That thread below? Impostor. I have it from the real Ace that this is the real overnight thread.

How do I know? He's tied up in my basement.

Mine comes with a NSFW cartoon: more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:57 PM | Comments (26)
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NPR just loves this butterball.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said today that this week's meltdown shows the free-market approach long promoted by the United States has, in his words, "collapsed." Chavez may be overstating the case, but as NPR's Tom Gjelten reports, the current financial crisis is causing some rethinking of the free-market gospel, especially in Latin America.

Especially in Latin America? Dude, at best, Latin America's love affair with free market capitalism is best described as "semi-committed, on occasion".

Also I'm not making up that shit about chicken-fried bacon. Check out the entire list. "Fried" seems to be a pretty popular preparation choice. It almost makes me want to bother with the state fair.

Almost.

(pretty sure I saw that chicken-fried bacon thing somewhere over at the Hostages. It's a bacon-friendly blog).

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 09:41 PM | Comments (21)
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Ignore Gabriel's claim of an "overnight thread." He doesn't know what he's talking about.

His "overnight thread" is poor pretender.

It's pathetic, really, when you think about it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 PM | Comments (39)
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I sat down to write about the Senate bailout bill and realized it's all already been said. I continue to oppose the bailout because of the moral hazard associated with progressively bailing out undeserving industries. There are better ways to deal with a credit crisis (losing mark to market is a good start; so is increased Federal lending to make up some of the lost supply). Also, I just don't like to see a bad actor like Secretary Paulson be rewarded for behavior which exacerbated the crisis (this is spiteful, I know, but there it is).

Once Congress gets off the fence and either takes action or unambiguously announces that it will take no action, commercial paper will begin to move more readily again. The fact is, just as borrowers continue to want to borrow, lenders want to do something with that cash. The absolute worst thing they can do is let it sit idle. They're only holding out now because the possibility of getting a better deal out of Congress than each other still appears to be a possibility. The abandonment of the mark-to-market rule is a good first step; raising the FDIC maximums isn't going to make a difference. If Congress absolutely must do something, it would be better to focus on credit and let the failing banks declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy doesn't mean they or their assets disappear. Rather, it means that they will get new owners (hopefully ones that will make better decisions).

Anyway, you've read it all here before and I'm extremely discouraged by passage of the Senate bill.

Consider this an open overnight thread.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:39 PM | Comments (16)
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Via Hot Air's headlines, a steaming cup of rich cocoa with little marshmallows of awesome.

Here's one:

Rep. Barney Frank: I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. . . .

Also very cool: Guess who paid for academic studies "proving" Fannie and Freddie posted "effectively zero" risk?

Do I really need to say? Fannie and Freddie paid for that scholarship themselves.

And I'll tuck this in as an addendum because people will be annoyed if I highlight it: Rep. Shadegg may now support the rescue, given the mark-to-market change and raising of the FDIC maximums.

I know I'm really pushing things to link this guestimate of the odds of serious financial downturn, based on the "wisdom of the markets," as they've expressed themselves thus far.

And phreshone points out a good side of the crisis: European banks are glutted on our bad paper, too, and might also fail.

Okay, I guess that's not really "good" per se, as it increases the chance of a global crisis.

But still-- as far as downsides go, knowing we've screwed Europe more than we've screwed ourselves is sort of as up a downside as you can get.

Thanks, Barney! Roll those dice, chubby man!

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 PM | Comments (17)
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Slipped her mind.

A recent example of Ifill's idea of "balance" in "moderating" a panel.

She had people from two different parties claiming John McCain's temperament is too unstable and mercurial to entrust the presidency to his judgment.

Now that's why I call balance!

Correction: Whoops. That was Ifill's show, Newshour on PBS, but it was actually Judy Woodruff doing the moderating.

Posted by: Ace at 06:39 PM | Comments (117)
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On FoxNews, everyone's talking about the wooden arrows as if they're pork added to the bil.

Here's the explanation for wooden arrows tax breaks:

They didn't attach that crap to this bill. They attached this bill to that crap.

Why? Because all bills dealing with revenues must originate in the House. This one, the wooden arrows tax break one, already came up from the House -- and it already passed the Senate 93-2.

So, to get around that, they took the bill that already passed the House -- one dealing with revenues -- and attached the bailout to it. The bailout bill is not being voted on, technically, itself (rules prevent that), so it's being voted on as an amendment to a House bill already passed.

It's purely a bit of procedural chicanery.

"the Senate is attaching the Treasury bailout to the AMT patch/tax extenders bill (H.R. 6049) that passed the Senate 93-2 last week. Note that this language contains far more tax relief than tax increases (i.e., it is a net tax cut by tens of billions of dollars). Americans for Tax Reform remained silent on the Senate-passed extenders bill and said it was NOT a taxpayer pledge violation."

So, yes, they're taking this legislation very seriously. They had to look for a House-initiated bill, that passed the Senate almost unanimously, in order to attach this bailout as an amendment (just like Dave J and Molon Labe already said.)

Thanks to notropis.

So, if you don't like the tax breaks for wooden arrows -- fair point. But that actually already passed. This rescue bill is just being added to that bill, which already passed, to technically comply with the Constitution's requirement that revenue-raising bills must originate in the House.

(I haven't checked, but a reader tells me the Constitution specifically allows any amendment to a House bill, by the way, so, assuming that's right, it's not unconstitutional. It's just tricksy. I'm observing the rule here, right in 90% of cases, that my readers know their stuff.)

Everyone on Fox is talking as if the tax extenders were added to the bill, rather than the bill being added to the tax-extender bill which had already passed.

Bill Sammon is selling this as some sort of victory for conservative tax cutters, when it was only a procedural gimmick. The tax break extender was already passed.

And they're all still talking wooden arrows.

I didn't understand this myself, so I can't criticize them too much.

But while this has been known since 12:13 pm (not by me, but by others, posted at The Corner), everyone is still talking wooden arrows.

Can the people who read my site from Fox please clue in your associates?

This is going to be demogogued over wooden arrows. Bad bill or not, this demogoguing is off-base.

In Case You're Wondering... No, this doesn't mean that the bailout has now passed in both chambers. The chambers must agree too, and vote for, bills with identical provisions and language.

Obviously this bill is no longer even close to identical to what the House passed.

So now it goes back to the House, which can either pass it as it stands, or the two houses can appoint conferees to work together on a bill that can be submitted back in both houses.

Posted by: Ace at 06:27 PM | Comments (104)
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7-2 Dodgers. The inevitable Cub collapse and Torre's revenge has begun. anyone want to start a pool on how long Cashman retains his job?

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:46 PM | Comments (43)
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Just to let everyone know-- if you've been banned, it's almost certainly a glitch.

Pixy revved up the ban/block software to combat the problem that the site was choking on spam-comments. All that anal sex, young hot teenagers, etc., you frequently see. Well, there's less of that now, because Pixy is blocking it.

I am afraid the system is required to be a bit over-robust to fight these spammers. I think the spammers themselves are using spoofed IP addresses -- so when all these thousands of foreign spammers from China and Africa flood the site, it's likely that once in a while your innocent IP gets banned. Because someone else was spoofing under it.

If this happens, please go to Geobytes to find out what IP you're on, and send it to me. I will forward it to Pixy to see if you've been accidentally banned.

One other thing: To stop lefties from deliberately breaking the blog with humungous URLs, Pixy instituted a block on any comment containing a string of 80 characters or longer. This is why some of you see your comments eaten when you attempt to post links -- the links are longer than 80 characters.

Some of you may have long URLs in your blog name, or may be attempting to post links longer than this.

We'll see about a better solution to this, but for now, www.tinyurl.com always comes up with tiny urls which are 25 characters or shorter and always work.

Posted by: Ace at 05:20 PM | Comments (74)
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Although this is, in fact, an extremely important vote, our genius senators don't seem to be treating it as such, do they?

See Below! Correction! I Was Massively Wrong There's a very interesting reason for this. Forget what I just said.

Those aren't earmarks, per se, as they're tax-break extensions, but they are special interest favors that certainly should not be in this bill. Tax breaks for the manufacture of wooden (and only wooden) arrows for children?

God.

Who changes their mind about a $700 billion bill over such crap? There are actually Senators who can be bought off with such trivialities?

The political class has argued this is a crisis. As Glenn Reyonlds says, I'll believe it's a crisis when the people saying it's a crisis start acting like it.

Now, obviously, I believe it's a crisis. But it doesn't exactly reassure me that proponents of the bill apparently do not.

PS: I think this stuff will be scrubbed out, just as it was previously.

But what the hell are they doing larding the bill up with this in the first place?

Ah-HAH! There's a reason they've attached all that crap.

They didn't attach that crap to this bill. They attached this bill to that crap.

Why? Because all bills dealing with revenues must originate in the House. This one already came up from the House -- and it already passed the Senate 93-2.

So, to get around that, they took the bill that already passed the House -- one dealing with revenues -- and attached the bailout to it. The bailout bill is not being voted on, technically, itself (rules prevent that), so it's being voted on as an amendment to a House bill already passed.

It's purely a bit of procedural chicanery.

"the Senate is attaching the Treasury bailout to the AMT patch/tax extenders bill (H.R. 6049) that passed the Senate 93-2 last week. Note that this language contains far more tax relief than tax increases (i.e., it is a net tax cut by tens of billions of dollars). Americans for Tax Reform remained silent on the Senate-passed extenders bill and said it was NOT a taxpayer pledge violation."

So, yes, they're taking this legislation very seriously. They had to look for a House-initiated bill, that passed the Senate almost unanimously, in order to attach this bailout as an amendment (just like Dave J and Molon Labe already said.)

Thanks to notropis.

Posted by: Ace at 04:35 PM | Comments (247)
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