Author: Greg Saunders

So let me get this straight. For a few years now, the financial industry has made billions in risky subprime loans by essentially tricking people into believing they can borrow more than they’ll be able to pay back and now that this brilliant idea is going south, people are floating the idea of a government bailout. Well, screw ’em. If you’re foolish enough to loan hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who can’t even balance their checkbooks, then you deserve to be as poor as your customers.

Then again, this is all assuming that these creditors were giving out loans in good faith in the first place. The way it looks to me is that these subprime loans were always about locking people into high interest loans for a few years until they went broke after which the banks would take back the house and any more money they can squeeze out of the debtors (thanks, bankruptcy reform!). Once they unload the house, which has almost certainly grown in value, they make a nice profit on top of the cash they gouged out of their now-homeless former customers.

The reason this has all come back to bite lenders in the ass is because they lacked the foresight to realize that when their customers were going broke, everybody else would be going broke as well, which would drive down the value of their repossessed houses and make them harder to unload to the next poor sucker who just wants to move out of an apartment.

In a truly free market economy, we’d be pointing these idiots towards the back of the line at the local soup kitchen, but these guys had a backup plan. They bribed (I mean, “lobbied”) every level of government that’s willing to cash their checks, insisting that if they pay the price for their moronic business practices, the entire economy will suffer. In short, they don’t need government bailouts to help themselves, but to help us.

Tom adding: relevant cartoon here, particularly the last panel.

Ron Paul sucks.

What? You want me to elaborate? Okay, let’s start with this quote from John Derbyshire (of “the best thing he ever did was get kicked in the head by Bruce Lee” fame) :

Ron Paul believes a lot of what you believe, and what I believe. You don’t imagine he’s going to be the 44th POTUS, but you kind of hope he does well none the less.

And why not? Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO; end the War on Drugs; overturn Roe v. Wade; repeal federal restrictions on gun ownership; fence the borders; deport illegals; stop lecturing foreign governments about human rights; let the Middle East go hang. What’s not to like?

First of all, abolishing the IRS is a batshit crazy idea. The idea that you can fix a problem by either abolishing the agency with problems (IRS, Fed) or pulling out completely (UN, NATO) is anarchy. It doesn’t make the need for those organizations go away, it just replaces one set of problems with a worse set of problems.

Ron Paul is one of those “free market” zealots (a scary breed of faith-based politician) who honestly believe unregulated capitalism is the cure for all of society’s ills. We tried that in the late 1800’s and we ended up with the Gilded Age, steel monopolies, children working in factories, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, etc. This “Invisible Hand” bullshit would lead us back to that awful time. Ron Paul’s rhetoric sounds good when you’re trying to get a crowd of people to pump their fists, but in terms of actually solving problems, it’s lunacy.

Another thing, and this can’t be repeated often enough, that Ron Paul caucuses with the Republican Party. The same one that wants to ban gay marriage, ban abortion, has exploded the deficit, etc. Odd that a principled, small government maverick would aid a party that has abandoned every ideal he stands for. It’s enough to make you wonder if “libertarians” like Ron Paul aren’t just a bunch of phonies or sellouts who will support a party whose platform they find abhorrent as long as they get their precious tax cuts.

Of course, the way liberals are jumping on the Ron Paul bandwagon, I can’t help but wonder if their support is equally based on a myopic one-issue platform, even if it means, for example, we get stuck with a small government conservative president who would likely oppose any effort to provide universal healthcare. As long as he ends the war, he can roll back Roe vs. Wade all he wants.

Normally, I’d just end the Ron Paul bashing there, but there’s so much more to cover, like this but from a recent NY Times profile :

A larger vulnerability may be that voters want more pork-barrel spending than Paul is willing to countenance. In a rice-growing, cattle-ranching district, Paul consistently votes against farm subsidies. In the very district where, on the night of Sept. 8, 1900, a storm destroyed the city of Galveston, leaving 6,000 dead, and where repairs from Hurricane Rita and refugees from Hurricane Katrina continue to exact a toll, he votes against FEMA and flood aid.

FEMA and flood aid are pork? I guess he gets points for not being one of those libertarians who favors abolishing everything only to backpedal when you start pointing out all of the things we really need the government to do, but voting against FEMA? Moreover, why is he the lone dissenter in these cases?

In 1999, he was the only naysayer in a 424-1 vote in favor of casting a medal to honor Rosa Parks. Nothing against Rosa Parks: Paul voted against similar medals for Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. He routinely opposes resolutions that presume to advise foreign governments how to run their affairs: He has refused to condemn Robert Mugabe’s violence against Zimbabwean citizens (421-1), to call on Vietnam to release political prisoners (425-1) or to ask the League of Arab States to help stop the killing in Darfur (425-1).

And let’s not forget that he’s a racist too. DailyKos diarist phenry found this choice nugget from the “Ron Paul Political Report” :

Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficultly avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action…. Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.

Oddly enough, Paul’s excuse for this stuff now is that his offensive articles were ghost-written. Don’t worry folks, Ron Paul just outsourced his racist rants.

A friend of mine was in an argument with a Ron Paul cultist the other day whose answer to criticism is that we’re just scared of “people with big ideas”. You know what’s even scarier? People with bad ideas.

Josh Marshall makes an interesting find regarding campaign spending :

Turns out there’s one place GOP prez candidates spent a lot more than their Dem rivals last quarter: direct mail. Don’t want to read too much into one factoid or imply that direct mail is an outmoded campaign money technology. But it was very much a key pillar of what the late 20th century GOP machine was built on. And I would imagine the political future belongs to the digital equivalents of direct mail.

I completely disagree that this is a sign that the Republican party is “slower to make the switch” to more technologically advanced methods of voter outreach. Have you seen direct mail campaign literature? At first glance they look like nonpartisan “voter guides” that give a rundown on the various measures and candidates that will appear on the ballot. It’s only upon closer inspection that people see that they’re carefully constructed bits of Republican propaganda that give the illusion of being impartial. This is where Fox News got their “fair and balanced” trick.

Moreover, despite the higher costs, direct mail has a distinct advantage over other forms of communication. Voters may tune out political ads and instinctively delete mass emails, but they hold on to these flyers until election day. For a week or more before election day, many of the recipients of the GOP direct mail efforts see the same advertisement over and over again, whether it sits in the mail pile, used as a bookmark, or tacked to the refrigerator, these ads make a much more lasting impression than any other type of political communication.

When election day arrives, these voters pull out their “voter guide” to do some research and then march to the polls to vote the way the Republicans told them to. It’s a brilliant move, I just wish our side did it more often.

If I had a nickel for every time CNN aired a story about Evangelical voters under the banner of “Faith and Politics”, I could probably afford to be a Republican.

For those of you remember the cartoon my friend Tom Neely and I produced a few years ago, “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?”, you might be interested in his first book, The Blot. If you live in Los Angeles, the book release party is Friday night :

Friday July 20th Secret Headquarters will proudly host an evening with:

Tom Neely and his new book: The Blot.

Painter and cartoonist Tom Neely’s first graphic novel, “The Blot,” is like a sad song that breaks your heart while reminding you of life’s beauty. “The Blot” follows a nameless everyman who, while dealing with the fallout from a doomed relationship, is stalked by a mysterious black splotch. As the story unfolds, this shape-shifting blot appears as a harmless cloud of ink, a faceless demon, a source of strength and an inescapable darkness, testing our character in a new way with each metamorphosis.

With a drawing style resembling the 1930s newspaper comic strips of E.C. Segar and Floyd Gottfredson, and a surrealistic sensibility inspired by painter René Magritte, Neely eschews traditional, representational comic storytelling and finds innovative new ways to tell an ultimately human story about love and loss.

Accompanying The Blot will be a selection of original art work as well as the introduction of 3 new limited giclée prints of Neely’s paintings. These prints will first be available at SHQ Friday, July 20th.

Tom will be signing copies of The Blot at SHQ from 8pm – 10pm.

My guess is he’ll be drinking beer at SHQ from 10pm – until we decide to close the gates and even then we may lock him in the store. He’ll share some beer with you I’m pretty sure.

His new book is fantastic, so even if you aren’t able to make it to the opening, you should pick up a copy of the book. I’ll be there too, so don’t miss this opportunity to say “Oh…so that’s what that one guy with the website looks like. I thought he’d be thinner. Is there any beer left?”