Author: Stagger Lee

This may be the single best obituary of all time. I have my work cut out for me.

They really like us!

ETA: they must really like us…Vandy vs Auburn has been picked up for ESPN’s prime-time game, Saturday Oct 4.

No, no, no, a thousand times no.

“We ran the economy to the brink of oblivion, so let us have $700 BILLION to bail out the firms that did it…without applying any regulation, without any sort of corrective measures, without even allowing anyone to review or approve the process. Just give us a shitpile of cash and don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of things.”

Is there any reason – any reason AT ALL – not to expect them to make a hash of this? And don’t start with that bullshit about what Obama would do, or what Clinton (either) would do. The old theoretical equivalence game is not in play here. The responsible party is the one who has fucked us sideways, so they are the ones who have to demonstrate why handing them one bazillion dollars scot-free is not THE STUPIDEST FUCKING IDEA ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

Fourteen years it’s taken…but today, the Vanderbilt Commodores are ranked #21 in the AP poll.

I’m going to go get very, very, very drunk now.

Four wins, no losses.

Two conference wins, no losses.

One win over a ranked foe, no losses.

Outscored opponents 51-10 in the second half.

To cap it all off, not one, not two, but FIVE AP-ranked teams lost, and five more that didn’t have a loss already.

And we were the first team “also receiving votes” last week.

If the Vanderbilt Commodores aren’t ranked in the Top 25 when the new poll ships on Monday, they should cancel the whole thing for the rest of the year. Because right now? Any time, any place, any team…WE WILL FEAR NO EVIL.

DYNAMITE GO VU!!!

War in Iraq. Recession at home. Me in a funk. It can only be…1991.

Continue reading “Flashback, part 4 of n”

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.

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.

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.

…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.