I’m just glad this vid is making the rounds.

“We don’t know.”

So they handed over the problem to proponents of the very ideologies that got us into this mess?  And there is still no accountability for the ‘bad actors’ of the financial world.  They are still being rewarded for pissing away our grandchildren’s prospects for economic health. 

It should now be obvious (to anyone with a pulse) that we have more to fear from our own greedheads than we do from the Foreign Brown Menace.  If Mr. Hope and Change wants to start moving in the right direction, he should pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and redeploy them to the Cayman Islands, Wall Street, and Switzerland.  Free the potheads and lock up the speculators.

Hard to know what to make of it, really. Paulson & Bernanke had their nethers all tied up with the bankers, & the bankers were hurting. With GWB still at the helm, why wouldn’t they just lie their asses off to get the money?

On the other hand, I recall the terror on Paulson’s face during his hearings in September. Maybe we are doomed.

With the real danger of economic collapse on the table, it’s interesting to think about this threat and how much sincerity was behind it.  I fear quite a bit.

Also, if we don’t invade Iraq right now the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud.  :-p

I’m not saying things aren’t bad.  I’m not saying the couldn’t / won’t be worse.  But I do believe that Bush Admin officials love to dive all over the worst case scenario to try and scare up votes.  If my next door neighbor told me, “I made a serious of bad bets.  Now empty your bank account, max out your credit cards, and tap out your home equity so we can pay off the local bookie, or there’s going to be a mob war”, I’d tell him to go fuck off.

So far, all this money getting thrown at the banks doesn’t appear to have relaxed the credit market at all.  And with CEOs passing out $18 billion in bonuses (from taxpayer bailout money) to an industry that just LOST a trillion (?) in the course of a couple months… I can’t help but think the Wall Street Big Shots aren’t taking this situation too seriously either.  So what am I supposed to believe?

I believe this was sincere, not a ginned up crisis.

TARP badly botched by Bush was better than no TARP at all.

Which is a terrifying notion in and of itself.  The idea that something could be so awful that Bush Administration action could improve it is just beyond reason.

Man, I keep hearing that, but I keep reading Kos and seeing nothing that would reasonably prompt it.  Kos is gigantic; of course you’re going to get some nitwits and people with aggression issues.  But fundamentally, the stuff on the front pages and rec lists is pretty good, and the commentary that gets voted up is quite good. 

Basically, I think the fear is just of the fact that there are a lot of people there and they’re left of center.

Bosworth, I think you should actually provide some examples.

Generally, in the aggregate, the Kossacks demonstrate the rationality of crowds. I have to echo Punditus Maximus: what appears on the front page and what diaries get recommended tend to be pretty good. The vaccination threads are good examples of the dynamic: the vaccination diaries that get recommended are the ones comes on the pro-rationality/pro-vaccination side, and while there are plenty of commenters drinking the anti-vaccination crazy-sauce, plenty of other commenters take them to task.

The main weaknesses tend to come from the fact that a lot of diarists—even recommended ones—aren’t very good writers. That’s hardly a partisan problem.

I think that for a lot of conservatives, DailyKos acts as a synecdoche for their fears of liberals. The idea of a swarming collection of liberals seems dangerous and distrurbing, so they project that view of DKos onto it. I can’t seem to find that such an observation is based in reality. An addition problem for many conservatives is that DKos doesn’t offer any quick-and-easy places where one could grab talking points to repeat. Instead it looks very chaotic, and I’m not sure that many people know what to do with that.

Actually this video in a diary on Daily Kos, is what prompted me to complain about hysteria over at Kos in one of Amanda’s previous posts. Many of the comments in that particular diary seemed to jump into total loony territory. But Punditus, you are right, Kos is gigantic and there are plenty of sensible people over there as well, it just feels like with the anxiety level so high that so much of the discourse is dominated by panic and crazy responses that don’t seem to get challenged as they do in smaller discussions here.
In contrast coming to Pandagon and reading Amanda’s economic posts and the comments on the site in general, the reaction to the crisis seems a bit more levelheaded then Kos.

Well, nutpicking is never exactly fair.

Just as a snap shot of the recommended diaries right now over there:

A kind of a rah-rah the GOP are not serious type post. (They’re not)
Talking about the bailout press conference today (I disagree with the post. Namely that I think that the bankers will take the economy down rather than take a “bad” package. But it’s a fair, reasonable opinion)
Talking about the intended terrorism behind the big church shooting last year.
A link and transcript of a really strong Rachel Maddow clip (Fair enough)
The video that inspired this post (Quite frankly, a very important diary, and even if we’re reading too much into it…I don’t think we are…it’s one thing the blogosphere is good at, not allowing things to go down the memory hole)
A discussion on the jobs bill in relation to The Great Depression (Could be seen as hyperbole. I doubt it. Certainly seems like there are some strong parallels.)
Very well reasoned and laid out economic news from bonddad, who I sometimes disagree with but it’s high quality stuff.
And an energy economy post by Jerome a paris, who sometimes is a bit too emotionally invested in the topic, but there’s a lot of value to say right there.

That’s a snapshot of the Rec. list right now. There’s no crazy there, there’s no radical. There are things I agree with, and things I disagree with. But it’s all reasonable.

I don’t like the busy nature of DKos myself, but that doesn’t make it bad. It’s just not for me.

It’s disaster capitalism. I don’t need to tell any regular readers of Pandagon. Newer readers should check out Naomi Klein. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4231109320246838401#6m03s

Representative Sherman later revealed that members were warned that Martial Law would result if the $700 bailout plan was not passed,

There’s no pleasant way to say this. Fascists have deeply infiltrated the government. Obama’s election is not enough to root them out.

What, would they have then pulled the troops out of Iraq to enforce the martial law? I mean, that would be logical, but you know.

“What, would they have then pulled the troops out of Iraq to enforce the martial law? I mean, that would be logical, but you know.”

Mercs like Blackwater?...

And that the best sites have a positive feedback loop between commenters and main posters that accumulates information and commentary so that the whole is bigger than the individual parts? (And, also, the aggregate does count?)

The best sites also have a commitment to an “open society”.  When a commentating community makes the mistake of censoring out opposing opinions, it starts reinforcing itself, engaging in self-congratulation, and drifting off in its own direction. This is most obvious in places such as “Little Green Footballs”

I keep hearing that, but I keep reading Kos and seeing nothing that would reasonably prompt it.

The only thing I can think of that has ever turned me off at Kos is the ongoing meme that Disaster Is Looming, and that you should get off the grid ASAP so that when the lefty version of black helicopters come…  Which gets real boring, real fast.

Kos comments and diaries go into Sky Is Falling mode _a lot_.  I think it led to a backlash, which prompted a number of “Chill out” diaries to run up the reco list in recent days.  The comments at Digby are perhaps even worse, because there’s seemingly always someone saying a variant of this:  “See, I told you Obama was more of the same, but y’all didn’t believe me, and now it’s too late, suckas.”  People on our side like to presume the worst, and a lot of us flatter ourselves that always presuming the worst means that we’re much smarter than all the naïfs out there who don’t understand it’s a rigged game, man.  There’s certainly a place for lefty critique of squishy liberalism, but online the proportions are way out of whack, so just like the libertarians and men’s-rights weirdos, hardline lefty doomsayers are overrepresented.

Or, to be brief, people like to be the first one to hate something, and then they measure their superiority in the number of minutes that go by before the next person agrees with them.  It’s kind of like being an Insufferable Politics Snob.  You have a lot invested in declaring that Things Suck.

I’d like to see a comparison between this event and teh Soros-led run on the pound sterling back in 1998 (?).  i wonder if we can persuade the Dark Wraith to take a hack at it?

Has anyone speculated (ha, investment pun) about WHO was taking all these billions out of the system, and where it was going instead?  It’s such a supervillain kind of thing to do.

I do get the impression that some Kossacks seem not to realize the sheer wealth contained in the USA, and their impression of the consequences of the economic meltdown are always colored by this. To be fair, I think a lot of readers on DKos are in dire straits and their impression of America’s future prospects are colored by their bad personal experiences. But in general, I think that’s more of a reflection of a section of the commenters rather than the site as a whole. I mean, seriously, you’ve got a front page full of poll data and mockery of various talking heads, and this is what freaks out Bosworth Fockington St. John III? Once again, the right-wingers are thin-skinned.

Digby, of course, has always held Obama in a lot of suspicion and always assumed the worst. Honestly, she understands the dynamic and mindset of the Washington media very well but her political judgment is off, and her commenters tend to reflect her own beliefs. Then again, so is mine, because I’ve frequently had the same skepticism of Obama, but I don’t have a readership of thousands of people while I’m making my poor prognostications.

Blackwater would have handled martial law.  They did post-Katrina.

FlipYrWhig: what had happened was that the money market shares had gone below $1 (which meant they were losing money) and there was a fear that they might go under. Since there was no FDIC type insurance for money markets, the money in that case would be just lost. Therefore, institutional investors (like pension funds) jumped to move their money to other investments—prompting the bank run. Considering that other countries also almost went bankrupt (England, Pakistan, ..) and Iceland did go bankrupt, why do so many not believe this might have happened in the US?

I don’t believe the mercenaries have anywhere near the numbers you’d need to enforce martial law in the whole United States.

If you want to see clear evidence that the October bailout did a lot of good, take a look at the TED Spread.  It’s the difference between interest rates for interbank lending and Treasury bills, which makes it a good measure of how much banks are freaking out over whether the other banks they loan money to will default.  At the height of the crisis, it was 4.5%.  Then we did the bailout.  Now it’s fallen back to where it was before the crisis, at less than 1%. 

If interbank lending had totally frozen up, lots of banks would fail and lots of businesses wouldn’t be able to get the short-term credit they need to meet payroll.  Lots of people wouldn’t get paid.  I’m guessing that was the beginning of the Bernanke / Paulson story that leads to martial law and rioting and whatnot.

Of course, the TED spread historically ranges from 0.3-0.5, so the fact that it’s dancing around 1.0 is really only reassuring in light of its recent (insane, unprecedented) highs.

“I don’t believe the mercenaries have anywhere near the numbers you’d need to enforce martial law in the whole United States.”

Blackwater isn’t the only mercenary supplier.  Plus, the easy acquiescence of Americans to Security Theater at airports may show it’s easier than you think.

A big factor is that local and state police/sheriffs/troopers/etc. don’t evaporate in those conditions, they’re working side-by-side.  And there aren’t zero available military personnel, there aren’t numbers as large as there were before George Bush’s Big Iraqi Adventure began.

I’m guessing there are plenty of military/mercenary/police personnel to do a decent job of keeping us under control.  And even if there ultimately weren’t enough, the numbers are close enough to scare the piss out of any congress person or senator…

“See, I told you Obama was more of the same, but y’all didn’t believe me, and now it’s too late, suckas.” People on our side like to presume the worst, and a lot of us flatter ourselves that always presuming the worst means that we’re much smarter than all the naïfs out there who don’t understand it’s a rigged game, man.

I agree that most people who parrot that line like feeling smug.  The only other explanation is that they’re Kucinich supporters and they’re delusional enough to think that Kucinich could ever have a chance at winning the presidency.

The only other viable option was Hillary, and she was guaranteed to be more of the same.

Even with the best of intentions, bringing “change” to the presidency of the United States of America is a damn difficult task.  Our government is set up for incrementalism and the president has to worry about not pissing off the majority of 300 million people.  Sure it’s a “rigged” game, but you have to do your best with what you’ve got, and I’m still convinced that Obama was the best option under the circumstances.