200 proof snark, in the Financial Times. Gideon starts out by noting that "diplomat" Bolton rejects pacta sunt servanda, and goes on from there. The high point is Gideon’s noting that Bolton calls his book Surrender Is Not an Option, and observes that "When it came to Vietnam, surrender was not an option for Bolton because he never got close enough to the enemy to make it feasible…"
Anger: Among financially prudent Americans who are pissed at the government bail-out other Americans are getting for accepting mortgages they couldn’t afford.
Well I’m not angry, and I think I qualify as prudent. I bought my little Baltimore rowhouse in 2001 and it was way less house then I could "theoretically" afford, but I wanted something I could pay the monthly mortgage on with a week’s take-home pay. It was my first house ever, and I didn’t want to be saddled with a lot of debt over it. Debt makes me nervous. And I wanted to have plenty of financial breathing room to afford the maintenance costs I knew would be coming with home ownership. Like the seven grand worth of new furnace I had to put in a couple winters ago. The purchase price on my house was just under ninety grand, and since then, its "theoretically" gone up in value to just around two-hundred and fifty grand. So my house could loose over half of its "theoretical" value and it would still be worth more then what I have left to pay on the mortgage.
So I think I qualify as prudent. But I was also lucky in some ways. I bought before the price of housing began to skyrocket here in Baltimore…when for a while there was affordable housing near the place where I work. If that hadn’t been the case I’d have had to either keep on renting, for every increasing rents as the price of housing around here went up, or I’d have had to find a place to live further out of the city and commute. And the prices in the outer suburbs were starting to go up, even back then. Before I got work at Space Telescope, I rented a one bedroom apartment in the suburbs and I watched my rent rise from just under four-hundred a month back in 1993, to close to a thousand a month before I bought my house in 2001. What do you do when the price of housing just keeps going up and up and up, even in the outer suburbs? What do you do if you have a family and kids? I was, and am, a single gay guy. It’s not terribly hard for me to get a decent place to live at the low end of the cost scale. If I needed space for a family, I’d have been constantly worried to death about the rising prices.
So if someone came along and said they could get me into a house, even at today’s prices, with some of that new high-tech free-market creative financing stuff…my second thoughts might get snuffed out in the gnawing fear that if I didn’t jump on it now, right now, I might get left behind while home prices soar into outer space, so far beyond my reach I might as well resign myself and my family to living in slums and still not having enough to pay the rent. Especially when they sit me down and wave a bunch of numbers in my face telling me that even though it looks like I can’t afford this house, I really can because the trend is that in a few years the house’s value will have doubled and I’ll be able to refinance easily then, before the balloon payment comes due. Pay no attention to that crushing monthly payment behind the curtain…
If you want to point your finger at anyone in all this, point it at the jackasses who, for purely ideological reasons having little to do with the reality of how human beings behave, worked diligently to construct what is essentially a shadow banking system that could exist with nearly no governmental oversight, figured it would self regulate because free markets naturally self regulate to the best possible outcome, and then watched mutely as it evolved into a system of borrowing, wherein the people selling the loans, didn’t have to bear the burden of financing them. Oh who could have predicted that a bunch of people lending other people’s money for a tidy profit of their own, regardless of whether or not the loans went bad, would make so many bad loans? Oh who could have predicted that injecting so much easy credit into a market with so much demand for so limited goods would drive the price of those goods into outer space? Oh who could have predicted that the people making all those bad loans would view those rising prices as a way to make even more money making even more bad loans?
And once again, an unregulated market drives itself off a cliff, taking with it hundreds of thousands of hard working families. This is the Savings and Loan collapse of 1988 writ large. And…surprise, surprise…the current little unpleasantness is brought to us by the same people who gave us that other little unpleasantness. I guess the 1988 Savings and Loan fiasco was just practice, because I don’t think that one sacred Wall Street like this one is scaring Wall Street.
"According to Ars Technica, California testers have discovered severe flaws in the ES&S voting machines. The paper seals were easily bypassed, and the lock could be picked with a "common office implement".
A life of private jets and black-tie balls ended with Seth Tobias, a wealthy investment manager and a familiar presence on CNBC, floating face down in the swimming pool of his mansion here…
Mr. Tobias, who was 44 years old, had apparently suffered a heart attack, his brother Spence said at the time. The police did not consider his death suspicious.
But now an unfolding drama over Mr. Tobias’s estate is providing a lurid account of fast money and faster living in the volatile world of hedge funds. Mr. Tobias’s four brothers and Mrs. Tobias are locked in a legal battle over the estate, which is worth at least $25 million. And, in a civil complaint, they have gone so far as to accuse her of murder.
The brothers, Samuel, Spence, Scott and Joshua, claim Mrs. Tobias drugged her husband and lured him into the pool. Bill Ash, a former assistant to Mr. Tobias, said he had told the police that Mrs. Tobias confessed to him that she had cajoled her husband into the water while he was on a cocaine binge with a promise of sex with a male go-go dancer known as Tiger.
…
Mr. Tobias’s life was apparently as volatile as his investment returns. After Circle T lost 5.3 percent in 2005, his marriage began to fray. In March 2006, the police were called to the Tobiases’ home because of a domestic disturbance. A few days later. Mr. Tobias filed for divorce. It was one week before the couple’s first anniversary.
The Tobiases later reconciled. But the divorce filings included a laundry list of accusations. Mrs. Tobias stated that she caught him having an “adulterous affair” and that he “gambled away tens of thousands of dollars and used other funds on illicit habits.” She asked the court to award her $46,000 a month for living expenses. He argued that she was constantly spending too much money.
Even after the couple reconciled, they fought constantly, mostly over money, according to several friends, who asked not to be identified for fear of being subpoenaed in connection with the case or because they were worried that their professional reputations would be harmed by being associated with the case. At one point, Mrs. Tobias bought a Porsche on her credit card and then cried when Mr. Tobias told her to return it, one friend recounted.
They also secretly frequented a gay bar called Cupids in West Palm Beach, in a strip mall along a main thoroughfare. It was there, according to Mr. Ash, that Mr. Tobias first met Tiger.
“Seth used to come in here back when it was crazy,” said Adiel Hemingway, the longtime manager of Cupids. As a flat-screen television blared hard-core gay pornography, he said that Mr. Tobias often came to the club with his wife. Mr. Hemingway took out a picture of Tiger in his office. Tiger is blond and covered with tattoos that look like stripes.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani continues to discard the moderate and liberal positions of his past. The latest is civil unions for same-sex couples, which the Republican presidential candidate has been backing away from in recent months.
A campaign aide told the Globe this weekend that Giuliani favors a much more modest set of rights for gay partners than civil union laws in effect in four states offer.
Giuliani has described himself as a backer of civil unions and is frequently described that way in news reports. But he began distancing himself from civil unions in late April, when his campaign told The New York Sun that New Hampshire’s new law goes too far because it is "the equivalent of marriage," which he has always opposed for gays.
Giuliani’s aides offered little explanation of what specific rights he would support for same-sex couples.
Rudy Giuliani faced fresh questions about his judgment last night amid claims that trysts with his mistress while he was New York’s Mayor cost taxpayers thousands of dollars.
The Republican presidential frontrunner’s record as New York mayor is already facing closer scrutiny after the indictment this month of his close friend Bernard Kerik, whom Mr Giuliani appointed as the city’s police chief.
According to records obtained by a respected US political website, Mr Giuliani billed New York City for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for his security detail, who accompanied him on trips to Long Island while he visited his mistress.
Many of the security expenses were billed to obscure city agencies, such as the New York City Loft Board, giving the impression somebody did not want the expense claims to be linked to Mr Giuliani. The expense receipts tally the cost of hotel and petrol bills for police detectives who travelled everywhere with Mr Giuliani, according to the website, Politico.com.
More fun and games, from the folks morally qualified to tell gay people that our unions aren’t fit to be called marriages. Tune in next week as Mike Huckabee explains how having a divorce rate three times that of Massachusetts means Arkansas covenant marriage laws are working to protect and preserve the sacred institution of marriage whilst same sex marriage in Massachusetts has been greatly weakening it…
Via Slog… Another reason not to check myself into an Ex-Gay ministry…
“A Consequence of Misuse of the Internet”
That’s how a New York judge has summed up this tragically effed-up mess, in which a 48-year-old man (who’d been posing as an 18-year-old Marine in online chat rooms) murdered his 22-year-old rival for the virtual affections of a middle-aged West Virginia mother posing online as an 18-year-old student.
The Associated Press untangles it all for you here.
You know…I’ve never lied about myself on the Internet…about my age or my looks or my income or anything. Not on the Internet, not on the few dating sites I’ve tried. I just don’t do it. Believe that or not as you like, but I’ve never even used a pseudonym. I’ve have always gone by my birth name online. It’s not rectitude, it’s vanity.
It has been an honor and a privilege for both of us to serve on the Human Rights Campaign Business Council. Since joining the Business Council in 2002 we have both played active roles in advancing workplace equality, providing education, guidance and leadership, and ensuring that workplaces in America are fair for ALL employees. Our collective work has been at the forefront of the successes that HRC has enjoyed in recent years, has affected the daily lives of GLBT employees throughout this country in profound and substantive ways, and is a continuing source of pride for us both.
Rather than rest on past achievements, the Business Council continues to develop critical new initiatives to support transgender employees. We are working to raise the bar on the Corporate Equality Index. We are planning to revise and re-publish the booklet Transgender In the Workplace: A Tool For Managers. We are planning a Female-to-Male educational DVD. We have been working on insurance issues affecting transgender employees. Never before have so many important efforts for transgender workers been underway and we are both heavily involved in all of them. That is why the decision we are announcing today is an extremely difficult one.
Recent HRC policy decisions – to actively support a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that excludes our transgender brothers and sisters as well as gender-variant lesbian, gay, and bisexual people – have placed us in an untenable position. On November 8, the day after the ENDA vote in the House of Representatives, we requested an opportunity to meet personally with HRC President Joe Solmonese to share our concerns and to discuss HRC’s strategy for addressing recent legislative shortcomings before making a decision to stay or go. As the only transgender representatives on the Business Council our community expects us to have some influence, or at least to receive the courtesy of a consultation. Almost 3 weeks have passed since that request and we have heard nothing in response. This lack of response speaks volumes, so we feel compelled to take this stand today.
(Emphasis mine…) After a while, you finally begin to realize that the reason you’re there is window dressing. And then…you’re no longer needed.
That the bill in question doesn’t really do anything is wrongheaded, only if you think it’s purpose to make a difference in the lives of GLBT Americans, and bring this nation a little closer to reaching its promise of liberty and justice for all. No. That’s not the purpose of this bill. What the bill does, is give Barney the place in history he’s always wanted, as the man who put through the nation’s first non-discrimination bill for gay and lesbian Americans. It’s not that it doesn’t actually protect any of us, it’s that its got his name on it. That is why transgendered Americans had to be thrown under the bus.
For Tax Year 2007 I Will Not Be Bringing My Schedule C Income Onto My Balance Sheet
Via Atrios…
From CNBC: "Citigroup will not be bringing its SIV assets onto their balance sheet."
SIV = Structured Investment Vehicle. The Wiki article isn’t bad…go read it for some insight into why big capital is getting anxious about what’s happening now due to the sub-prime mortgage collapse. Basically what Citigroup is trying to do here is a little creative Enron style shell company book keeping in the hope of propping up their market value. Oh no…those aren’t Our worthless assets…they belong to that company over there…er, the one we created to hold those worthless assets… What’s…astonishing…is how brazen they’re apparently being about it.
And you thought the stock market was the only form of gambling Wall Street did. Oh goodness no…
Laying awake the other early morning, the twin images of Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton kept coming into my mind. Maybe it was the Ambien, but inevitably the choice between those two haunts the fevered brow in the dead of night.
Pay attention here…he’s been prescribed a CPAP machine (which he’s previously written flowery praises of) and he’s taking Ambien on top of that and he Still can’t get to sleep. I was on Ambien myself for a while and I’m here to tell you it knocked me flat.
Problem was, it also fucked with my head. Maybe some day I’ll go into more about the ugly episode in my life when I was dealing with insomnia and was taking sleep medication and eventually put onto a CPAP machine myself. It was an adventure in our modern health care system that taught me in spades how little the system actually cares about your health, as opposed to selling you treatments. There must still be some Baptist left in me because I’m feeling guilty right now as I type this at taking pleasure in the grim ironies in Sullivan’s predicament. He’s been bellyaching ever since Michael Moore’s Sicko came out about how superior the American profit motive health care system is over the socialized health care systems used by every other industrial nation in the world, and there he is, a perfect example of what it does to people. He’s on a CPAP machine, he’s downing Ambiens and he still can’t sleep. But you best believe his doctors have another pill he can take for all of that. And the best part is his sleepless nighttime is haunted by worries over the moral character of the person who will occupy the absolutist presidency left behind by George Bush, a man he once compared in a fit of giddy hero worship to Frodo, and then to Sam in Lord of The Rings.
You know…all that lefty field hippy stuff about eating more whole grains and fresh veggies and wholesome organically grown food and exercising more and keeping your weight down and not pigging out on junk food, really does go a long, long way toward getting you a good night’s sleep without drugs and machines pumping air into your lungs through a mask attached to an air hose. Ask me how I know. Ah…but that’s lefty stuff isn’t it Andrew…and that automatically makes it evil. So you’ll be popping those pills and hooked up to that machine and staring at the ceiling wide awake in the middle of the night for all of that anyway for the rest of your life won’t you?
Keith Mays, creator of the blog mocking men without that extra ‘Y’ chromosome Andrew Sullivan adores, is the creator of many other blogs besides Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians. One of them is titled, People I No Longer Speak To.
So I see Rex Wockner, and Andrew Sullivan are in agreement with John Aravosis that transgendered people have basically hijacked the gay rights movement. Dan Savage is at least on board with the transgender free Barney Frank/HRC bill that just passed the house. Somehow, it’s…unsurprising…to see the "No Fems" contingent bellyaching that they just don’t get the transgendered. Here’s Wockner giving it his best attempt…
I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?
Any deeper then this and Wockner is in danger of getting his own reality TV series. Wille. Wille. You know, not all transgendered persons go the sex reassignment surgery route, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the "No Fems" crowd to have picked up on that. Geeze…and I used to think I had a problem with things female, my libido and my emotions being so relentlessly polarized toward the male sex. But the worst I ever was, was indifferent. I didn’t dislike girls and I don’t now, they just don’t register on my radar like guys do. I like guys. I like being a guy. I like being around guys. I like being made sweet sweet love to by guys. But there really are males, heterosexual ones too amazingly enough, who just get deeply anxious when confronted with anything even vaguely suggestive of femininity, and never more so then when it’s within another guy. I guess they’re afraid of their own dicks falling off or something if they get too close. Notice Wockner’s problem is with "a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts" and "become a woman". Notice further that he’s saying this right after talking up Shannon Minter, born female, now living as a man.
I do, in fact, count myself among those Americans who still don’t fully understand and "get" the whole concept of being born in completely the wrong body. I’ve asked Shannon for a personal, one-on-one crash-course the very next time we’re within range of each other on the national map.
Probably because Shannon is butching it up and Wockner can deal with that better then with a person born male but who considers themselves female. Well let me say I don’t "get" what the goddamned problem is here. Has Wockner, after all this time, never pondered what makes some people gay and others straight? There is a mountain of evidence building now, that sexual orientation is innate, something in our biology, that draws us to mate to our own sex. It’s not in our willies, but in our heads. Is it really that hard to look at this, and consider then that gender expression may also work in some similar way? And for Christ’s sake it’s not like issues of gender haven’t been animating American politics ever since…oh…the feminist movement. I know that serious questioning of whether gender expression is more nature or nurture, biological or sociological, have been tracking alongside the same questions regarding sexual orientation since at least my own teen years and I’m older then any of these three deep thinkers (Aravosis doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of this at all so much as machine gun jerking his knee…)
I think my eureka moment came some decades ago while reading an article on boys who had been born with deformed or missing genitals and were, shortly after birth, surgically assigned a female gender and raised as girls. Tragically, horribly, it didn’t work. There was one boy in particular, who said he’d kept on reflexively trying to pee standing up all through his childhood. That opened my eyes. As it turns out, it’s not what we have between our legs that makes us masculine or feminine, it’s what we have between our ears.
What T’s have in common with LGB’s is that primary opposition to all of you comes from your subversion of proper, binary, complementary gender roles. You may be quite different from the inside, but from the outside you look similar. I heard my southern baptist grandfather give a sermon in which one of the ills of the modern world was "men not wanting to be men." I’m pretty sure he had gays in mind.
Surely you know this.
To which Sullivan reliably babbles…
If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don’t conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?
Not to worry Andrew, a lot of gay folk don’t regard you as being part of our community either. Not after you swooned over the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy laws because he thought they were a valid expression of the morality of the majority of Texans. But, no you drooling moron, the entire point of anti-discrimination laws Is how other people view us, not how we view ourselves.
Yes, yes…we’re all different from one another in so many little ways. Men and women from other men and women. Whites and blacks and Asians from other whites and blacks and Asians. Gays from other gays. How many different sub groups within that vast rainbow of humanity that are homosexual? Bigotry on the other hand, ignorantly lumps people together. Since when did prejudice ever make sense? No, the color of your skin doesn’t say anything about the content of your character. Neither does your sexual orientation. Neither does your gender. Neither does your gender expression. And as for why ‘T’s are part of this movement too, well let’s let Jack Chick explain something you need very much to understand:
Now, look at that. No…Really Look At It. Anti-discrimination laws aren’t about how minorities see themselves. What they address is how popular prejudices view and treat minorities. Look At That Image. This is what the bigots see, when they look at us. They don’t see difference one between the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s you idiot. They don’t even admit there is such a thing as sexual orientation. let alone something called transgender. To them, it’s all sex perversion. You’re a man and you’re having sex with other men and that means as far as they’re concerned, that you’re acting like a woman. Never mind you don’t think you are. It’s not about what you think. Butch it up until you’re growing hair on your palms and it still won’t matter to them. They see a man making himself into a woman. They see gender non-conformity. In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1969, I was taught that as a literal truth: that homosexual men think they’re really women. You’ll always be a fairy to the bigots Sullivan.
None of us, the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s behave according to the gender expectations of the majority. That’s why we’re discriminated against. That’s the stinking rotten core of it, along with a healthy dose of misogyny. Men rule, women serve men, wives gracefully submit to their husbands who are the head of the household and all is right with the world. Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered people all throw that nice neat little "natural order" into question and they can’t deal with it. But you need to understand that the problem from their perspective isn’t that you’re homosexual. Many of them insist there is no such thing as a homosexual to begin with, merely damaged heterosexuality. Their problem is that you’re a man who, by having sex with other men, makes himself into a woman. That’s the thinking going on here. They see no distinction, zero, zilch, nada, between a transgendered individual and a homosexual. None.
And this is why any anti-discrimination law that does not include gender expression in it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Incrementalism is fine I suppose, when it actually gets you somewhere. Civil Unions before marriage. Okay…I can dig that. I don’t like it but I can dig it. At least Civil Unions are a step forward; at least they’re something. The EDNA passed last week is nothing but hot air and a bunch of preening politicans and HRC lobbyists patting themselves on the back for appearing to be doing something when all along they were too goddamned timid to actually fight for something honestly worthwhile because that might be risky. You know…behaving like democrats always do these days. Any bigot with half a brain can simply say they fired you because you weren’t conforming to their company gender norms, not because of your homosexuality. And Barney Frank has given them the green light to do that, by insisting that the law Specifically omits gender expression as a protected catagory. Lambda Legal has been all over this big honking loophole, and Frank and HRC (say…I thought you didn’t like them Andrew) went ahead and did it anyway.
But then…why someone who doesn’t believe in anti-discrimination laws in the first place is bellyaching about including ‘T’s, when he thinks ‘G’s and ‘L’s and ‘B’s shouldn’t be protected classes either is beyond me. I guess you just have to jerk your knee at every fucking thing that liberals are for, or that you imagine they’re for. The guy who once said that liberals might mount a fifth column against the war on terror is certainly no stranger to how bigots think is he? And I see that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton has you back to nearly full time snarling at the Clintons again hasn’t it? Jesus Christ you are one big fucking bundle of surly knee jerk reflexes aren’t you?
Instead of writing the transgendered out of EDNA, maybe Barney should have just written "No Fems…" into it. That would have made you guys happy, wouldn’t it?
No fems please…we’re all manly cocksuckers here. Hey…don’t get me wrong…I’m a big fan of Y chromosomes myself. Just not the big stupid ones.
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Ben Franklin
A southwest Idaho woman accused of setting fire to a mounted bison head at her ex-husband’s home faces arson charges. Police arrested Ryann Jean Stafford, 26, Thursday on a charge of third-degree arson, a felony.
Investigators said Stafford and her former spouse got into an argument at his home. But after he left the house, police said Stafford began throwing objects and then used a lighter to ignite the mounted head.
I’m sitting here wondering if the Bison head was there when she married him. Did he put it there to spite her? To drive her crazy? Hey honey…you ever notice how the bison’s eyes seem to follow you around the room…? Did he give it to her as a gift and she filed for divorce immediately thereafter? Was it a prized memento from their honeymoon? Were they fighting over who gets it in the settlement? Did he name it after her? After her mother?
Note to self: Marital bliss is probably not enhanced by tacking large dead animal heads to the wall. On the other hand, I used to know a gay couple who had a buffalo hide rug and they said it was absolutely their favorite thing to have sex on.
My brother and I were talking last night about the sub prime loan whirlwind and the housing market drop. He’s a home improvement contractor and business where he lives is actually still very good for him (he has a good name in the market where he does business). But he’s been renting now for ages and he’d like to buy if home prices would just come down a little. Unlike a lot of folks, he wasn’t the type to be suckered in by any of the creative financing schemes that are currently causing people to loose their homes, and CEOs to loose their jobs.
Anyway…I just thought he (and you) would appreciate this little blurb today from Atrios…
Deep Thought of the Day
Nobody could have predicted that it might not be such a good thing if the issuers of loans have little incentive to issue good loans.
-Atrios 09:27
There’s a big part of the problem right there. The other big part, is that the anti-government republicans are in charge, and they could be reliably counted on to look the other way while Wall Street went crazy with other people’s money.
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