Another $1600 or so

A nice low-end MacBook Air from everybody. Yup. Uh-huh.
Look, I’m not insensitive to the notion that it would be really bad for everybody if these things went belly-up. Nor do I want to see all the janitors, secretaries, help desk donkeys, etc etc. shoved onto the street. I get that.
What I don’t get is how, through all this, there are absolutely no consequences for the people who got us into this mess. You know, the innovators of NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, No Assets). The people who lent money knowing full well they were lending to bad risks. I don’t want to EVER hear this put on “irresponsible borrowers” – if you’ve got a thousand bucks, and you decide to lend it to your drunken cousin Slick who’s never held a job and who’s been in rehab three times for crack addiction and who got the neighbor’s sow pregnant – is it Slick’s fault for taking the money, or your fault for being a FUCKING MORON??
And the Whiffle Life goes on. Dear God, in my next life, please make me a Republican so I too can be immune from the consequences of my actions.

Here’s the first one for the halftime show:

Martin Sullivan. $47 million severance from AIG in July, after two quarters of record losses.
Read the whole thing.
The worst six months in the company’s history is worth $47M…and an office and secretary until the end of the year. Now being paid for out of YOUR tax dollars.
Words fail me. Anything I post would probably be taken as incitement to a felony so I better shut up now.

$283 Each, Or, We’re All Pinkos Now

Consider that number, $283. Not a bad little chunk of change. Three months of a really good DirecTV package. A new 16 GB iPod Touch, with your friend’s employee discount. Ten rounds apiece at the 4Ps with three of your pals, tax and tip included. Cross-country airplane flight. Swank new American-made leather jacket from US Wings. (Maybe on sale. Those things have gone up.)

And you’re about to spend $283 – you and every other person in this country – so that AIG can get off the hook.

That’s $85 billion. That’s more than Warren Buffett has. That’s enough money to buy the entire NFL, all 32 teams, and start cleaning house.

Back to the old “moral hazard” again. Bear Sterns. IndyMac. Fannie and Freddie. Now AIG is the latest corpse to get stood upright and paraded around on this month’s version of Weekend At Bernanke’s. Almost makes you want to ask who the hell Lehman pissed off that they didn’t get the complimentary reach-around.

When you have a market where everything is a game of musical chairs, but nobody ever takes a chair away, that’s not capitalism, that’s not conservatism, that’s fucking socialist. And the free pass is being handed out courtesy of the same people who went apoplectic at the suggestion that credit card interest should be capped somewhere around 30%, because it would undermine personal responsibility.

However, if you exist above the Whiffle Line, you’re far too important to ever bear the consequences of your actions. So stand by to have an iPod plucked from your wallet so that a bunch of gold-plated weasels can keep putting their name on Man U’s shirts. The very least they could do is round up their executive team, march them out at halftime of the Super Bowl, randomly select one or two, and let five lucky taxpayers go to work on ’em with steel-toes and a ball bat.

Not likely, obviously. They’re far too rich and important for silly shit like accountability.

Incidentally…

…I don’t know who had a worse weekend: the Pac-10 (four teams lost to Mountain West opponents; one week away from formally being renamed the Pac-One) or the Big Ten (beaten soundly about the head and face even before their flagship team shat the bed again). At least now we have a tiebreaker in place when it’s time to decide who’s going to lose to the SEC champion this year.

Yes, it’s troubling that Georgia seems to have had more trouble with South Cackalacky than Vandy had…but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the Lame Gamecocks are better than their record indicates, that Georgia is actually pretty good, and that *gasp* Vandy may actually be pretty good. If you look at the AP poll, who’s the first team “also receiving votes”?

Gulp.

Better beat Ole Miss.

Fog

60 degrees and overcast. Perfect. That marine layer just does amazing things in the morning – far from being gloomy or grim, having that thick gray ceiling at 8 AM is a comfort. No garish sunlight, no glare punching you right in the face, no unpleasant heating up first thing in the morning.

Fog is also what apparently drifts through the brains of assorted football officials. Setting aside the preposterous non-call of a safety that Cal forced on the Twerps just before the first half, Ed Hochuli’s brain-lock in Denver suggests that the NFL has the same unnatural love for Mike Shannahan that the media once had for John McCain (though that shows signs of fraying when some bobblehead bimbo on Fox in the morning is ripping into the campaign manager). Amazingly, the play’s a fumble, because the ball moved backwards…but it’s *not* a turnover? I got nothing but love for Jay Cutler, pride of the Commodores, but isn’t it enough that nobody ever calls the cut block above 4500 feet?

Meanwhile, yes, I have a new iPhone. I didn’t want a new iPhone, but mine had an esoteric failure: something went wrong with the dock connector above and beyond the traditional “it’s got lint in it” problem. It charged just fine, it would sync with no problem, but it kept thinking something was plugging into that dock connector, thus activating the screen and occasionally even warning that an unsupported peripheral was being plugged in. As a result, you could take the phone off the charger and barely touch it, and seven and a half hours later, it would show that it had been used for seven hours. That’s bad arithmetic.

As it turns out, once out of warranty, the fix is a refurb unit for $199 with only a 90-day warranty. At that point, you may as well have the new one. And as it turns out, I got to keep a foundation account…so my monthly bill only goes up by about $12-15 total. At that point, it’s worth it to have the new one with a full warranty (and 3G and GPS besides, which I guess I will be happy enough to use). The big trick now is the battery life…I think my old iPhone may have had this problem well before I noticed, so I’m curious to see whether I get more than a day out of the new one (especially with the new firmware, which I strongly recommend to everyone).

Oh yes – my brother-in-law has the old iPhone now. He has no fear of cracking cases and firing up soldering irons, so if he can make it work, it’s his. Meanwhile, I have bought a nice silicone-grip case for my new iPhone…with a cover for the dock port.

Oh and by the way…

…I don’t remember the NFL being so solicitous when the Chargers got chased by a fire, or when the Saints got run out by Katrina. So stop screwing around and move the Texans-Ravens game. Ideally, move it off the edge of a cliff, but then, I’d have been just as happy for those two to play during the hurricane…

Vocabulary Lessons

Disasterbation, n. The act of supporting Cal football.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious to a small child that this is the way to beat Cal this year: stack the box to stop the deadly Jahvid Best, overload on the pass rush, and force a quarterback in his first full season to make plays to receivers with a combined total of four catches and no starts when the season began.

Well, it worked like all hell, and as a result, Cal shat the bed in the Eastern time zone again. The fact that the team only flew into Maryland on Friday didn’t help either – despite their attempt to “acclimate” to EDT while still in Berkeley, there’s really no way you can stay in California and simulate DC-caliber heat and humidity.

At some point, someone is going to have to drill into Jeff Tedford’s head that he has to be flexible in how he does things, and that decisions made in August are not binding on an entire season. It cost Cal the Holiday Bowl in 2004, it cost them an over-.500 season in 2007, and it probably cost them the first half today.

However, Vanderbilt put together a nice little 38-21 game. After trading score for score in the first half, the ‘Dores slammed on Rice in the second half with a 17-0 performance to cap their third win of the season. Vandy gets most of their work done on the ground, with Jared Hawkins pounding up the middle and Chris Nickson a surprisingly effective runner from the QB spot who also completes the necessary passes. Put that together with a defense that tends to slam the door after halftime, and it’s hard not to see some serious possibilities ahead for this team – opponents like Duke or Kentucky can certainly be had and there’s no reason to think Ole Miss or Wake are by any means unbeatable. Hold tight, don’t drop winnable games, don’t do anything stupid, and maybe…?

Not a great day for the Pac-10 – UMN beating Arizona and BYU over UCLA by 59 isn’t going to help the “Pac-1” talk – but a worse day for the Big Ten, with Wisconsin down in Fresno grasping for the only major intersectional win of the day for the conference. Cal notwithstanding, I’m still not prepared to take the “Almost College Conference” tag off until I see something impressive, and losing to Little Middle isn’t the sort of thing that can be overcome with one win.

And you just know that you’re going to see that clip of Jahvid Best’s unfortunate intestinal reversal all over YouTube, Deadspin, and EDSBS for the rest of the year, if not the rest of his career. I’m sure he would tell you that was a lot better going down than it was coming up.

ETA: Here’s how obvious the problem was: even the Junks, mostly Maryland alums and all Maryland supporters, basically said that Tedford screwed the team by not flying in until the night before, and that a 3000 mile flight is no joke. When the guys who just gave you a preposterous upset are sympathetic to your plight, you know your coach F’d up.

Cribbed from two years ago, edits in italics

…This, ultimately, is what drives me absolutely insane. We have had five (ETA – seven) years to find Osama bin Laden and his primary associates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have had five (ETA – seven) years to study what the British and Israelis do and come up with a consistent and reliable plan for airport security. We have had five (ETA – seven) years to make sure a nuclear device won’t sail in on a container vessel into Baltimore or Oakland. We have had five (ETA – seven) years to figure out how to cope with a world where a steady supply of cheap Middle Eastern oil is not a sure thing. And yet, we are constantly sold the notion that this is an extraordinary menace, an unparalleled crisis, that this is a war unlike any other and that wildly exceptional means are needed to combat it, that the threat of terrorism is something that should throw us into a state of, well, terror.

And in the end, it should be obvious: this government, this administration, (ETA – this WHOLE COUNTRY) is simply not serious about fighting “terror.” If we were serious, we would have settled down from the first flush of panic and set about doing something serious: isolating radical Islam and reaching out to the mainstream (especially to the Islamic world outside the Middle East), stomping out the last remnants of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and making sure we set up a working and friendly government in place of the Taliban, building a comprehensive program of air and port security for the United States, establishing plans for coping with another large-scale attack, and ensuring that other potential state actors know of the consequences for being associated with another attack – whether those actors be Iran and North Korea, or Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Sudan and Somalia. We would have planned for shared sacrifice, asked people to adjust their lifestyles to something more appropriate for wartime. We would have tried to fight the fear.

We have done none of these things. Instead, we’re bogged down in Iraq, the one leg of the “Axis of Evil” that definitely DIDN’T have a nuclear program. We’re so bogged down, in fact, that we’re ill-equipped to mount a response to Iran or North Korea if they decide to get nasty. We still do nothing about port security, to the point where a professor with a fishing boat in San Francisco Bay can whip up a more effective nuke-warning system than the Department of Homeland Security. A Category 5 hurricane with multiple days’ notice can almost completely destroy a major American city and we are unable to respond, either before or after. The Taliban are regaining control of the south of Afghanistan, the Iranians who held moments of silence for us on September 12 are no longer in control of the government, we’re pouring every liquid on the plane into a big bin in the concourse and putting shoes through X-ray machines that won’t actually show explosives, and we’re throwing around terms like “Islamic fascism” that make everyone who bows toward Mecca think we’re out to get them. We have taken the ball and run 180 degrees in the wrong direction across the board.

Not to crib too much from V for Vendetta, but it’s true: fear has become the ultimate tool of this government. Fear is enough to keep them in power, and fear is all they can offer. There’s not a plan, there’s not action, there’s only fear – fear that has to seem as raw and scary as it was on September 11, because if we’re not terrified of an immediate threat, we might look up and realize that we’re no safer now than we were five (ETA – SEVEN) years ago. This is why they keep jacking up the color-coded threat system. This is why we get the ominous mushroom-cloud-smoking-gun imagery. This is why we hear constant alarm about duct tape and liquid explosives and hype of a new threat every few weeks, especially when it seems like people might be on the verge of asking exactly what the hell the government is doing.

For them, it’s always September 12. It has to be. There always has to be an imminent threat, something that necessitates emergency powers, something to forestall questions and investigation and just demanding to know what the hell is going on here. It’s been five (ETA – SEVEN) years. FIVE (ETA – FUCKING SEVEN) YEARS. We shouldn’t still be reeling from the first punch. But nobody in charge has a plan other than to keep reeling, because perpetuating the notion that the sky could fall any second is so much easier than actually stopping it from falling.

Wake me up when September ends.

Dana Perino Is a Stupid, Stupid Idiot

Q: But Osama bin Laden is the one that — you keep talking about his lieutenants, and, yes, they are very important, but Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11 –

PERINO: No, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11, and he’s sitting in jail right now.

Way to move those goalposts, you dumb bitch. Obviously “dead or alive” ain’t what it used to be. Seriously, I’ve heard of living in the moment, but it’s tough to shake the sense that these morons doesn’t recognize the existence of anything over 24 hours in either direction…