These prices are insane!!!!

Welcome my friends to the bear market that never ends. Today, Pakistan and Iceland are on the verge of bankruptcy as per the wires. The Nikkei fell close to ten percent. Interesting fact: even though money is cheap for banks to lend, the yield curve is too flat for the banks to make money. So the banks are all dressed up and no place to go. It is almost heads you lose, tails, I don't win.

Maybe we should swap Xmas and Halloween, because retail sales are going to be scary. Rio-the stock not the company-is down in the teens from the forties just since Feb; and they are a hard asset company.Who owns the Trojan brand? People are not going to stop humping, and can't afford a kid in this economy, so I see a play there. Their vibrating condom is also a winner...or so I hear.

It is telling that oil is down below 90, yet we are still significantly over $3 a gallon for gas. And they are still selling those bullshit 1.5L containers of ice cream for the price of a half gallon. I like BJ's-no you perverts the warehouse store-because you can hedge toilet paper and tuna fish. Oh well, looks like I will be spendingmore money in BJ's than on...

Good morning suckers...

My name is Maurice; and I am a sucker. I pay my bills, and when I had a mortgage, I paid it on time. But now I see that our government never valued people like me; instead, it values "risk takers". And now, by adding another $700 billion to "buy bad loans", they are showing me that good guys do indeed finish last.

Let's see, my jackass neighbor will get to stay in his house, despite the fact that he never pays his bills, and put down nothing for his house. Of course, my taxes will go up, because my income comes from work, not from dividends. Oh yeah, I also get screwed, because the money I have managed to save, has just been devalued by the government printing money (anyone see the rise in the price of oil and the price of the Euro lately?)

Guess what? The talking heads are now saying we cannot afford a "middle class tax cut"; yet they are not pulling back on ending the Bush tax cuts.

I am going to take my twelve step program for economic suckerism. The first step is acknowledging that I am a sucker. The second is acknowledging that there are things the government will now do to me that I cannot control. My third is accepting that I am a peon in the larger economic scheme...Oh screw it, I am going to buy a bigger HDTV and get "No Money Down, No Payments Till 2012" financing. My days of being a sucker are over.

How to ruin governments and eviscerate people

When an entity truly hates people, one should not be surprised at the extent said entity will go to cause mayhem. We have seen it before, in examples as small as the jilted lover who says "If I can't have him/her nobody will", to Sadaam Hussein setting the Kuwaiti oilwells on fire in GW1. What we are seeing now in our society is an organized hated of a segment of our population, and the attempt to ruin it, regardless of the collateral damage. And if you do not believe that the folks behind this will not create collateral damage, just ask the families of the 4000+ dead, and the thousands of injured and raped soldiers of the current war.

The problem with a democracy, if you are part of the organized effort, is that it is democratic. In a sense, anyone with a vote, no matter how stupid, or radical thinking, pretty much cancels your vote. And now, knowledge is not monopolized, making the old saw "knowledge is power" a little different. So how do you control a government? You cripple its ability to function. And a government cannot function without money or resources. Of course, you gotta protect your "base". How do you do that? You decrease the amount that they have to render unto Caesar. Once that is done, you ruin the economy. Now your boys have gotten out with enough to keep them comfortable, and they are able to keep more of what they plundered, and you mop up the idiot sons who did not have enough sense to get out with "bridge loans".

But wait, what about the little guy and gal, who like a squirrel, was just trying to get a nut. SCREW THEM!!!! They did not buy into the system of government we tried to feed them, so let them suffer. Hey we never cared about them before now, so we will not lose any sleep going forward. Just to show you how ruthless we can be, we will have the First Chick wear $300, 000 worth of swag to the coronation just to make a point. You guys are little people, and as the dearly departed Leona Hemsley said before she willed $12 million to her dog, "The little people pay taxes".

Poor you. You expect to have good schools and clean water and safe streets. Well we can't afford it now. We need to protect ourselves from the "terrorist threat" and "shore up our economy". We all have to make sacrifices; Muffy and I are using the jet to get to the yatch less and less. Just think about how we are suffering.

And so it starts. Now that your pension fund is screwed, we should privatize Social Security to give you a better chance of getting even. And funding for schools will have to go down. And the potholes on the Interstate? Well you can't afford gas for the SUV you can't sell, so don't worry about it. For those of you who read my "Big Trends of 2008" letter, you know what I am talking about. The transfer from people to government and from domestic to foreign has begun. The desire to create a smaller government has started in earnest, and we may not have a way back, because even if we vote the bums out, the mess is neutron bomb like.

You have to hand it to them; their plan worked perfectly.

Halloween comes early this year

I bet the big sellers for masks this year will be those of Hank Paulson, Dick Fuld, and Ben Bernanke. And people will decorate their houses with bonds of Fannie and Lehman.

Folks sit down if you are reading this: this fiasco will cost our government at least $1.5 TRILLION DOLLARS to correct. Do the math: $200 billion for Fannie and Freddie as a start; $85 billion for AIG as a start; $30+billion for Bear; at least $75 billion for Citibank in two to three weeks: and about $125 billion for the lesser known banks like bumfuck trust in Media, Pa. And that is for starters.

But do not despair, there is some hedge fund guy out there getting his knob polished because he made a tremendous contraian bet. I think it was Paul Tudor Jones who made about $2 billion dollars in one year betting against subprime. There is a guy out there who had a huge bet against Fannie and Freddie months ago. I find it interesting that folks can not be both negative and positive about stocks, i.e. both go short and go long, depending on the situation. Did anyone think that oil could stay over $130-140? Goldman did, but when little old ladies who only drive on Sundays bitch about gas prices, they have gotten too high. When Google goes to $650, yet advertisers are pulling back ad dollars in tv, radio, and print, can it still go to $750? If Dell is selling computers on Ubid and Ebay, can their business really be that good( the drop in share price from $26 to $16 in the last three months says NO).

Remember my friends, be like David Carradine in Kung Fu: maintain balance depending on the circumstance. Or be like Marcellus Wallace and go medieval on a mofo when you get f''ed in the butt by the market. Just don't let your candy get taken and your house egged...

Dear President McCain

Okay, you win. I did not think it would happen, but someone once said you'll never go broke underestimating Americans. I thought that issues which threaten our very way of life would be important, since our health care system sucks, the baby boomers are about to decimate the economy, and our infrastructure is about to need major upgrades. But it looks like I was wrong, and I am a big enough person to admit it.

I really thought Obama had a chance. But I forgot the Democrats are famous for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. They have never learned that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. The true conservative wing of the Republican party hates you, but they hate mamby pamby Democrats even more. Your party is even letting the American people pay for your campaign, while the national party has raised more to help take back the Congress. Oh, and how is it that you take crap from someone for months, then humiliate them, put them in debt, yet basically give them YOUR convention? WTF is that? Oh yeah, that's the Democratic party way. Oh, and a note to perpetual Senator Obama, if you are going to a DEBATE at a church, have a Goddamn decent answer to the abortion question that you know is going to come up.

President McCain, I know it's your world, and I am just a squirrel trying to get a nut, but I hope you will listen to a few suggestions. One, despite your win, Americans are still by and large, idiots. Just look at the poll of folks who think their houses have INCREASED in value over the past three years. Optimism is one thing, stupidity is another. Two, a country cannot be both free and enslaved at the same time. This is a corollary to my first point. Our educational system is in shambles, despite No Child Left Behind. Even the kids coming from "good" schools are lacking. We have gone from gentleman's C's to gentleman's A's in colleges, in order for these schools to say they have high GPA's. If we do not educate our population, get off oil or at least provide additional alterantives, and provide true health care for everyone, we will be beholden to the highest bidder, and will make Hedda Nusbaum look like Laura Croft-(Sorry if you do not get either reference, but that's sort of my point.)

Listen, I can not wait for the parties, I think your suggestion that your wife would make a good "Miss Sturgess" biker chick is rad, and I pretty much enjoy seventy-five degree weather in DC in January, so I am breathlessly awaiting your reign. Please remember to take you Ginko and to wear your sunblock, and if InBev tries to screw with Budweiser and your wife's company's earnings, I am sure that you will be able to find some good old boys to invade France and show them who is boss...or is it a Belgium company? I forget.

Anyway, good luck, God Bless, you rock!!!!

Yours truly,
A Democrat whose butt is sore

Wanted: Someone Oblivious To What's Going On Around Them

Can you imagine taking on a job in which most of your customers either hate you or distrust you, your budget is totally screwed, and those who support your endeavor are in such bad shape that they may not survive? Welcome to the next President of the United States nightmare.

There are so many places to begin, but I will pick a few:

1) The economy. Oil prices will be back up as the Xmas price cut goes away(got to help the retailers lure the lemmings into the stores one last time), and the resurgence of the Chinese demand comes back on line. There will be the end of the availability to borrow from the Fed, and the housing crisis will be entering the FOURTH INNING.

2) The budget. $481 billion dollars? Ha!!! That does not include the war, rising Medicare costs, decrease tax revenues, and increased demands from states and retirees. Will we be able to get out of Iraq, or will we be going into Afghanistan/Iran? Oh yeah, in order to borrow more money, interest rates will be so high, that Tony Soprano would blush at the vig.

3) Inflation, also known as they want what we got. There are more Indian school kids than there are American citizens. DC should be called flan city as opposed to chocolate city. And 60,000 cars a month come on line in China every month means the demand for goods goes way up. Good for Cisco; bad for the rest of us.

4) Energy. This one is tough, because I see little old ladies freezing to death, and families dying in fires because they cannot afford heating oil or to pay their gas and electric bills. Gasoline will be back up, and no significant change in energy policy is forthcoming from the current Congress. While everyone will be talking a good game, we will still be lusting after Alaskan oil, clean coal, spent nuclear fuel storage, and unicorn based biofuels. Oh yeah, ethanol actually decreases fuel economy while increasing food costs. That's supply side economics for you.

I am surprised that any sane person would want to be POTUS. Then again, how many of the previous POTUSes did not have something a little off kilter? An actor, a redneck, and a C student who thinks he is a cowboy? Maybe it is us who are a little off kilter...

Terrorism comes in all flavors.

In my current life, I deal in the medical industry. One of the ironic things in medicine is how practitioners disproportionately value thwarting one type of death versus another. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent trying to save one premie, yet Medicaid shortchanges funding for vaccines. Millions, if not billions are spent on the last days of elderly patients' lives, which many feel is futile, while healthy seniors can not get blood pressure monitors covered.

I say this because our government also values certain lives more than others. My heart goes out to the over 3000 victims of the 9/11 attacks. I lost people I knew from college in the attacks. Millions have been paid to compensate their survivors. And close to a trillion dollars have been spent "trying" to fight the supposed perps of the attacks.

Yet we devalue the over 4000 who have lost their lives fighting the war. Whether it was shipping the bodies back home like so many Ipods without honor or fanfare initially, or lying to their parents about the nature of their deaths, as in the case of Pat Tillman, our soldiers, who are put on a pedestal by false patriots, are given short shrift. In fact, soldiers for a time, were only given less than $100,000 in death benefits until a few Senators became outraged.

And even this is not the most outrageous sin to me. The fact that women are becoming sacrificial lambs to satisfy the bloodlust of soldiers who can't rape and kill enough Iraqis, and the fact that our military addresses the issue by telling the families of such victims that they "committed suicide" is abominable.

I have read stories of soldiers and female contractors being raped and told to be silent, and of raped soldiers being killed to cover up the attacks. But this story in Alternet:http://www.alternet.org/blogs/waroniraq/93071/, turned my stomach in a way no other story has. Was it that she was a woman, or a Black woman, that she was treated worse than a dog?

And yet, we have a President and Vice President who both have daughters, and a Secretary of State, who is a woman, who have been relatively silent on this issue. A friend of mine works as a social worker at a VA. She tells me that to a woman, all the female soldiers have a history of sexual abuse. The unlucky ones, it seems, are the ones who survived.

It seems that in order to hunt down certain terrorists, we only have to look at our neighbors, or in the mirror...