I wish they'd stop "saving" my hide

yeah, we'd get a lot more viewers if we focused exclusively on BrAngelina too, but I'm not gonna do it...wouldn't be prudent.

Anyway.....no they didn't save us.

This was not a case of a system that failed because it needed tweaking. We were robbed, it's been neatly covered up by traditional rhetoric and meaningless partisan hackery, and with a bit of "regulatory reform" rather than actual fact finding, it will all be forgotten and the ponzi scheme continues.

Here's an eye opening (and lengthy) article from those right wing lunatics at Rolling Stone

The Rules of the Game

(Matt's reply:)
Oh yeah, our blog where we don't mention political parties, names of politicians or the title of the predominant political movement of our lifetimes! That ought to draw a lot of eyeballs. Bring a book!
OK, I screwed up. In truth, I have labored mightily to scrub the proper nouns from my blogging, and found it interesting. But I deserved the dope-slap, I suppose, and will labor anew.
I find we agree more than we disagree. No politician wants to have a General Motors -- or our entire financial sector -- fail on their watch, even if the decay set in many watches ago. So they intervened: Yes, to save their hides, but also to save ours.
Let's not forget, Ed, how bad things were last fall. The financial sector -- the biggest part of our economy -- froze up, and would have remained frozen if not for government intervention. How can government not act in such a case?
It was too late to act on the issue of "too big to fail," it was a fait accompli. The predominating political ideology of the previous decades had allowed these mammoth, crooked institutions to leverage themselves out over the cliff. Then they came crying to Uncle Sam when they fell off. Now the guys who won the battle of ideas get to stand around and see for themselves what they have wrought. Neither of us much likes the way the old game was played, or umpired. I'm saying we need a new game! One where we all admit the ref is fair and the honest player can really win.

If they're so evil, stop saving them

by Ed

First of all, you're in violation of blog rules. Throwing the term conservative around as if it somehow bolsters your argument is a no no. Argue ideas, not straw men. You're not debating "conservatives" or "republicans" or "right wing zealots". I'm nobody's spokesmodel. The name's Ed. Address your concerns directly to me.

Washington didn't bail out the banks to save Wall Street or even Main Street. They did it to save their own phony baloney hides. If the "too big to fail" were allowed to fail, investigations might have been held into exactly why everyone was loaning money to people they knew damn well couldn't pay it back. Better to sweep it all under the rug with a few trillion tax payer dollars.

It's ridiculous to keep hammering on big business and industrial giants while at the same time taking my money and giving it to them "for my own good". STOP HELPING ME PLEASE!! If they're a bunch of evil no good crooks, here's a novel idea, LET THEM FAIL!

Of course free markets need rules and enforcement mechanisms just like a good football game needs referees. When the refs start arbitrarily awarding points to one team, tying bricks around the ankles of others or flat out trying to play it for them, it really takes all the enjoyment out of it.

Transparency and accountability would go much farther in ensuring fair markets than another round of regulation that the nobody involved has any intention of enforcing. Regulatory reform is just a white wash. We can all feel good because the problems have all been fixed. They passed a new bill. Wake up and smell the horse......

Regulatory Reform: About Freakin' Time

By Matt -- One year after last fall's meltdown of the U.S. and global financial markets, the leaders of the world's 20 biggest economies are meeting to discuss long overdue regulatory changes. We should be cheering, and some of us are, because we don't want to go again down the merry path my conservative friends have held us to since the 1980s. Time and again over the last three decades, their laissez-faire faith in the free market's wisdom and ethics have led us to the brink of disaster. Sensible regulation will lead us back.
The G-20 leaders are considering moves that just make sense: 1) to sustain and then wind down the stimulus packages that, regrettably, governments must implement when economies falter. 2) to implement new bank capital rules and, finally, 3) to rein in financial industry excesses. While we can't expect to see outright limits on executive pay, as some European nations have argued, we ought to, considering the damage that these high-rollers have done.
Let's not forget, as time passes, just how close we were to real disaster. Titans of Wall Street were falling like dominoes, financial markets froze and the Dow plummeted. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were disappearing every month. It really looked like the end of capitalism as we know it. And it was.
For too long, conservative ideologues have ruled the roost in the White House and in the Washington think-tanks which pull the strings behind our political parties. These people got what they wanted: Deregulation, a loosening of restrictions on financial markets and banking activity, runaway executive pay and ever-lower taxes for the richest Americans. These were the thinkers in the driver's seat when the car went over the cliff. Now that we've had to pay to haul the thing out of the ditch and put it back on the road, we don't just want a new driver. We want the previous driver admit that he was wrong, or drunk.
We will be setting new rules of the road that may keep these folks from driving so fast and recklessly in the future, as well we should. Let's hope the cops are watching the road more closely from now on. And with that, I will yield this belabored analogy.

For Men? Damn right!

From Matt: Let this be a lesson to me about failing to meet my blogging obligations in a timely manner. I was hunting high and low for a good topic to out-debate my buddy Ed, and had settled for limits on Wall Street pay and the necessity of strict financial regulation. But too late! Ed has punctually and bravely taken the position that Day Spas are Not for Men. I must offer a counterpoint! En garde!
I'd go to a good day spa in a New York minute. I once dated an esthetician, someone trained in the proper treatment of the skin. This is when I learned that everything I have been doing in the shower all my life is wrong (I kind of thought so).
She forced me to abandon my Ivory soap, explaining that continued use of it would cause my epidermis to shrivel, crack and fall off in pieces. Ivory robs the skin of oils, which she said was bad. I said I thought I was trying to get oil off my skin. Wrong again!
Men generally have no thoughts about their skin unless it is either on fire or missing in places. Consequently we look like hell all the time, unless we get with the program.
Look, fellow 40-plus guys, it's 2009. We've been living in the future for years now, and here in the future, men take care of themselves. We are off the couch and running around the block, building the kind of endurance that our 20-something-year-old galpals expect of us. We are shaving our heads, using plenty of moisturizing body wash and begging the dentist for another shot of prescription teeth whitener. We are flossing, brushing, waxing and loofah-ing in a frantic effort to hold back the tide of age, and because looking at a man vaguely resembling our fathers in every mirror is starting to freak us out.
Look, once you've started going to the chiropractor, how much farther can it be to the day spa, a couple blocks? Why use the blanket the dog sleeps on when the wife's new snuggie smells a lot better? Here in the future, "manly" means "stuff men do to impress women." And trust me, those women are harder than ever to impress.
Pot belly? It's gotta go, dude. Flabby arms? Man up! Pasty, bumpy skin? I'm sure that little blondie across the office is going out of her mind with desire.
Hey, middle-aged guys, your winning personality and knowledge of football trivia alone isn't going to cut it with the ladies anymore, and let's face it, you're not able to throw money around like Mikey Bloomberg. You've gotta give the ladies something to look at. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a date this afternoon and I'm out of moisturizer...

For Men? I don't think so.

Technically, it was Matt's turn to start a thread, but he's been delinquent in his duties, so I'm going to take the liberty.

I want to address an issue of utmost importance. It came up during a networking meeting, when our featured speaker did her presentation on Mary Kay, or Avon, or whatever it was. Anyway, most of the products and samples were for the women, but she said "Don't worry, I didn't leave the guys out completely" and proceeded to show us the samples of scented hand lotion...for men. She went on to say that it was perfect for times like when your hands had been covered with motor oil or engine grease, or dinged up from hard work. I beg to differ.

If you're a man and your hands get all dingy and dirty and the bar soap or even the dish soap didn't do the trick, there are several acceptable options. You can use the goopy, gritty brown stuff that comes in the big can, a pumice stone, or the best option, kerosene followed by more dish soap. There is no appropriate time for a man to use scented hand lotion. I don't care what the label says.

Another disturbing trend is developing in the apparel world. The fact that it has your favorite college team's logo on it does not make a "snuggy" okay for men to wear, and for Pete's sake, if you do give in to the temptation, don't wear it in public! You might as well put on a skirt and high heels.

Day spas are not for men, even if there is a Sports Illustrated in the lobby and a game on the TV. Manicures and pedicures are not manly in any setting. If the rough edges from the clippers are bothering you, the proper solution is to rub your nails back and forth on your jeans, or better yet, the sidewalk or a brick wall.

These may seem like trivial issues, but if you let it go to far, as happened in the eighties, you get things like Phil Donahue the Bee Gees and the Back Street Boys. We don't want to go back there again.

There is a much better way to get in touch with your feminine side. There are people who are very adept at exploring, displaying and maintaining the feminine side. They're called women. Try talking to one.

Universal Care Equals Apocalypse? Doubt It.

Did you ever stop to wonder why it is that all the other countries in the industrialized world manage to insure all their citizens and we can't? If what Ed fears is true, their economies should have collapsed generations ago. Yet somehow they haven't. The reason is simple: Making sure all your citizens have reasonable access to basic health care is good for your country. Your citizens will thrive and prosper, pay taxes and contribute to the economy. National (or universal) health care works, and has for generations. Nothing remotely like the apocalypse that Ed describes has come to pass in Europe, Canada or Japan. So it need not happen here. That's obvious.
In the rest of the world, no one goes bankrupt because they get sick. But most of the bankruptcies in the US are the result of medical bills. Prevention of millions of personal bankruptcies is only going to help the economy.
When Americans can afford the pain medications and treatment they need but have forgone, they will be able to get more done. More projects, more materials, more jobs.
Despite Ed's insistence, I am happy to live in a country that allows people to invest, to profit and to make absolutely stupid piles of money. But considering the spectacular failure of free market, private health insurance companies to meet the health care needs of all Americans, it is clear that government must step in and offer help. That's what it's there for.
And as to the expense, consider this: The cost for covering all uninsured Americans for the next 10 years -- about $900 billion -- is about equal to how much money the richest Americans saved as the result of a tax cut they got eight years ago. It also about equals the cost of the Iraq war (that one is a full trillion, kiddos).
I know my buddy Ed hates paying taxes. Maybe next time someone wants to invade a foreign land for no coherent reason, I hope I hear him kicking up a fuss. -- By Matt