience will agree with Rorschach's decision to execute the criminal on the spot, but the reality of the death penalty is mistakes are made in its application by fallible humans and they aren't worth it. Perhaps Bill Richardson is trying to gain favor in fighting off corruption charges as George Ryan did in Illinois, but it was the right decision none of the less.

(On the international front, though, Rorschach is right and psychopathic regimes need to be taken down. Unfortunately most won't go down without a fight.)

What we've got here is a failure to communicate

(which is what Obama and Geithner should tell AIG about the bonuses.)

If the Ongoing Clusterfuck (in the economy) had a soundtrack it should include Lily Allen tunes, like her song about schadenfreude, Smile, and new song The Fear.

A Post-Capitalist Future is Possible by Doug Henwood.

The Revenge of Karl Marx by Hitchens.

I caught Obama's point man on the economy (or "political economy"* as Marx, Hitchens and probably Henwood would say) Larry Summers on Charlie Rose and when Rose asked him which economist or thinker is most relevant to understanding the crisis, Summers didn't hesitate to respond with "Keynes."

But Keynesian economics took a hit in the late 1970s when welfare states and relatively strong unions came up against high inflation. Central Banks raised interest rates to unprecedented high level and brought on a crash, which tamed inflation but the Right took advantage and won the political battle. (There was stagflation thought to be caused by Nixon's wage and price controls which were followed by cost-push shocks in commodities and the oil crisis of '73 which was a result of another Arab-Israeli war and OPEC's limiting of supply.)

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*The main political question now is to what extent the administration will take on the banking/financial institution lobby - as former IMFer Simon Johnson among others has been pointing out - and demand "clawbacks" and recompense for the taxpayer. There's also the question of the future regulatory environment.

What do you see?









What do you see?

Lorrie Moore writes about Donald Barthelme.

Podcast about her review.

Moore has a new book coming out in September.









Would be strange to have a book titled "Understanding (Insert Your Name Here)." Mine would be short. He's charming. Funny. Intelligent. Honest. Self-deprecating. Respectful of elders. A Roschachian crank about foreign dictatorships and despots. Not a realist in other words.

Neko Case's new album came in 3rd on the Billboard charts last week, after Taylor Swift and U2. She's also in the New Pornographers.

Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum












West says the school inadequately prepares
students for the black seas of infinity.

Don't make him angry, you wouldn't like him when he's angry.

The Rock/Dwayne Johnson is staring in a new movie, The Race To Witch Mountain, with my favorite 15-year-old actress/celebrity (weird, I know), AnnaSophia Robb. I checked her website again to see if she added anything in support of the movie, and there was a little holiday in my heart because she had. She's noted some magazine interviews she's done and added some photos of her at an Obama rally. Robb also updated her list of favorite movies: Slumdog Millionare, Batman: The Dark Knight, Blood Diamond, Zoolander and Best in Show. Again, great taste. And she has another movie coming out in November with the girl from Little Miss Sunshine.

Too Many Dicks on the Dancefloor*

Looking over my blog links, I noticed there are too many guys and the ratio is way off. So I added Majikthise, who is Canadian also so that makes a twofer as the tactless say. I also added Michael Bérubé who is blogging again and is very funny, especially about the raging stupidity and hubris in politics. Yes he plays hockey. Yes his name looks suspiciously French. No he's not Canadian.** I've also added A Fistful of Euros which provides a European perspective on the Ongoing Clusterfuck*** in the financial markets and wider economy.

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* Doesn't one of the dancers in the video look like a Village Person, specifically Randy the Cowboy?
** Actually, yes he is of French-Canadian ancestry, though. (Added this note after I was corrected in the comments. Reminds me of what Alexander Cockburn once said about the corrections section newspapers tuck away on page 2 or 3, admitting mistakes in previous edtions. The real purpose is to convince the reader everything else in the paper is true.
*** I believe Tom Tomorrow coined this. William Safire recently had a contest in his Language column to name the current situation in the economy and this would be my nomination.

Cocooning
(or Blast from the Past/Back to the Future)

The Vatican and Pope Benedict are cocooning hard these day, but I'd like to think a group of wronged people have hired a 21st Century Robin Hood team, like the one from the cable show Leverage, to subvert "Popery"* from within.

First you had the Pope rehabilitating extreme right wing bishops and in some cases Holocaust-deniers. They backpedaled after an uproar but the damage was done.

Also, the church is bringing back the sale of indulgences which is a good way to raise money, but also a potentially alienating move.

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*Popery and Papist were slurs common in the 18th and 19th centuries. JFK's election symbolized a more tolerant attitude in the 20th. Who might have hired possible agent provocateurs who are advising Benedict? Could be disgruntled scientists, feminists, gay rights advocates or perhaps some men who were molested in their youth by priests have funneled their legal reward money back into attacking the church.

Trailer and video from Whit Stillman's Barcelona.

Strange to be cheering on White House economists, but I really do hope these people are successful. Most people admit they don't know what will happen, which on one hand is unnerving, but on another it means they will be willing to try different approaches. It's also good to hear they understand speed is of the essence. Reagan and Clinton didn't fully enact their big economic packages until August. Obama and his propellerheads got it done in a month. From the New York Times:

Sometimes, during the 30-minute briefings that Mr. Summers delivers in the Oval Office nearly every day, Mr. Obama addresses him as Professor, as in, "What do you think, Professor Summers?" Sometimes, as he did in the Roosevelt Room one recent afternoon, Mr. Obama tweaks him and his fellow policy wonks, dubbing them "the propeller-heads."

This, senior White House officials say, is the president’s way of ribbing Mr. Summers, who is back in Washington - he served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton - in the role of what his new boss calls a "thought leader."


...
"The irony is that Summers and Geithner wrote the textbook on how to manage these crises, and they lectured countries all over the world on what to do," said Adam S. Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, lamenting that they did not "follow through with their own prescriptions."

Mr. Summers dismissed the criticism, maintaining that the bailout plan, for which he said Mr. Geithner would announce details in due time, was "tough and ambitious."

In the meantime, Mr. Obama’s chief propeller-head is on to other matters, like housing and huddling in the Roosevelt Room to plan the budget with the president, as he did on Friday, when Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director, passed out propeller-head hats.

Ian McEwan writes about John Updike.

What I like about Obama going around the country promoting the Stimulus bill is that it shows he's not afraid. Here's the very funny Dave Chappelle joking about being the first black President.

Fareed Zakaria writes about our neighbor to the north Canada:

Guess which country, alone in the industrialized world, has not faced a single bank failure, calls for bailouts or government intervention in the financial or mortgage sectors. Yup, it's Canada. In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada's banking system the healthiest in the world. America's ranked 40th, Britain's 44th.

We should probably follow their example regarding how they set up their healthy banking system and while we're at it take a look at their health care system.

I vote we skip right to the Swedish Model

Brad DeLong has some notes on the Geithner Financial Rescue Plan:

...

7. The net effect might be that fears that banks are insolvent or will become illiquid will ebb.

8. And the financial crisis and the Bush depression will come to an end.

9. But Geithner said this is not the end--that if the TARP money is expended and if banks still fail their stress tests, then what...

10. This plan does not foreclose a resort to the Swedish model, it is instead an attempt to use the TARP money to escape the necessity for adopting the Swedish model.

Jacob Sullum writes about the next Drug Czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske.

Executives from the financial institutions who received funds from the $700 billion banking bailout faced their critics on the House Financial Services Committee yesterday in Washington. The chief executives at the hearing were: Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America, Robert P. Kelly of Bank of New York Mellon, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley, Ronald E. Logue of State Street, and John G. Stumpf of Wells Fargo - CEOs from the too-big-to-fail banks essentially.

Instead of facing a firestorm, as the regulators at the SEC recently did, they got a "slow burn." One wonders if this happened because the banks are about to endure a "stress test" or because the critics have major employers in their districts who are on the hook to these banks. Maybe they even get campaign contributions from employees of these banks. Even though they were part of the problem, no doubt these CEOs will have to be part of the solution, so perhaps the critics were "looking foward" as Obama would say. Probably it's all of the above.

Robert Reich writes about perp walks at Congress at his blog:

When in 2005 Yahoo surrendered to Chinese authorities the names of Chinese dissidents who had used Yahoo email, and Google created for the Chinese a censored version of its search engine (removing such incendiary wordsa s "human rights" and "democracy," many Americans were outraged. Executives of both companies were summoned to appear before the House Subcommittee on Human Rights. Christopher Smith [(R-NJ)], its chairman, accused Yahoo of entering into a "sickening collaboration." He ridiculed the firm’s avowed justification for revealing the names of dissenters, saying if Anne Frank had put her diaries on email and Nazi authorities wanted to trace her down, Yahoo might have complied if Yahoo’s email system had exposed Nazi Germany to American culture. The late Tom Lantos, a leading Democrat on the committee and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, asked the assembled executives "are you ashamed? Yes or no?" He called their behavior a "disgrace" and asked how they could sleep at night. James Leach, a Republican from Iowa, accused Google of serving as "a functionary of the Chinese government," adding that "if we want to learn how to censor, we’ll go to you." Smith subsequently introduced a bill to prevent American companies from, among other things, cooperating with censorship, but no one expected it to pass, and neither Smith nor any other member of congress pushed for it.

Perp walks like these may serve a useful public function. Rituals of public shaming are not inconsequential. But they're no substitute for laws and penalties that prevent the conduct in question from recurring.

You have to wonder if Yahoo and Google helped John Poindexter with his - now defunct - Total Information Awareness Program. Hopefully Obama and the new Congress will get tough with laws and penaltites.

Another intelligent guy I would include in my economic crisis rogues gallery along with Robert Samuelson is the blogger Mickey Kaus. He's on a permanent jihad against things like unions, welfare, immigration reform - you know, stuff that would help out the little people suffering during a global economic downturn.