Suitz Movie
by: dinocrat

We decided to make this movie (it took about 20 minutes to do so) after the previous week’s media stories about one potential Republican presidential candidate began to sound just like the dialogue in our little vignette. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get if Perry actually turns out to be the GOP candidate.

It’s hard to imagine how the country gets through the next 15 months with a more-of-the-same economic policy, though we have no reason to expect anything else from this crew. Apparently a part of the current political-media strategy is to turn up the volume against those average Americans called the Tea Party (here and here, for example), but it’s hard to see what the purpose of that is.

If America’s predicament was a work of fiction, we could imagine all sorts of lurid plot twists, evil-cracker-plots, peasant uprisings and so forth. But it’s not a work of fiction, though the attempt to paint nice people who want to cut the budget as extremists does have its humorous elements. So what’s the next plot twist? We can’t go on reading this dreary book month after month after month without something to break the monotony.

(Of course treating every business in the country like Gibson Guitar could create a series of diversions, but it’s very hard to see a happy ending for the authors of that plot line in November 2012.)

The other day we recommended some excellent and free educational resources. Now here’s one that’s been right under our nose but we were unaware of until just now: iTunes U. Interesting courses from places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley. Don’t be surprised when the $550 billion in student loans created during the education bubble run into trouble.

The trendline is clear on the economy’s improvement, it’s dramatically up as the dark green line indicates! Oops, wrong graph. HT: Wretchard

We spoke of the end of a fireworks display. Here comes the last bottle rocket. Washington Post:

President Obama sought to reassure jittery investors Monday following a credit rating downgrade, declaring that the United States “will always be a triple-A country” regardless of an agency’s grade…Immediately following Obama’s remarks, U.S. markets continued to lose ground. As he began speaking, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 426, or 3.7 percent, to 11,018, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index had declined 58 points, or 4.8 percent, to 1,141. Half an hour later, the Dow was down 474 points…At day’s end, the Dow had plunged 635 points

The faculty lounge has no new ideas, and needs a new teleprompter to boot. How embarrassing is this “will always be a triple-A country” business? Hard to see how this goes on unabated for another 18 months. The satire now writes itself, yes it does.

Glenn Reynolds comes out in favor of tax increases, specifically urging the repeal of a tax break from the fifties:

One of the things that’s been floating around the Web over the past week is a video clip from 1953. It’s a short film produced by the motion picture industry, seeking the end of a 20 percent excise tax on movie theaters’ gross revenues that had been imposed at the end of World War II as a deficit-cutting measure…In the film, figures ranging from industry big shots to humble ticket collectors talk about how the tax is hurting their industry and killing jobs…

I would be agitating to repeal the “Eisenhower tax cut” on the movie industry and restore the excise tax. I think I would also look at imposing similar taxes on sales of DVDs, pay-per-view movies, CDs, downloadable music, and related products. I’d also look at the tax and accounting treatment of these industries to see if they were taking advantage of any special “loopholes” that could be closed as a means of reducing “tax expenditures.”…

I note that FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who approved the Comcast merger, left the commission to take a lucrative job at Comcast…Because much of their value to their employers comes from their prior government service, I think that the taxpayers deserve a share of the return, say in the form of a 50 percent surtax on any earnings by political appointees in excess of their prior government salaries

Gee, maybe the media would form their own tea party. But what then would they say about themselves?

Who is the most effective politician in the US? A long-time blogger answers that question:

I think Obama is easily the winner and currently stupidly under-rated – and drowned out by all the noise in the conservative-media-industrial-complex.

Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP’s broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama.

On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.

Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). But notice what hasn’t happened. Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin? Where are his Katrinas?

Well, there’s that “unprecedented blow to the world’s largest economy.” But maybe we’re nitpicking.

We encourage you to get acquainted with Khan Academy and Tech Guy Labs. They are a window into how university education will be likely changing due to technology. Salman Khan is a polymath who delivers hundreds, if not thousands, of fascinating mini-lectures on all sorts of subjects. We’d wager that more than 80% of college courses aren’t as chock-full of knowledge and as succinct and well-delivered as those of Mr. Khan.

If Khan’s formula is an excellent replacement for the college lecture, Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy Labs offers something of a replacement for the college seminar. Laporte broadcasts a technology radio program for six hours on the weekend, and offers all sorts of other tech programming live and on podcasts. One of the interesting features is his seminar — really, it’s a chatroom — with a thousand participants or more online during the broadcasts. In those instances when the highly knowledgeable Laporte doesn’t know the answer to a particularly arcane question, the hive often provides real-time answers to questions that come in live over the phone lines. We’ve never encountered a more well-informed group of seminar participants.

There’s one other improvement over current college practices that both Khan and Laporte offer — participation is free. College education in most cases does not deliver good value for the money. Expanding educational opportunities in this country by expanding scholarships is clearly a vastly inferior policy approach to lowering delivery costs. But politicians prattle on, do they not?

NYT:

tens of thousands of Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square on Friday for a day that had been billed as one of unified protest against the interim military government. But the turnout was lopsided, dominated by members of religious movements, ranging from the most conservative, the Salafists, to the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood…demonstrators called out, “The people want to implement Sharia,” a strict code of Islamic law…blogger and activist Nora Shalaby wrote on Twitter that the Salafists were “diverting us from the real demands of the revolution bc of their selfishness.”

Yeah, right. As we noted back in February when the media found its latest fleeting Utopia, Egypt is a country where 84% of the population thinks apostates should face the death penalty. Twitter indeed.

We noted below that Rick Santelli and Glenn Reynolds are apparently American Taliban. Probably we have to add Salman Khan of the amazing Khan Academy to the list. Just watch as he explains that the obligations of the federal government are unsustainable. Why, that’s just like setting off bombs in Afghanistan, isn’t it?

Would you see this. HT: IHTM

It was 1983. HT: PJM

Anyone familiar with the collected works of Messrs. Cee Lo Green and Enrique Iglesias knows the utterly debased state of much of American popular music today compared to the past.

It is genuinely hard for us to imagine the moral universe that these men inhabit — and not just them, but all the businessmen around them, the producers and record company executives, the companies buying product placement in such music, etc. How long can such a downward spiral continue? Perhaps that’s the subject for a different day; let’s move on to more pleasant things.

We’re writing this because Scott Johnson just took note of the birthday of Alison Krauss, a happy occasion for American music. We’ll also pause to remember that the wunderkind Bob Dylan will turn 70(!) this year, and that Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert is 36 years old now. Ebb and flow.

We recently caught a glimpse of some of the posturing that goes on in the budget negotiations. Now Jonathan Chait of TNR discusses what happens when the Gang of Six present their proposal to the House:

The Senate “Gang Of Six” today made a final push for its deficit reduction proposal…How do they think this plan will get through the House of Representatives?…The thing to understand about the House Republican caucus is that it’s riven between anti-government fanatics and anti-tax fanatics.

Perhaps the video above is a meeting of the House and Senate subcommittees. Sadly, the crooks still got away with some money. However, it’s a start. (Pete Ferrara has a more serious treatment of the issues in play today.)

and other oddities. Must be summer.

Org charts.

From a review of Morgenson’s and Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment at Amazon by Srikumar S. Rao. George Will has an interesting review of the book as well. (HT: Ace):

you learn how James Johnson, the erstwhile CEO of Fannie Mae built it into a colossus that gradually jettisoned all prudence in lending and vastly enriched himself and a bunch of cronies. He also suborned powerful legislators like Barney Frank, the powerful Massachusetts Democrat. And, lastly, he looked on and encouraged Wall Street firms to do the same and used that as justification to increase the scale of his own operations. And, Oh! I almost forgot, he also admonished fresh graduates to pursue their careers with “honesty and integrity”. When Johnson left Fannie Mae, a senior executive recalled “…we always won, we took no prisoners and we faced little organized political opposition.” He continued to be politically influential and was an adviser to the current president until forced to resign because it surfaced that he had received sweetheart loans from a leading purveyor of toxic financial junk.

Did you ever feel that “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is the norm on Wall Street? Consider this: Stephen Friedman, former CEO of Goldman Sachs was a director of Fannie Mae when the directors improperly allowed company executives to set earnings targets that they could meet. Federal investigators concluded that “As a direct result, senior management reaped ongoing and extensive financial rewards through accounting manipulation.” Johnson was then inducted to the board of Goldman Sachs — when Hank Paulson became CEO — and promptly made chair of the compensation committee. He dispensed some of the richest paychecks on Wall Street and these became the norm as other firms played catch-up. In fact, Johnson chaired the compensation committees of every board he sat on.

Angelo Mozilo, founder and CEO of Countrywide, was a good friend of Johnson’s and used his methods to grow the cancer that was Countrywide. The company made it a policy to give sweetheart loans to persons in power — these VIP loans were informally known as Friends of Angelo loans. Richard Holbrooke got such a loan. So did Senators Chris Dodd, Kent Conrad and Barbara Boxer. So did Donna Shalala, former head of Health and Human Services and Alfonso Jackson, secretary of HUD. And Countrywide hired sons and daughters and relatives of the influential and made sure that they were not fired during mass layoffs.

Round about Christmas Eve 2008 the NYT did a 5000 word piece that blamed the mortgage disaster on the “White House Philosophy” of that era. Of course it was obvious even then that this looked like the greatest bi-partisan heist of all time, and that appears to be been proven out, since nobody has gone to jail. Silly us! We thought No Income Verification meant that the banks had very clever computer data bases, and not that everyone and his brother were being invited to participate in the fraud.

Mark Halperin’s rude remark the other day was not news — he wrote last year that the Democratic and media establishment says such things in private all the time. What is news is that his colleagues goaded him into making his comment on the air. They practically pleaded with him to say something bleepable, and then they all laughed when he did. They weren’t at all shocked or dismayed, because, as Halperin previously noted, they all say similar things behind closed doors. It’s as though the MSNBC hosts were saying to their audience: we may be partisan, but we’re not stupid.

Here’s some of what was going on in 1940:

1. In The Mood – Glenn Miller
2. When You Wish Upon a Star – Cliff Edwards
3. I’ll Never Smile Again – Tommy Dorsey w/Frank Sinatra
4. Only Forever – Bing Crosby
5. Body & Soul – Coleman Hawkins
6. When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano – The Ink Spots
7. The Breeze and I – Jimmy Dorsey w/Bob Eberly
8. You Are My Sunshine – Jimmie Davis
9. When You Wish Upon a Star – Glenn Miller
10. Tuxedo Junction – Glenn Miller…

one-fourth of the top hits sold or listened to by the majority of Americans in 1940 were performed by Glenn Miller…Frank Sinatra jumped ship to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in January. Together they recorded some 40 songs during the next 12 months, the most successful of which was I’ll Never Smile Again which became one of the most important chart toppers of all time, spending almost three months at the number one spot.

A simpler time, and in the world of contemporary music and popular culture, a better time.

NYT:

News organizations mobilized teams of reporters and even recruited online volunteers to scan more than 24,000 pages of e-mails…MSNBC.com deputized 40 volunteers, chosen with the help of the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees…

The New York Times and The Guardian sent reporters armed with scanners and then solicited readers’ assistance. Politico enlisted a dozen editors, reporters and interns who worked as a team from their Northern Virginia newsroom “plowing through” the documents, as one editor described it. The Washington Post initially asked for 100 volunteers to sift through the documents. They were quickly overwhelmed…

“This is not a witch hunt,” said Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor at The Times. “There are 25,000 documents here, and we can use all the eyeballs we can get.” The Times, like The Post and others, uploaded the e-mails onto its Web site and invited readers to sift through them…“From our perspective, we’re just providing the public records to the public, who own them,” said Bill Dedman, a reporter for MSNBC

Question: when they say “this is not a witch hunt,” what is it? (A convoy?)