The call and response of blogmaking continues --everyone has one and everyone says they're no sweat to have. I figure, why not put my thoughts out there? So here they are. E-mail: justin_slotman at yahoo dot com

 
THE ITALIANS MADE CRAPPY CARS. THEY EVOLVED. THEY BOUGHT CHRYSLER. AND THEY HAVE A PLAN: Fiat looking at GM Europe too. Interesting.
posted by Justin at 7:37 PM

 
HIPSTERS OF THE WORLD UNITE: No, not a Kari Ferrell post (she's still on the lam it looks like, and maybe she'll stay that way now that her 15 minutes of Internet celebrity are up.) It's this probably-was-in-The-Onion-at-some-point-except-it-turned-out-to-be-true nugget: Chinese getting tattoos with nonsensical Roman characters. (Article does not actually say that, but it's close.)
posted by Justin at 3:46 PM

 
SOMETHING THAT'S BEEN NAGGING AT ME ABOUT THE ROXANA SABERI SITUATION: How the heck does one become a dual Iranian/American citizen? Particularly when you're from freaking Fargo? It's not like we and they have anything like normal diplomatic relations.

From what I can gather (answering my own question) Iran says she is a citizen because her father has/had Iranian citizenship. I am curious if she sought Iranian citizenship, or if it was forced upon her for the purposes of locking her up.
posted by Justin at 3:35 PM

 
WHEN YOU'VE LOST LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS: What is going on here? Charles Johnson is finding his internal John Cole?

EDIT: Maybe never mind? And JC never did a day full of updates about people talking about him becoming less crazy.
posted by Justin at 9:25 PM

 
MAKING ME LAUGH ABOUT THE UPCOMING CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL DISASTER: China Becoming a Total Sausage Fest. Just one of the many headlines of the fairly disturbing news that China has 32 million more boys than girls. Million!
posted by Justin at 8:27 PM

 
ONLY GIVING YOU THINGS YOU JOKE ABOUT WITH YOUR FRIENDS INSIDE YOUR LIVING ROOM: DougJ breaks blog kayfabe.

Have I mentioned that the evolution of DougJ from spoof poster to Balloon Juice front pager is one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed on the Internet? No? Because that would be true.
posted by Justin at 12:16 AM

 
THE SECOND TIME, BUT AS FARCE: Thoreau draws our attention to the Obama administration's version of the Hainan Island incident. Really--this one paragraph is all you need to know:

"Because the vessels' intentions were not known, Impeccable sprayed its fire hoses at one of the vessels in order to protect itself," the statement said. "The Chinese crewmembers disrobed to their underwear and continued closing to within 25 feet."

"Cap'n--they're giving us the skivvies!" "Blast--the hosing wasn't enough! Courage, men! Launch the fool moon salute!"
posted by Justin at 11:00 PM

 
THE GEITHNER TIPPING POINT: Yeah. This here is the last straw of the Geithner hate stuff I've been reading lately. It's probably a bit of a stretch--it blames Geithner for mishandling the Asian financial crisis, which leads to East Asia shunning the IMF (which they have little control over or say in) and building up their foreign currency reserves, which directly feeds into the current debt-fueled nightmare. But in concert with the dithering and lack of imagination and all around lack of response months into Great Depression II: Even The Homeless Have Cellphones? There's got to be somebody better, Barry. And someone not a total high finance thrall either (though that's certainly asking for too much. But just someone who might consider putting the national interest first at some point.)

(This cellphone other thing is yards of silly, by the way. Like cellphones are any kind of a wealth marker, or like every destitute Somalian doesn't have a cellphone at this point.)
posted by Justin at 9:13 PM

 
"FUCK THE HAWAIIANS. THEY DIDN'T VOTE FOR US ANYWAY:" I mean I don't watch 30 Rock so I can't enjoy that particular bit of Internet fun about the Jindal response last night. And the ridiculousness of the Republicans continuing to repeat the wasteful spending part of their catechism goes without saying. But picking on volcano monitoring? And putting it in scare quotes, as if the very idea that somebody in the United States of America could possibly have a legit interest in volcanoes was just obviously preposterous? They have nothing left, does the GOP. And if Mount Redoubt blows there'll be less GOPers!

(For the record I watched nothing last night, some of us have to work for a living. Barry needs to ditch the Summers/Geithner bankster cabal he's got working for him.)
posted by Justin at 6:22 PM

 
EMBRACING MY INNER GLENN REYNOLDS: Or why I think I'm becoming a fake libertarian. Two reasons:

1. Most of the posts on Hit & Run about the financial crisis just annoyed the crap out of me, especially anything having to do with the auto bailout. Seriously--in the midst of a global meltdown and after giving bajillions to the people who actually caused the meltdown you're against keeping our manufacturing sector alive? Is "Austrian" Randite for "Hooverite"?

Comments about how much people enjoyed their Toyotas were particularly hard to take. As if the quality of their product was anywhere near the biggest reason the Detroit 2.5 are in trouble. (Or 1.5 as it turned out, Ford obviously put a priority on managing their company over managing the Lions.)

Sometimes I think I am still libertarian, but I think the unit of competition should be the nation-state, not individual companies. I mean do you think Japan or Germany would let their automakers fail? Of course not--they'd get in there and muck around because they know their national prosperity is at stake. And yet it's a big debate in this country. Maybe our nation-state needs more government intervention in business and such to stay competitive with the other nation-states, you know? It certainly works for the rest of the world.

Other time I think the big gaping hole in libertarian economics is there is no conception of finance--that is, there is no conception of how money actually works, I guess because it's a practical, pragmatic field that you can't just yell "GOLD STANDARD!!!" at and explain anything. The only libertarianish thinker (she was in Reason once) I've enjoyed during this whole megadebacle is Yves Smith, who was in the big money business and is absolutely nondogmatic about this stuff. More libertarians need to get into the sausage-making business, I feel like, even if they become less pure by their exposure to the messy way things actually get done.

2. I am completely on board with government intervention to bring down the BCS, like the Utah AG is trying to do right now. The BCS is as clear an example as I can think of of the free market reaching the worst outcome possible. And yet you hear people say "if the government gets involved think of how bad it could get!!!!!!" How could it be worse than what we have right now? We have the worst of all possible worlds right now. It's not really a poll-based system anymore, since the final poll isn't allowed to vote anyone other than whoever wins the BCS Championship as number one. You can still split a championship but only if you're somebody who's on the AP's radar from the beginning, those dudes are not going to say to themselves "you know what, Utah? We were wrong all along" (even though they were wrong all along, of course) and give them half the title. And it definitely isn't a playoff. I remember reading somewhere that the BCS sort-of made sense coming out of the late 90s when it was always clear who #1 and #2 were (not sure if this was true or not, but it's a nice idea.) But now? No sense whatsoever. There is no legitimacy in a 1-2 matchup today, but especially this year.

And yet ESPN has bid to broadcast this system through 2014? Are you serious? Five more years of anticlimax? Of national media peoples pretending anything was settled on the field? Ugh, and ugh again. The people in charge of college football have shown no inclination to change their ways, and they're not going to, even if everybody's (on ESPN) favorite coach, Pete Carroll himself, thinks they're full of it. The conference commissioners are in charge and will be in charge until somebody takes power away from them. The networks and advertisers don't seem like they want the power, even though they have the money. (I've never understood why no one has tried to set up a competing system yet. Fox gets outbid for the BCS? Okay--flash some cash at the non-BCS schools, try to peel off a few BCS programs for added legitimacy--USC can't be happy about Rose Bowl after mindnumbing Rose Bowl--instant Counter-BCS! Or playoffs even.) The government is the only entity capable of rectifying this situation. And antitrust seems a perfect way to do it, as we really do have teams excluded from championships based purely on what conference they play in. But no matter how they do it, they're the only ones who can.

And so my libertarianism gets faker. Next I'll be writing sympathetic portrayals of how THE LEFT!!!! destroyed poor Alberto Gonzales. But I'm not a Republican!

(Sorry no links in the above, you need a blog that updates more than twice a year for that kind of attention to detail.)
posted by Justin at 6:53 PM

 
EPITAPH FOR THE BUSH YEARS, OR THE FINAL REPUBLICAN POOR DECISION: Yglesias:

The House conservatives who sank the bailout didn’t do so because they were listening to loud and angry voices. They sank the plan by accident. They were trying to double-cross the Democrats. First, they wrung lots of concessions out of Democrats at the negotiating table as the price for delivering 80 votes. Then, by not delivering 80 votes and forcing Pelosi to pass the bill as a partisan Democratic bill, they were going to wage a demagogic anti-bailout campaign. But Pelosi refused to be played for a sucker and so the conservative inadvertently sank a bill that, all evidence suggests, they actually wanted to pass. They just wanted to vote “no” on it for short-term political gain.

Getting rolled by Nancy freaking Pelosi is the final indignity for the GOP. If Matt's right with this, I mean.

And of course playing political chicken with financial armageddon in the balance is probably in poor taste. That said, I'm glad the bill died on Monday, since by all accounts it really is a big giveaway that won't solve the fundamental problem--see Yves. Of course Paulson's going back to try and get this particular bill done again, without explaining what the problem is (of course not, then he'd have to come up with a plan that wasn't a giveaway.)

By the way--I've always been curious if hedge funds contribute anything of real value to the economy, or if we'd even notice if they and their gallons of wealth disappeared. I guess we find out tomorrow!
posted by Justin at 7:39 PM