Schadenfreude and beer

From the Washington Post, Sunday 28 September, p. A3:

While New York City has

enjoyed the fruits of Wall Street's decade of dizzying success <...> for many, who didn't share in the spoils, there is a certain sense of schadenfreude — enjoying the new misery of the formerly wealthy.
<..>
"It's going to take their breath away, because they're going to have to deal with the reality that all the rest of us do. I think there's going to be a lot of people on the therapist's couch — a very typical New York thing. People are going to start drinking a lot."

Schadenfreude indeed. Sometimes it is about the beer.

In DC, a sad day for books & records

From olssons.com:

Olsson Enterprises, Inc., trading as Olsson's Books & Records, Record & Tape Ltd., and Olsson's Books announced today that it has closed all of its locations and petitioned the U.S. Bankruptcy Court District of Maryland for conversion of its current Chapter 11 protection to Chapter 7.

The reasons given for the petitioning were stagnant sales, low cash reserves, and an inability to renegotiate current leases, along with a continuing weak retail economy and plummeting music sales.<..>

Olsson's was established in 1972 and grew to as many as nine retail stores in the Washington, D.C. metro area with sales over $16 million a year and as many as 200 employees. Currently there are five retail stores: Reagan National Airport, Old Town Alexandria, Arlington Courthouse, Crystal City, and one in Northwest Washington at Dupont Circle. Olsson's earned its reputation as a locally-owned community-oriented retailer with a knowledgeable staff selling a wide selection of books, music, video and gifts. <..>

John Olsson, principal owner, Washington native and graduate of Catholic University had this to say, "Although it is certainly a sad day for us, I can rejoice in all the great memories of my life in retail in Washington. I began at Discount Record Shop on Connecticut Avenue in the fall of 1958, and worked there until 1972 when I left to open my own record store at 1900 L Street. Along the way books were added, more locations, a couple thousand employees, and many thousands of customers. It was exhilarating.

• Post your memories here.
• I was alerted to this announcement by the Washington Post's IT columnist Rob Pegoraro, at his Twitter site.

Spinning the prez debate

Results from a CNN poll of television viewers of last evening's presidential candidate's debate in Mississippi between Senators Obama and McCain had

Obama winning overall by a margin of 51-38. The poll suggests that Obama is opening up a gap on connectedness, while closing a gap on readiness.

Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you”. This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually speaking to middle class voters. Per the transcript, McCain never once mentioned the phrase “middle class” (Obama did so three times).

And Obama’s eye contact was directly with the camera, i.e. the voters at home. McCain seemed to be speaking literally to the people in the room in Mississippi, but figuratively to the punditry.

In a reversal of previous results, the same poll showed that the debate watchers

thought that Obama “seemed to be the stronger leader” by a 49-43 margin

The best line of the evening didn't take place during the debate. It belonged to Fox News bloviator Sean Hannity:

"Unfortunately, I think Obama won this debate," said Dick Morris on Hannity and Colmes.

"I don't know which debate you were watching, Dick," said Sean Hannity. "It was book knowledge."

Book knowledge! Fahrenheit 451 all over again, eh Sean?

another abrogation

Substitute Commander-in-Chief for Secretary (of the Treasury) and there's a frightening sense of deja-vu to the 1-trillion dollar* bail-out bill as submitted by the Bush administration.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Paulson's Folly
American Spectator
Robert Kuttner
22 September 2008

Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bush: You ask us to allow you to take the US from democratic capitalism to nationally socialized business. Your proposal is a startling alteration to the basic structure of our economy.

Why no oversight?

And, as Fishbowl DC said:

Sorry New York: last week proved that Washington is the financial capital of the world.

* The oft-quoted figure of 700 billion dollars, officials admit, is only guess. Nobody knows.

Socialism

We're told: We need smaller government, we need less regulation. That is, until greed and catastrophe threaten to ravel the warp and woof of the nation. Then we're told that we must privatize profits and socialize the risk. How ironic it is that

George W. Bush, champion of privatizing the Social Security program, decides to socialize the U.S. financial system instead.

But who will pay the 1 trillion dollar price tag?

We will, to some extent. But most of that debt will fall to our children and theirs. And that's a threat to the moral fabric of the nation.

More from Notions Capital.

Priorities?

A memorial in Falls Church, Va. to 9/11 victims has been removed ―by the artist― after complaints ...

... complaints about nudity.

"The Dust Cries Out," built by Northern Virginian artist Karen Swenholt, was installed Sept. 8 on Great Falls Street in Falls Church. It features two life-size nude figures resembling the dust-covered survivors of the Twin Towers collapse, with arms reaching toward the sky.

Mrs. Swenholt, 54, says she received permission to place the statue on a lot next to her home that is owned by VDOT.

But little more than a week later, the Northern Virginia Fairfax Permits Office told Mrs. Swenholt that it had received complaints from neighborhood residents about the nudity. The office also told her she had not obtained a proper permit.

Critics, threat mar 9/11 statue
Sculptor takes display home
Michael Drost THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Thursday, September 18, 2008

Go here to see photos and my earlier post about the statue and the anonymous note left at its base.

Beagles for Obama

Ethel Mae shows her preference.

Beagles for Obama
Originally uploaded by cizauskas

Business Socialism

My Republican friends tell me: you liberals, you just want to redistribute wealth, you just expect government handouts.

Robert Reich —Secretary of Labor under President Clinton— had the proper response, which he wrote this Monday on his blog, before the US government takeover of AIG.

a free-market-loving Republican administration is presiding over the most ambitious intrusion of government into the market in almost anyone's memory.

It's socialism for the wealthy, for business.

As to what to do instead, or rather to forestall this in the future, Reich continued:

Not to socialize capitalism with bailouts and subsidies that put taxpayers at risk. If what's lacking is trust rather than capital, the most important steps policymakers can take are to rebuild trust. And the best way to rebuild trust is through regulations that require financial players to stand behind their promises and tell the truth, along with strict oversight to make sure they do.

We tell poor nations they have to make their financial markets transparent before capital will flow to them. Now it's our turn.

Why Wall Street is Melting Down, and What to Do About It

Hurricane relief (and a useful charity resource)

A good resource for matching donation to need.

Putting lipstick on the pig (the post-convention bounce, that is)

538.com has offered up an interesting analysis of the post-convention (ok, Palin) bump for McCain.

He is indeed up ... but most of that gain is in strong Republican base areas. He/she is appealing to those states where the Republicans should have already been strong. A better measure of tracking the election will be available at the end of September, when the convention speeches will be gauzy memories.

the popular vote and the Electoral College are significantly diverging. Although the Republicans seem to be polling stronger than they were in the pre-convention period almost everywhere, the differences are much larger in traditionally red states, particularly in the South and the rural West (Colorado and Nevada, by the way, are not rural states).
<...>

McCain's gain in our popular vote projection has been 2.1 points. Note, however, that his gains have been less than that in essentially all of the most important swing states, including Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Only Virginia is on the other side of the line, and then only barely so.

As a result of all this, the Electoral College remains too close to call, even though McCain has a 1-2 point advantage in the popular vote.

That last sentence points to a potential Electoral College situation in which that anachronistic system could again trump democracy:

Obama now has an 8.4 percent chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, which is far and away the highest that this number has been all year. And that number may get larger rather than smaller, once polling filters in from other red states like Texas, Nebraska and South Carolina.

The 538 of the site's name refers to the total number of Electoral College votes. Assuming only McCain and Obama win the electoral votes —not a Constitutional given, by the way, but that's a discussion for another day— the magic number for victory is 270.

The Dust Cries Out

The Dust Cries Out
Originally uploaded by cizauskas

Walking the dogs this morning, I stopped to view The Dust Cries Out, a sculpture, only erected this week, commemorating the victims of the 9/11/01 attacks.

The sculpture can be found at the city limits of Falls Church, Va.

Then ... I saw this note which had been placed by someone on the back base of the sculpture.
[UPDATE 2008.09.14: Local coverage at Blueweeds, a Falls Church, Va. blog.]

[UPDATE 2008.09.18: Statue removed over neighborhood complaints of nudity.]

Remembering

I was having a cup of coffee in the living room of my rowhouse in Baltimore, Md. On the television set was the ABC network's morning show. That was much to the vexation of my stepdaughter, who would have preferred the more appropriate Clifford the Big Red Dog.

It was 8:45 in the morning; she and I would soon be walking to her school.

A breaking news report interrupted the program.

My stepdaughter remained home that day with my wife and me.

It was September 11, 2001.

Remembering.

"Iron my shirt," part 2

Seantor Hillary Clinton and Governor Sarah Palin. "What if," Anne E. Kornblut asks in the Washington Post, "the roles had been reversed?"

What if, back in the 1990s, Clinton had announced the pregnancy of an unmarried, teenaged daughter? Would the Republicans have declared it an off-limits family matter and declined to judge her, or would it have turned into a national scandal that hurt her chances as she decided to pursue her own career in elected office?

What if, instead of the GOP's new vice presidential candidate, Clinton had been the one to run for national office without any international experience to speak of? (After all, Clinton's rivals diminished the relevance of her eight years as first lady, saying they counted for little on her résumé.)

And what if Clinton had rejected questions about her record by calling such lines of questioning sexist? What if she had refused to name any national security decisions she had made, as a spokesman for Sen. John McCain did on Palin's behalf last week, on the grounds that the question was unfair?

A 12 billion dollar victory?

Senator Obama appeared last week on Bill O'Reilly's program on the Fox network.

O'Reilly, ostentatiously using big words like "perspicacious", behaved like, well, O'Reilly: "Why won't you say 'I was wrong about the surge,'" he badgered and interrupted.

Obama politely responded: Despite the surge, "the Iraqis still have not taken responsibility. We [the US] are spending $10-12 billion dollars per month."

Gustav: so far, so-so good

In New Orleans, it's so far so-so good, but remembering that the city's submersion three years ago occurred after Katrina had moved past, any assessment of the city's current safety needs to wait. The fate of the neighboring lands is not so good.

NEW ORLEANS - A weakened Hurricane Gustav slammed into the heart of Louisiana's fishing and oil industry Monday, avoiding a direct hit on flood-prone New Orleans and boosting hope that the city would avoid catastrophic flooding.

Wind-driven water was sloshing over the top of the Industrial Canal's floodwall, but city officials and the Army Corps of Engineers said they expected the levees, still only partially rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina, would hold. <..>

The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Gustav hit around 10:30 a.m. EDT Monday near the Cocodrie, a low-lying community in Louisiana's Cajun country about 72 miles southwest of New Orleans. <...>

While New Orleans avoided a direct hit, the storm could be devastating where it did strike. For most of the past half century, the bayou communities that thrived in the Barataria basin have watched their land literally disappear. A combination of factors — oil drilling, hurricanes, river levees, damming of rivers — have destroyed marshes and swamps that once flourished in this river delta.

Entire towns in the basin of the Mississippi delta have disappeared because of land loss. The rates of loss are among the highest in the world; erosion has left it with virtually no natural buffer.

Associated Press
12:30PM
1 September 2008