Martin Wolf's History lesson on Federal Debts

Deficits never bother Republicans when they are the ones creating them by foolishly ridding themselves of a tax base and building the nation’s stockpile of weapons, war toys, and defense lobbyists. Give us one bad economy where we actually need to put deficit spending into practice and suddenly every one gets holier than thou. Good example is my whacked governor, Bobby Jindal, who upon seeing a huge government surplus the year he was elected wanted to get rid of income taxes altogether. Some one had to explain that the surpluses were coming from the Federal Government trying to give the state money to rebuild after three devastating hurricanes in about 3 years and they weren’t going to last.  A year later, we’re in budget troubles and he wants to cut the state’s universities because we’re producing 10,000 too many 4 year college graduates a year.  Only a really warped mind could come up with either of those conclusions.  How about the government trying some policy to create good jobs?  The result is no more surplus graduates and incomes and spending that can be taxed.  No Republican or Democratic these days sits in an economics class long enough to learn the difference between automatic and discretionary fiscal policy.  It seems every one in our government has it backasswards these days.  This includes President Hopey Changey who better sit down and refresh whatever he knows on fiscal policy and business cycles because his statements to Fox news while in China on the deficit and a double dip recession were so misinformed as to make him look completely ignorant on economics.

So, Martin Wolf at FT–hardly the bastion of socialist thought in the UK--has added his voice today to the number of economists saying yes, the deficit is huge, but wait a minute not so fast to look at it right now.  The time to take care of deficits and debts is when the economy is good.  Unfortunately, that’s usually when the last thing on a pol’s mind is paying back what he borrowed during the last economic downturn.  Wolf’s advice is tersely summed up in the headline: Give us fiscal austerity, but not quite yet.  This is the same thing that a bunch of us dismal scientists have been saying all year.

So, let’s look at the nifty historical graph–always the most reliable thing you get from Wolf is the nifty graphs–to see how this really isn’t a big deal compared to where we or the UK has been in the past.

… the rise in the debt ratio is comparable to that in big wars – smaller than the second world war, but larger than in the civil war and the first world war. But this is not the first time the US has had a huge increase in its debt ratio in peacetime. The first occasion was under the Republicans between 1981 and 1992. That was when they discovered supply-side economics.

While the increase in the debt ratio is very large in both countries, the levels expected to be reached by 2014 are not historically exceptional, particularly for the UK, where the ratio of public sector net debt to GDP has been close to 250 per cent twice. For the US, debt levels seem likely to match the previous record. Yet, those past record levels did not create insuperable problems. In the 19th century, both countries grew out of their debt satisfactorily, with price stability. In the second half of the 20th century, they did so again, though inflation then helped.

This is not surprising. Assume that the real rate of interest is 2.5 per cent. Then the servicing costs, in real terms, of a debt burden of 100 per cent of GDP is just 2.5 per cent of GDP – almost a bagatelle. Assume, too, that the trend rate of growth equals the real interest rate (a not unreasonable assumption). Then the requirement for debt stability is a balanced primary budget (that is, before interest payments). Again, this is hardly crippling.

So what is the problem? It is that people may lose confidence that the governments will ultimately bring deficits under control. There are at least two reasons for such doubt. First, wars have a natural ending, while deficits in peacetime do not. Second, cutting deficits at the end of wars is easy, while cutting peacetime deficits is hard: every pound or dollar comes with a lobby group attached.

Paul Krugman dove into the Fed’s forecasts today and basically found no reason to stop either stimulatory fiscal or monetary policy.  My students are taking a test this week on the Taylor Rule which is the basis for monetary policy decisions in most country’s these days, including the U.S.  The analysis shows that this is absolutely no time to put any kind of break on the economy because we WILL double dip.  The analysis shows an extremely show creep without any more stimulus and just basically keep things relaxed.  If we put the fiscal brakes on now, things will only get worse.

The latest Fed minutes, together with the forecast, are out. What do they tell us?

Well, the Fed expects unemployment to come down only very gradually — over 9 percent at the end of 2010, over 8 percent at the end of 2011, around 7 percent at the end of 2012. Inflation, meanwhile is expected to remain consistently below the Fed’s target.

Which raises the question, why is anyone talking about an “exit strategy”? On the Fed’s own forecasts, the economy will remain seriously depressed three years from now.

If we apply the Rudebusch version of the Taylor rule to the mean Fed forecasts, I get the following for what the Fed funds rate should be:

End 2009: -6.3%
End 2010: -5.4%
End 2011: -3.3%
End 2012: -0.6%

Yep: three years from now, we’re still in a liquidity trap, with no reason to raise rates above zero and a continuing need for quantitative easing and fiscal expansion.

As far as I can tell, what’s going on in monetary policy debate is a policy in search of a justification. Many central bankers just hate, absolutely hate, being in the position of being so accommodating; yet economic analysis offers no justification for tightening. So they’re inventing new policy doctrines on the fly to justify doing what they want to do.

It’s a familiar story: see Japan’s premature exit from the ZIRP in 2000, and also see 1937 — which was a monetary as well as fiscal bungle.

Both Wolf and Krugman are afraid of premature withdrawals of monetary (btw, ZIRP stands for Zero Interest Rate Program where interest rates are kept near the zero bound)and fiscal (deficit spending) stimulus because of the incredible harping  of the economically ignorant.  Again, this includes President Hopey-Changey.  If interest rates are kept near the zero boundary through the end of 2012, the cost of carrying the debt will stay low in terms of interest payments.   This appears to be what the Fed will do.  In this case, it is much wiser to look towards job creation and let automatic fiscal policy kick in with increased tax revenues that way.  Basically, that means, more jobs, less people on the government safety net programs and more people paying sales and income taxes.  Speed up job creation, speed up recovery, speed up debt pay-off.  Once the economy fully recovers and the tax receipts begin to poor in as well as the expenditures start decreasing on things like SCHIP and unemployment insurance, THEN hold their feet to the fire and tell them to pay the debt off.  Let’s focus on first things first.  Take care of Unemployment, THEN worry about the Federal Debt and Deficits.

Like Keynes taught, you run deficits during recessions, you run surpluses during booms, and you stay neutral with a balanced budget during times when you’re close to Full Employment Equilibrium. It’s really not that difficult to understand.  My freshman students get this.  Why can’t our politicians and pundits?

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

- Rudyard Kipling

President Obama said Tuesday that he was determined to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, and his aides signaled to allies that he would send as many as 25,000 to 30,000 additional American troops there even as they cautioned that the final number remained in flux.

(“Hillary voted for the AUMF! Obama opposed the war!”)

More:

In declaring Tuesday that he would “finish the job” in Afghanistan, President Obama used a phrase clearly meant to imply that even as he deploys an additional 30,000 or so troops, he has finally figured out how to bring the eight-year-long conflict to an end.

What a fucking maroon. Obama doesn’t have the first clue how to bring the war to an end. If he did he would declare victory and bring our troops home.

(“Fairy tale is racist!”)

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

Matt Taibbi

1) The political media has always taken it upon itself to make decisions about who is and who is not qualified to be taken seriously as candidates for higher office. Without even talking about whether they do this more or less to Republicans or Democrats, I can testify that I witnessed this phenomenon over and over again in the primary battles within the Democratic Party. It has always been true that the press corps has drawn upon internalized professional biases, high-school-style groupthink and the urging of insider wonks to separate candidates into “serious” and “unserious” groups before the shots even start to be fired.

[...]

2) When that does happen, when the press corps decides to abandon all restraint and go for the head shot, it usually tells us a lot more about the reporters’ bosses and what they’re thinking than it does about the reporters themselves. Your average political reporter is a spineless dweeb who went to all the best schools and made it to that privileged seat inside the campaign-trail ropeline by being keenly sensitive to the editorial wishes of his social and professional superiors.

[...]

The tone for all this behavior is always set somewhere way up the corporate totem pole, and it always reflects some dreary combination of simple business considerations (i.e. what’s the best story and sells the most ads) and internalized political calculus (i.e. who is a “legitimate” candidate and who is an “insurgent” or a “second-tier” hopeful). It’s not that the reporters are making this judgment themselves, it’s that they have to listen to what the apparatus Up There is saying all day long — not just their bosses but the think-tank talking heads they interview for comments, the party insiders who buy them beers at night, the pollsters and so on.

And when all these people start getting in their ears about this or that guy doesn’t have “winnability,” or doesn’t have enough money to run, or has negatives that are insurmountable, all that thinking inevitably bleeds into the coverage. It’s not that the reporters are “biased.” They just don’t have the stones, for the most part, to ignore all the verbal and non-verbal cues they get from authority figures about who is “legitimate” and who isn’t.

[...]

That said, even back at the very beginning of the campaign, before the signal came down that it was okay to start giving Obama big sloppy blowjobs on the air, when reporters were all slamming the one-term Illinois Senator for being a “lightweight” prone to “rookie mistakes” (those among us whose version of recent history imagines Obama being handed the 2008 election by the campaign press seem always to forget that part, but go back and look — the “Hillary is the presumptive frontrunner” period lasted a solid nine or ten months), Obama’s press handlers observed the prime directive. They did not interfere with the reporters’ civilization. There was a “let the chips fall where they may” attitude that helped out a lot when the Beltway consensus finally shifted and the money started pouring in behind the candidate; there was no bad blood to overcome when the press had to change its mind again and embrace an “Obama is now the presumptive frontrunner/We are now at war with Oceania” posture.

(emphasis added)

Matt is being a little disingenuous. He writes for Rolling Stone magazine, and they were treating Obama like a top-tier candidate way back in February 2007, when he barely had two years in the US Senate.  But Matt’s post still begs the question – who sent the signal telling reporters to treat Obama as a contender?

In a sane and rational world Obama would never have been considered a viable candidate.  He was certainly a rising star and a possible Vice-Presidential candidate, but considering his lack of experience and accomplishment, he should never have been taken seriously as the Presidential nominee.  The media made him a contender – so who decided that the media should do so?

Matt also ignores the fact that Obama raised $99 million in 2007 – more than all the other Democratic candidates except Hillary raised combined.  He raised that in approximately equal amounts in each quarter throughout the year, even though he was running a distant third behind Hillary and Edwards until late in the year.  Where did that money come from?

(Hint: It wasn’t from college kids sending in their lunch money.)

Matt Taibbi obviously knows more than he is telling.  The secrets he’s keeping would reveal how the leaders of the Democratic party and the media conspired to ignore the voters and make Obama the nominee.

The same people who selected Obama are trying to destroy Sarah Palin.  Who are they, and why are they doing these things?

Whose democracy is it anyway?

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

Good Morning Conflucians!

I’m starting the day off by sleeping in late because yesterday was my only day of work this week.  The kids are both heading off to spend thanksgiving elsewhere so I’ll have  a nice quiet week to continue my research agenda.  What’s on your menu today?

Our Nation Politic:

McClatchy says that Obama will send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he’s called “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.

Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said.

The U.S. officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly and because, one official said, the White House is incensed by leaks on its Afghanistan policy that didn’t originate in the White House.

CNN reports a poll that shows the country divided over the situation.  The folks that seem squarely behind the move are the Republicans.  Does that surprise you?

Half of the people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey say they’d support such adecision, with 49 percent opposed.

But support for a troop buildup of that size is greater than the 45 percent of the public who support the war in Afghanistan. The survey indicates that 52 percent oppose the war.

“The war is unpopular and previous polls have shown that Americans oppose sending more troops in the abstract,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “But it may be a different story when Americans are confronted with an actual decision, by the Commander-in-chief, on a military matter. Previous presidents have seen a ‘rally effect’ – at least temporarily – when they have made command decisions like this one.”

The poll’s Tuesday morning release comes just hours after Obama met Monday night with his national security team on Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. This was the ninth meeting of the president’s war council to consider whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, as requested by the U.S. commander on the ground there.

More indepth information on this is available at WaPo.

Lieberman continues to present problems on the Health Care bill. He’ll refuse to vote for any thing with a public option.  This is from the WSJ.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, speaking in that trademark sonorous baritone, utters a simple statement that translates into real trouble for Democratic leaders: “I’m going to be stubborn on this.”

Stubborn, he means, in opposing any health-care overhaul that includes a “public option,” or government-run health-insurance plan, as the current bill does. His opposition is strong enough that Mr. Lieberman says he won’t vote to let a bill come to a final vote if a public option is included.

The Economy:

The WSJ reports that One in FOUR borrowers is Underwater.  That is they owe more on their house than it’s worth.  Wealth is one thing that will boost spending and lack of it, well, let’s just say that’s another reason it will still be a while before our economy picks back up.

These so-called underwater mortgages pose a roadblock to a housing recovery because the properties are more likely to fall into bank foreclosure and get dumped into an already saturated market. Economists from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. said Monday they didn’t expect U.S. home prices to hit bottom until early 2011, citing the prospect of oversupply.

Home prices have fallen so far that 5.3 million U.S. households are tied to mortgages that are at least 20% higher than their home’s value, the First American report said. More than 520,000 of these borrowers have received a notice of default, according to First American.

Most U.S. homeowners still have some equity, and nearly 24 million owner-occupied homes don’t have any mortgage, according to the Census Bureau.

It seems that fundamental data has finally awakened Wall Street.  MarketWatch says Financial worries rattle major indexes at the open.

U.S. stocks opened lower Tuesday, led by the energy and financial sectors as crude-oil futures fell and worries about the financial sector increased after China’s banking regulator warned the nation’s lenders to strictly comply with capital requirements or face sanctions.

Most eye-opening was the big revision of the third quarter GDP Data.

Third-quarter GDP was revised lower, to 2.8% from the 3.5% gain originally estimated, although the revision was in line with forecasts. It showed overall consumer spending rose a quarterly 2.9% in the third quarter and contributed 2.1 percentage points to GDP at annual rates, smaller than prior estimates. More about the third-quarter GDP revision.

Culture Shock and Schlock:

Lou Dobbs may be running for President. This is from Politico.

Asked if he might make a run at the White House in 2012, Dobbs answered flatly: “Yes is the answer.”

“I’m going to be talking some more with some folks who want me to listen in the next few weeks,” Dobbs told Thompson. “Right now I’m fortunate to have a number of wonderful options.”

Dobbs’s political future, however, remains shrouded in question marks. He has left open a variety of paths to public office—in addition to toying with a presidential campaign, Dobbs hasn’t ruled out a bid for Senate in 2012 in New Jersey—and also left his party affiliation a mystery.

Mathew Dowd is still obsessed with Sarah Palin.  I still can’t believe the number of people she either incites to an apoplectic frenzy of hate or love.

Polls show that Palin’s favorability numbers are a mirror image of those of Obama. She is respected and loved by the Republican base, while Democrats despise her. Granted, independent voters have significant reservations about her capability to be president, and this would be a hurdle in the general election. But to win the Republican nomination, Palin needs only to get enough support from the base to win early key states. Already, in nearly every poll today, she has a level of support that makes her a viable primary candidate. Just look at the crowds and the buzz her book tour is drawing.

What’s on your reading list this morning?

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

I’ve always been interested in the moral disconnect that frequently comes when huge companies owned by numerous, faceless stockholders hire CEOs  to tend their stakes.  It’s a bit like thinking the way I did when I was a kid watching farmers bring their livestock to the Pig Palace in Omaha.  I thought they were going to some marvelous Pig Ball because the farmer loved them.  My dad told me they go in as pigs and come out as sausages.  I went there as youngster on a school field trip and I’ve never eaten a hot dog since.  I feel somewhat the same about buying stock in huge multinationals at times.

We’ve spoken here about Agency problems. They are at the heart of the field of Corporate Governance.  If you’re not going to run a company yourself, but entrust it to others, you better find a way to keep track of your managers.  They frequently take you to the Pig Palace.

The connection between executive malfeasance and executive pay is one of the few areas in my corporate finance field that really fascinates me.  It’s because the stories that emerge really show the underbelly of business and it’s probably schadenfreude on my part more than anything.  However, just when I think I’ve seen the worst of it, another example comes from yet another study.  This time Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard landed a big one and a timely one.  The study even wound up in executive summary format in today’s NYT. It seems there’s never a lack of meat for the sausage maker.

There’s been little debate on how badly the CEOs of failed financial industry giants like Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers leveraged their company’s portfolios into bankruptcy.  It’s pretty obvious they screwed up big time. Most folks assumed–and it appears wrongly–that since many executives receive compensation in company stock and these stocks obviously are now worthless, that the executives of the company basically took it on the chin.  Well, sit down, because this will make you irate.  The headline that tells all reads “Executives Kept Wealth as Firms Failed, Study Says”. The author, Louise Story, points out that our belief that the CEOs went down with their ships is ‘urban myth’.  They may have tanked the company, the stock, and to a large degree the economy and financial markets of the world, but they hardly walked away empty-handed.

Though the chiefs at both investment banks lost more than $900 million in their stock holdings, the professors argue that it is important to also consider all the riches the bankers took off the table in the years preceding the crisis.

At Lehman, the top five executives received cash bonuses and proceeds from stock sales totaling $1 billion between 2000 and 2008, and at Bear, the top five received more than $1.4 billion, according to the study, which was released on Sunday night on the Web site of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School.

The payouts came in the form of cash bonuses as well as thousands of shares of stock that the executives sold as the share prices of their companies soared. Most of the executives sold far more shares during that period than the number they held when their companies hit bottom.

“There’s no question they would have done massively better had their firms not collapsed,” said Lucian Bebchuk, one of the study’s authors. “But the wealth of those top executives was hardly wiped out. The idea that they were devastated financially has kind of colored the picture people have about what payoffs they were facing.”

Well, isn’t that special?  Please, go read the working paper over at the Harvard website. Then come back over here and let’s discuss why the Europeans are acting swiftly on the excessive executive compensation these jokers receive, while we have a pay czar that is doing practically nothing while congress does absolutely nothing.  You can also read Business Week and see some of the major issues that we just can’t seem to deal with in this country and find out that they argue that the compensation is just about right.

Of course in my experience, those overpaid executives are basically the same folks that read Business Week so consider the source.  But the story does address the four big market imperfections then talk about what is being done.  The House version of the bill is called Say On Pay and is up for passage by the end of the year and implementation by 2011.  And of course, executives hate it.

… the soon-to-be-mandated annual advisory vote on executive compensation, referred to as “Say-on-Pay.” The Corporate & Financial Institution Compensation Fairness bill (which includes Say-on-Pay), passed in the House and will be considered by the Senate soon. Passage is expected by the end of 2009 and full implementation in time for the spring, 2011, proxy season. Say-on-Pay is designed to increase the dialogue between shareholders and boards on executive compensation.

The House Bill that covers “Say-on-Pay” also includes proposals to tighten the standards for serving on a board compensation committee and would put compensation committee members under essentially the same requirements that apply to audit committee members under Sarbanes-Oxley. Companies would also be required to provide funds to allow compensation committees to retain independent advisors and legal counsel.

However, potentially much more significant are proxy voting reforms, which are part of the same proposed legislation. These reforms would make it easier for dissident investors to nominate their own director candidates, require annual elections by majority vote, and enact other changes to make shareholder voting more representative. In terms of executive compensation, the significance is in giving real teeth to the shareholder-advisory votes. If boards don’t take the shareholders’ advice as reflected in the “Say-on-Pay” vote, there is a much greater chance they could be voted out in subsequent years.

The problem in the past has been that the board compensation committee is frequently made up of friends of management.  They are very rarely made up of any one hostile to the CEO.  I’m not betting that even if they tighten the standards, they manage to tighten them enough to get at least a sixth degree of separation between executives and their committees.   The correct word here is cronyism and nothing they’ve done in the past seems to get rid of it.  So this is the deal, the U.S. version of the bill puts the deal squarely back on stockholders, the compensation committee, and executives, yet again. In other words, if they don’t like the golden parachutes or whatever, the process to remove them is tighter but it’s still basically the same process.

What is Europe doing?

Well, for one their suggesting laws that control how the boards get paid as well as how they get appointed.

Following several recent high-profile cases and mounting evidence that executive pay structures need to be improved, the Commission’s new Recommendation on the structure of directors’ remuneration and on the process of design and operation of the remuneration policy for directors in listed companies sets out a series of new principles complementing the existing Recommendations. There is widespread consensus that remuneration policy should be linked to long-term results and should not reward failure. This is in line with the ECOFIN Council’s conclusions of 2 December 2008, which invited the Commission “to update its Recommendation so as to promote a more effective control by shareholders, and encourage a stronger link between pay and performance, including on leaving pay (“golden parachutes”)”.

This means that the directors don’t just get to merrily collect their fees without performing correctly also.  Will this decrease the cronyism problem?  I doubt it but maybe they did hold Pig Balls at the Pig Palace and I just never saw them.  (Undoubtedly some one was holding lots of pig balls at the Pig Palace, just not the kind I envisioned as a child.)

Bebchuck as well as the Europeans recommend the following.

Mr. Bebchuk has been advising the Treasury Department on compensation at bailed-out companies. He advocates locking up stock compensation for longer periods as well as pay clawback provisions for years later.

It’ll be interesting to see if the approaches merge as they both make their way through their respective political bodies.  Of course, we all know which of the respective political bodies rely heavily on corporate donations for their campaigns, now, don’t we?

Well, I found this really interesting investment site that gave some advice to shareholders on what to watch for that I think is good advice in the meantime…

and yes, we’re back to the company’s directors again.  The folks that are really supposed to watching what the CEO is doing for the little guys.

First, how much stock do the company’s directors own? In a big long study I took part in several years ago, we scoured company’s proxy statements and examined how a bunch of so-called “good” corporate governance factors were actually linked to longer-term stock returns. Almost all of them (such as whether there was a split CEO and chairman, or if the board had a number of “independent” directors or not) had no correlation with stock price increases. However, we found one variable that had a whopping link: whether a company had a lot of directors who had dug into their own pockets and actually bought stock in the company. This is different from a case in which stock ownership in the company was only due to stock grants or stock options.

Then there’s this one:

The second characteristic I like to look at is the total compensation the CEO and his/her management team take home. Is it significantly above other companies in that industry, even though the stock returns between the companies over time are not different? If so, that’s a big red flag. Why does this management team (and the board members who approve their pay packages) think they’re worth so much more than their peers, with no commensurate better historical track record?

As part of total comp, you should also look out for extreme executive perks that have been thrown in to supplement an executive’s already high salary. I mentioned recently a Las Vegas Sands (LVS) senior vice president, Rob Goldstein, who got the company to pay $364,000 to remodel his home and never had to pay it back. Mark Hurd and his senior management team at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) saw their total compensation double last year, after they imposed 10% to 15% pay cuts across the organization. The HP execs also get to spend hundreds of thousands of shareholders’ dollars jaunting around the country on the HP corporate jets for personal use, with hotels and meals also covered for personal use.

Yup, there’s those perks again.  Now, go back into the bills and see if you see anything about controlling those.  My bottom line?  It’ll probably amount to yet another symbolic stab at a problem that’s not going away any time soon.  I prefer stocks where a lot of the company’s founders are still on the boards and where most of them have their names closely associated with the products.

digg!!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

It’s almost here.  The “I’ll eat so much that I’ll probably explode” day also known as Thanksgiving.  With all of the family traditions out there in Conflucian-land, I thought it might be fun to share your traditions, menus, and recipe ideas.  Maybe we can add a little something different to the table this year.

So, what’s going to be in YOUR Thanksgiving feast?  Do you have any special traditions? How about “secret” recipes?  Any unique twists on traditional favorites?  I’d love to hear all about them!

And this is also an OPEN THREAD!

Good Morning Conflucians! It’s been a lost weekend for me. I don’t know if I have the flu or just a bad cold, but I’m really out of it. I’ve been checking in at TC to read comments, but haven’t had the energy to get involved in the discussions. I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next couple of school days; thank goodness I have a five-day weekend coming up!

Anyway, I’m going to share a few stories with you and then open this thread for you to post what you’re reading this morning.

Now this is a really strange story. Am I actually awake and reading this?

Daily Mail: Rom Houben: Patient trapped in a 23-year ‘coma’ was conscious all along

A car crash victim diagnosed as being in a coma for the past 23 years has been conscious the whole time.

Rom Houben was paralysed but had no way of letting doctors know that he could hear every word they were saying.

‘I dreamed myself away,’ said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.

He added: ‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.’

Doctors used a range of coma tests before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.
But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

As for the zombie health care reform health insurance rescue bill, Democratic Senators are already announcing they will gladly give away the rest of the store:

Senate Dems suggest they’re open to altering health care bill

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat, acknowledged he was open to changing the bill’s controversial government-run public health insurance option favored by the left.

“We are open because we want to pass the bill,” Durbin told the NBC program “Meet the Press.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, summed up the situation to CNN’s “State of the Union” program: “Listen, in the end, this is going to be a compromise. It’s not going to be a perfect bill, but it’s going to be a very important starting point.”

If this is the best they can do with a Democratic supermajority, I can’t imagine what it would take to make any real improvements to this joke of a bill. I guess surrender is the latest “health care reform” talking point, because the Washington Post has a similar story.

Public option at center of debate: Reid must find compromise to pass health-care bill

Democrats had little time to savor their weekend Senate health-care victory, as two of the lawmakers who voted to move the debate forward Saturday night indicated Sunday that they will not vote to pass the package if it includes a government-run insurance program.

One member of the Democratic caucus, independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), reiterated Sunday that he will oppose any bill that contains a public option. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he called such a government-run plan “radical.”

“We have a health-care system that has real troubles, but we have an economic system that is in real crisis,” Lieberman said. “And I don’t want to fix the problems in our health-care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis.”

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), another centrist who supported the move to continue debate but has made it clear he has many objections to the legislation as currently written, restated his opposition to a public plan. “I don’t want a big-government, Washington-run operation that undermines the private insurance that 200 million Americans now have,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Moderate Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) also have deep misgivings about the Senate language — a public option with a state opt-out clause — and have expressed varying degrees of unhappiness about other approaches under consideration.

{{Sigh…. }}

This sounds really ominous:

The New York Times: Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Politico: Forecast for Dem primaries: Ugly

The most closely watched Senate primary is in Pennsylvania, where Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak are slugging it out in unusually personal terms.

Specter has cast Sestak as ineffective and opportunistic, attacking him for his failure to register to vote in Pennsylvania until shortly before launching his 2006 congressional campaign and labeling the two-term congressman as “No Show Joe” — a reference to the House votes Sestak has missed while pursuing the Senate nomination.

Not to be outdone, Sestak has assailed the party-switching incumbent’s character, referring to Specter as a “flight risk” for Democrats and reminding the party rank and file of Specter’s decades-long career as a Republican. Last month, Sestak launched a website dedicated to “The Real Arlen Specter,” featuring quotes Specter would rather forget and past tributes to the five-term incumbent from a cast of GOP heavies including President George W. Bush, Sen. Rick Santorum, Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush adviser Karl Rove.

Arlen Specter really isn’t a Democrat, you know….

This story is horrendous.

Story of an American Detained Overseas

Last month, an American citizen who spent over a year imprisoned in the Middle East was quietly freed by his captors in the United Arab Emirates. That man, Naji Hamdan, is now reunited with his family in Beruit, Lebanon. In his first broadcast interview since being freed, Hamdan spoke to me about his ordeal.

Hamdan is a 43-year-old Lebanese-American who spent 20 years living in southern California. Until three weeks ago, he was jailed by the UAE in a terrorism case still shrouded in mystery.

Hamdan spent 14 months behind bars in what he and his attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union call “proxy detention,” suggesting that Hamdan was detained by the UAE at the request of the United States.

And did you know there was a radiation leak at Three Mile Island over the weekend? Phew! Deja vu or what?

OK, I’m out of steam. Please post your links in the comments and have a marvelous Monday!

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

Behavioral Economics and Finance academics still have a difficult time getting respect even though J.M. Keynes introduced the idea of “animal spirits” back in 1936. Pure, rational models of finance and economics don’t always do well explaining things like momentum in stock prices or another phenomenon we call the equity home bias puzzle.  I always likened it to the majority of people being basically herd types that tend to follow whatever leader they can summon.  They can feel very loyal to those herds or tribes too.

There’s a few lone wolves out there, but not many.

This is the definition postulated by Keynes.

“Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits – a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”

So that hopefully gives you enough to read an article in today’s NYT written by one of the great minds of Behavioral Economics, Robert J. Shiller.  Even the title is interesting.  It’s called “What if a Recovery Is All in Your Head?” and it speaks to the psychological idea of self-fulfilling promises.  Not every one feels comfortable with those kinds of things in the economics discipline.  If you go read Mark Thoma–of Economist’s View–you’ll hear the kinds of doubts most often expressed.

I find that I have a knee-jerk, negative reaction to explanations based upon mass psychology, sentiment, story-telling, and the like. I have to consciously force myself not to dismiss them. I’m not sure why that is, though it probably has something to do with a feeling that such explanations aren’t scientific, and hence have no place in serious academic investigations. That is, prior to the crisis I thought that the real economy drove sentiment, and not the other way around. Sentiment could definitely provide a feedback loop that strengthens negative or positive economic shocks, but psychology was not the prime mover. Thus, sentiment changes that did not have evidence to support them would quickly die out before having much, if any effect.

If I stayed with the academic journals forever, I’d have to agree with this.  However, I’ve yet to miss a crash in the 1980s or 1990s just by relying on this wondering feeling in my stomach which starts ”the fundamentals are still out of whack, what are these guys trading on?”  I have that question now and still am expecting some kind of market correction.  I’ve just watched the market froth itself into a frenzy too many times over what I consider frivolous reasons to not take the work of Shiller seriously.

Consider this possibility: after all these months, people start to think it’s time for the recession to end. The very thought begins to renew confidence, and some people start spending again — in turn, generating visible signs of recovery. This may seem absurd, and is rarely mentioned as an explanation for mass behavior late in a recession, but economic theorists have long been fascinated by such a possibility.

The notion isn’t as farfetched as it may appear. As we all know, recessions generally last no more than a couple of years. The current recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, so it is almost two years old. According to the standard schedule, we’re due for recovery. Given this knowledge, the mere passage of time may spur our confidence, though no formal statistical analysis can prove it.

So, history tells us our business cycle is due for an upturn. Are we just in a funk and prolonging the bad times or are we reacting to our analysis of bad fundamentals?  Barry Ritholz of The Big Picture pooh-poohs most of the salient points put forth by Shiller.  I’m not sure I’m ready to buy his point by point distraction.  Especially this point that sees us all the way one way or the other.   Some times I think many scientists can miss the gray areas when applying their gray matter.

Not Totally Irrational: One of my complaints about economics is it over-emphasizes people as rational, unemotional actors. However, when it comes to sentiment, economics seems to make the same mistake in the opposite direction — it assumes that people are foolish, unthinking creatures unable to engage in ANY rational thought whatsoever. All sentiment, no rationality at all.

I think we see times when it is easier to be rational than emotional and times when it seems hard to be rational in the face of overwhelming emotion.  This is especially true in the day of 24 hour news cycles and financial channels that bring us stories of people like us that are bankrupt, losing jobs, and being foreclosed on.  Also, when the suffering is more wide spread, like it is today, it is easier to see some one in your neighborhood with issues.  I think there are definitely times when we blow anecdotal evidence clear out of proportion.  I see it in my students–and down page here– all the time.

That’s not to say that we always play to our lesser natures.  I just think that sometimes we still do have the animal within us and that we tend to bring that out in each other.  That is also something proposed in the 1930s by a French psychologist  Émile Coué who was the father of  positive thinking with his phrase  “every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”   He just thought we could talk ourselves into almost anything.  Does it not work in reverse also?

Ritholz does make a rather good point that we are, in fact, seeing a lot of bad things go on and we maybe just reacting rationally to bad things.  He includes the fact that most of us have seen our buying power stay the same or decrease, our home values have decreased, and that Pollyanna pundits on CNBC keep looking a bit daft because they keep being so wrong.  It is, afterall, Dr. Doom and Gloom that has gotten it right recently and the papers are eager to tell us that.

This is way I was interested to see Thoma’s last paragraph.

But this crisis has caused me to reevaluate. I still find the Shiller-type animal spirits, psychology based explanations hard to swallow, but when the foundation supporting your beliefs is called into question (in this case modern macroeconomic models), it’s important to open your mind and at least give alternative explanations a chance. That’s particularly true when the person pushing the stories has a pretty darn good record of using them to warn of bubbles, as Shiller does. So I’m trying.

Exactly, what is a bubble or excessive exuberance or watching CNBC say “every day in every way our stock market is getting better and better” but a form of tribal COUÉISM?  Does it work?  Nope, probably not.  However, do we act on the belief it might?  My guess is yes, we do.  After all, we may be more rational then the other living, breathing sentient beings on this planet, but like them, our hearts still pound, our breathing gets shallow, and we feel excitement or fear when things happen we do not expect.  We prefer to amble with our herd in green pastures than to be separated out there vulnerable to the wolves and other predators.

My guess is that’s it’s not so much that we are rational or we are animistic, but that we have differing degrees of each dependent on the stimulus and the situation.  That is why I have never completely bought into the notion of rational markets.  Well, that and they can’t explain away some of the frictions without completely leaving the period of the Great Depression out of the data.  (Don’t believe me, go read a Fama study.)  I’ve always believed that we need more of a Bayesian approach where we get weighted to the more rational notion while things are looking normal and more animistic when things are not.  I’ll be the first to admit that there are times when my dog appears a lot more calm and rational than me.  But that is because I know when the kibble comes and she does not for certain.  She assumes, by experience, that it will always be there when she heads to the bowl or it will be forthcoming when she nudges me.  That is her experience without a Great Dakinikat Depression.  

Did I mention her name is Karma?

So, is it all in our head?  All in our heart?  Or what?

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

Good Morning and Happy Sunday Conflucians.  This morning’s breakfast is served in bed.  The coffee beans have been freshly ground, the muffins are still warm from the oven, and Rico added a shot of something special to that strawberry smoothie.  So get comfy, adjust yourself under those covers, and enjoy this delightful tray of goodies as you peruse the morning news.  Oops!  Don’t worry about that tiny spill.  Just make yourself at home.

OK, let’s get started.  What better way than to start off with some…

Hillary Clinton News

Vogue has an interesting profile of Hillary Clinton this month.  Some of the excerpts are wonderfully revealing yet comfortingly confirming our general sense about this incredible woman.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: Her Brilliant Career.

When she walks into one of the many grand diplomatic reception rooms on the eighth floor of “the Building,” as everyone calls the State Department, she is clutching a big mug of milky coffee and is wearing no makeup. She looks tired and cranky. She is about to tape three I’m-sorry-I-can’t-be-with-you-here-this-evening videos for events she can’t attend. This is obligatory drudge work, to be sure, but it’s drudgery that requires her to suck it up and find that extra gear: She must be on. Clinton says hello to the group—not her usual effervescent eye-popping hello but a barely mustered blanket nicety. She sits where she is told, facing a teleprompter, and her ever-present and very chic deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, hands her a small case filled with cosmetics. Holding a compact, Clinton puts on mascara, lipstick, blush, and a little powder. She yanks her jacket straight, affixes her mic, and signals she is ready by sitting up and staring directly into the camera. And—click!—just like that, the public Hillary appears: upbeat, reassuring, in control, wide awake, means business. She nails all three videos in one take. Done. Next.

******************************

Of Course there’s Healthcare Health Insurance Reform

Landrieu shows her DINO side:  Landrieu says Reid will soon realize no triggers = no bill.

After announcing her intent to support a health care debate this afternoon, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) told reporters she thinks Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will soon have to choose between a triggered public option and no health care bill.

******************************

Jon Walker gets the feeling Harry Reid is fixing to throw the public option under the bus: Sounds like Reid is going to sell out the public option.

It looks like Harry Reid is getting ready to sell out the labor unions, the progressive community, the Democratic base, and the majority of the American people. The vast majority of Americans want a public option as part of health care reform. Reid fully has it within his powers to get a health care bill passed with a public option. He could use reconciliation to pass a bill with a simple majority. He could even use the “nuclear option” to eliminate the silly filibuster, like Bill Frist threatened to do only a few years ago.

******************************

After 10 hours of grueling pontifications and reading of lobbyists’ notes, the Senate voted along strict party lines to open the health bill to formal debate. Senate votes to open healthcare debate.

The 60-to-39 vote, along party lines, clears the way for weeks of rowdy floor proceedings that will begin after Thanksgiving and last through much of December.

******************************

Democrats hold the line, but cracks show.  So who really thought this thing would be a walk in the park and turn out to be a great achievement for a Democratic supermajority.  The two provisions?  If you guessed the public option and abortion coverage, you would be correct.

In a 60-39 vote on strictly partisan lines, the Senate sent the $848 billion health care bill to the floor for debate after the Thanksgiving break, but not before a clutch of moderates served notice that they couldn’t back the bill in its current form.

One key provision – for a government-run insurance plan that would allow states to opt-out of coverage – effectively died in the Senate chamber Saturday, as the last two Democratic holdouts demanded changes to the bill. s

“I am opposed to a new government administered public health care plan as a part of comprehensive health care reform, and I will not vote in favor of the proposal that has been introduced by Leader Reid as it is written,” said Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), the last Democrat to commit to a vote for opening debate. Two hours earlier, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) had said much the same thing.

Their comments signal that weeks of negotiations remain on a bill Obama once hoped to have on his desk by Christmas – and even raised the prospect that splits in the party over the public option, abortion and other aspects of the bill could scuttle passage altogether.

******************************

The Economy

The Democrats are beginning to realize, it IS and will continue to be the Economy stupid!  Hard Math for Democrats.

Counting to 60 in the Senate is only the beginning of the tough math that bedevils Democrats these days as they try to pass health reform, survive a bad economy and appeal more to the middle-class voters whose support they’ll need in the 2010 elections.

******************************

Unemployment rose in 29 states last month. Yep, it’s still the economy stupid.

Joblessness rose in 29 U.S. states last month compared with 22 in September, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Michigan had the highest jobless rate at 15.1 percent, followed by Nevada at 13 percent and Rhode Island at 12.9 percent.

The national rate last month reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, weighing on consumer spending that accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Nov. 17 that joblessness “likely will decline only slowly,” a reason policy makers will keep interest rates near zero to ensure growth is sustained.

“We’ve had a surprisingly sharp jump in the jobless rate,” said Richard DeKaser, president of Woodley Park Research in Washington. “Businesses have truly been doing an extraordinary job of wringing out productivity from the labor force.”

******************************

A full spate of economics news will be dropped during Thanksgiving week.  Will there be much to be thankful for?  Thanksgiving Week Stuffed With Economic News

******************************

No major revelation here: No Recovery for Main Street.

Apropos Sean’s post on the results of the CNN survey, there are plenty of data points to to explain why Americans are visibly frustrated with the state of the economy. While Wall Street Banks are set to dish out record-breaking bonuses just a year after being bailed out of the financial collapse, things are not nearly so rosy on Main Street.

******************************

National and World News

I can’t tell if this is a major revelation or no big deal: Climate-gate: how the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science.  The Telegraph breaks down the news coverage of the leaked emails between climate scientists.

******************************

Sarah Palin as the “Mean Girl?” Geez, that’s a new twist.

[S]itting on the other side of Winfrey’s skeptical glare, Palin looked too cynical and savvy to play the innocent. Instead, she reverted to the mean girl, the woman who charmed conservatives by slicing gleefully into her foes, whether they be oil barons or community organizers. Her takedown of would-be son-in-law Levi Johnston was nearly virtuosic: All I want to talk about is his beautiful son, whom he hasn’t seen in a while because he’s so busy being Ricky Hollywood . . .

Johnston gives new meaning to the term opportunistic, and clearly deserves Palin’s scorn. But mean girls tend to turn on other women, and Palin’s chief target – besides those evil campaign staffers who forced her to wear designer clothes – is Katie Couric, whom she calls “the perky one.’’ Palin’s book is filled with snide remarks about Couric’s demeanor and her ratings. And Palin offers a new and inventive reason for fumbling so badly on the national stage: She was annoyed.

******************************

Oddz ‘n’ Endz

Hey, even God deserves a little procedural due process.  Senator Suing God Urges Judge to Proceed: Court Could Throw Suit Out Because of Failure to Serve Notice on God.

State Sen. Ernie Chambers says his lawsuit against God might seem funny but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a serious point.

(SNIP)

The court told Chambers last week that his lawsuit may be dismissed because he had failed to serve notice on God. Chambers acknowledged that failure in court Tuesday while sitting a few feet away from an empty table reserved for God and God’s attorney.

“Despite my most sincere, zealous efforts, I could not find a location to serve the defendant,” Chambers said.

******************************

My daughter (the former waitress) would love this story.  College students arrested for not leaving a tip.

It was an evening out that college students Leslie Pope and John Wagner will long remember.

Not only did they get what they called lousy service, they got handcuffed and arrested.

All over a $16.35 tip.

******************************

I’ll bet you missed the chance to celebrate World Toilet Day on November 19th.  Don’t fret, you can still learn all about Toilet Paper History: How America convinced the world to wipe.

******************************

Sure, you probably think it’s just science fiction crap.  Nope: 5 Scientific reasons a Zombie Apocalypse could actually happen.

******************************

These are definitely double-take worthy: 27 very strange and funny signs.

******************************

NASA has found a creative way to use the images of Mars they’ve collected over the years. Be a NASA “volunteer” -  Play: Be a Martian.

******************************

But, can he dance?  Couple declares “Our unborn baby looks like Michael Jackson.” No, really…he does.

******************************

The Final Word…

And finally, with all of the talk about healthcare, I think I’ve found the best answer yet.  Here’s a great “Wellness” initiative we should implement everywhere.  I know I’d find it addictive.

What’s caught your eye this morning?

Happy Sunday Everyone!

SoD

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

The healthcare just give us anything and we’ll declare victory health insurance industry gift bag reform discussions have reached a Senate showdown point.  The 60 votes needed on a procedural vote to move debate forward will be sought this evening, supposedly at 8pm; but another 60 will then be needed for cloture.  What will Harry concede to the conservatives from the Democratic Party and the Republicans in order to “declare victory?” For your review and in case you may need to check out specific parts being bantied about this evening, here is the FULL BILL, and here is a SUMMARY.  Debate has begun, lines are being drawn.

Here is the LIVE STREAM of the Senate Debate on CSPAN

According to TNR, Harry already deleted women’s gynecological care from the mandatory minimum coverage list to mirror the House anti-women version.  In The Fate of Lady Parts in the Senate Bill, Suzy Khimm notes:

Reid’s merged Senate bill left out part of an amendment that Barbara Mikulski had successfully introduced into the Senate HELP legislation, which requires insurance companies to include women’s preventative services as part of all minimum benefit packages, for little or no cost. Mikulski argued that women of child-bearing age end up paying an average of 68 percent more in out-of-pocket costs, partly due to reproductive health needs, and often ended up delaying or forgoing care (like mammograms) because of the expense. The provision—which was in neither the House nor Finance Committee legislation—was slated to be in Reid’s bill this week, but “CBO decided at the last minute there was a problem and it was removed until that is resolved,” Mikulski spokesperson Rachel MacKnight said in an email today.

The problem, according to sources familiar with the issue, was that the Mikulski’s amendment wasn’t specific enough in terms of how it would determine which services would be covered, simply saying that it would be it up to the discretion of HHS to set the guidelines for coverage. As such, the provision was so broad that CBO ended up having to give it a very high—i.e. expensive—score, and Reid ended up leaving the language out of the bill.

According to MacKnight, Reid and Mikulski “are working on a solution to include her amendment” and strengthen provisions for women’s preventative services in the final bill. But given the tempest surrounding the new mammography recommendations—along with today’s news about Pap smears—this might not be an easy task.

What is really disconcerting is the continual assertion by the Obama administration that there’s nothing to worry about with these new recommendations from the “TASK FORCE.”  This is a bald-faced lie since both the House Bill that was passed, and this Senate version, both use this same TASK FORCE as the mechanism for establishing preventive standards for the insurance industry plans.  See page 17, Section 2713 (a)(1) of the Senate Bill and page 106, Section 222 (b)(8) of the House bill. As Khimm accurately observes:

In all of the bills, HHS uses the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force serve as a basic guide to determine what should be covered at little or no cost as part of a minimum benefits package. (Of course, as I’ve reported, HHS can choose to go beyond the task force recommendations.)

Yeah.  The HHS is not listed int he bill as the defining code.  Their “move along, nothing to see here” approached will not fool us.  We’ve all learned the value of being vigilant.  Here is the TASK FORCE website for a complete rundown of CURRENT recommendations.  However, as we all know, these standards can change at any time.  And the changes that have been recently announced are all adverse to women’s health: new recommendations for cervical cancer screening and mammography.

So, what will happen throughout the day and tonight?  Will the Stupidstupaksepsis language be incorporated into the bill?  Harry has already been busy buying votes by doling out special dollars to the DINO holdouts.  How far will they throw us under the bus to be able to deliver a “victory?”  Air America Radio has their idea about how things will play out today.  Let’s follow along and discuss as it’s happening.

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine