All too often lost in the full-court-press on our coming economic apocalypse is the far more existential threat from those head-rending hordes intent on our death.

I speak, of course, of the zombie menace.

A recent ZWN poll suggests that the economy is still #1 concern, The undead threat is#2, terrorist threats and the war in Iraq are #3 followed by the environment at #4.

While most of us focus on our bank accounts and our portfolios, you can trust that zombies are focused intently on our brains. They want them, and if we don't remain vigilant, they will have them.

A fat lot of good it will do to have a healthy economy then, what with the ravenous undead making what used to be an innocent trip to the local mall a veritable death march.

The question that must be answered is which candidate provides for our best protection from the indefatigable zombie death squads?

Luckily for you, Zombie World News is covering the stories other media outlets ignore:

Up until now, neither side has been willing to make a central issue of the world wide threat of an advancing 'Necro-Mortosis' plague. However, the McCain camp fired the first salvo at a meeting with local farmers in Idaho this weekend. When asked "who will protect us best from the necro's?" by an elderly concerned lady, McCain responded "The fine American people of this country deserve a president who has a plan and who will stick to it. A president who will not change course. Senator Obama is on record as voting against the bill for assault of May, 2007."

This bill, which would require people indicted on assault charges to be tested for necro-mortosis, is one that Democrats oppose, earning them accusations of being soft on potential zombies.

So I urge you all to remember in these trying times, while some are trying to make an intelligent decision based on all the issues, others are voting to eat your brains and other assorted soft tissues.

Posted by: Open Blog at 11:17 PM | Comments (29)
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But nobody (including, perhaps, the actual Congresscritters) yet knows just what's in it.

UPDATE: In my opinion, this has been conservatism's stupidest, most dispiriting hour. That the insane "let it burn" sentiment in House GOP ranks and among the blogging/commenting hordes was, at the end, redirected to actually accomplishing something useful (chopping the crap out of a crisis plan that had to be enacted) doesn't whitewash the politically and economically suicidal path that all too many earlier wanted.

Of course, if they couldn't get rid of billions in subsidies to the leftist pressure/electoral fraud groups trying to bring down America, the GOP leadership is not only ignorant but incompetent.

Posted by: Open Blog at 08:57 PM | Comments (262)
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Or, why we're being fed crap and told it's filet mignon. (sorry, linked to AP article)

In the new $635 billion spending bill, automakers get a $25 BILLION in "below market loans" to help refit their plants to build cars with "new" energy efficient technologies. In short, hydro-electric cars.

Oil drilling ban is supposedly dropped, correct? But, the east coast of the Gulf of Mexico is off limits still (Florida) and the government won't be able to issue new leases until 2011. If that. There is no imminent drilling.

Pelosi et al couldn't block it indefinitely, but they could kick the can down the road in hopes that the next president, (Obama) will play along with them and sign another executive order, a la Clinton, to put that oil off limits again. Imagine that with a Democrat controlled congress.

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Posted by: Open Blog at 02:31 PM | Comments (98)
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Because you dickheads canÂ’t seem to restrain yourself from posting political shit in the football thread, hereÂ’s your very own sandbox to play in.

Apparently no oneÂ’s informed you that AoSHQ is primarily a sports/softcore porn blog.

Posted by: Open Blog at 01:45 PM | Comments (171)
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Eh, why not. I got nuthin.Â’

Update: I just got asked why I posted this (and also why I wasted Cyrus). No reason. I just like doin' things like that.

Posted by: Open Blog at 12:34 PM | Comments (95)
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The Army is accepting nominations for the next carbine, and doesn't appear to be excluding any options.

In late August, the Army issued a solicitation to the arms industry asking companies to submit proposals that would demonstrate "improvements in individual weapon performance in the areas of accuracy and dispersion ... reliability and durability in all environments, modularity and terminal performance."

And in a dramatic gesture that could throw the door wide open to a totally new carbine, the service did not constrain ideas to the current 5.56mm round used in the M4.

Now if someone can figure out a way to miniaturize the technology and create a shoulder fired SWAFLB(A)*, we will be cooking with fire. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 11:51 AM | Comments (68)
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Haste makes waste. That was one concern that many are having about the bailout plan. What kind of give-a-ways was Congress planning to give a way to their friends and supporters under the guise of rescuing the financial system?

Jim Lindgren at Volokh points out one really ugly give-a-way that should make it obvious why McCain needed to get back to Washington and make sure that the American people were not going to be raped...again.

I have read DoddÂ’s proposed statute and in some respects, it is far worse than has been reported. Senator Dodd has placed a loophole in the bill that is explicitly designed to siphon off tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund even if there are no net profits in the $700 billion venture.[snip]

But Senator Dodd’s bill does not provide for losses to offset gains: “Not less than 20 percent of any profit realized on the sale of each troubled asset” must be given to the two housing funds, so $200,000 of the $1 million profit on the one asset that made a profit must be siphoned off to the housing funds, despite the $400,000 net loss on the three deals taken together.

Read the rest of it here.

Lindgren at Volokh points out that there is a potential for the Housing Trust Fund and others could net hundreds of billions of dollars. That trust fund is a "slush" fund that is routinely used to give funds to ACORN, the Democrats political machine that has been involved in numerous voter registration scandals and is one of the organizations that had sued banks and other lending institutions to force them to give loans to people with unsound credit.

UPDATE: Yes, how serious are the Democrats taking this mess? Just another day in Washington where the shell game continues. Tax payers aren't going to get their money back. It isn't going to go to pay down our astronomical debt. Worse, it isn't going to pay back any loans the US might have to take to fund this little debacle in the first place. 20% of it will go into some program whose worth is questionable in the first place and tax payers will be stuck holding the bill for hundreds of billions of dollars more in debt without any possibility of realizing it's pay off from the sell of these "toxic assets".

(thanks for the correction "someone")

From Christoph: Mark Levin Explains Things

UPDATE: Obama ACORN's man in the shadows?

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:15 AM | Comments (104)
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Congressman John Shadegg (R-AZ) thinks so.

Is a bailout necessary to save the economy at this point from complete collapse — from a major failure of multiple institutions at the same time?

I think thatÂ’s the most difficult question that could be posed under these circumstances, and itÂ’s the question that I have struggled all week to find the answer to. I have talked to a lot of smart people who know Wall Street, know banking, know the economy quite well, and you hear different opinions. Some will tell you that it is absolutely essential. Quite frankly, IÂ’m skeptical about that.

But I think that in some ways the question doesn’t matter any more. Because Secretary Paulson chose to raise the matter in the way he did — that is, to go public in a very high-profile way, not just with his concern, but with a kind of Chicken-Little, the-sky-is-falling kind of demand — it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That is to say, once the secretary of the Treasury announces to the world that there is a pending financial collapse, perhaps as great as the Great Depression, and Congress must act — he has sent a signal that essentially tells world markets that Congress must act. I will tell you that has been one of the most frustrating things about this since the very beginning...

I can’t tell you how many members of Congress were stunned at that news, and were stunned that none of their local bankers were calling them. And then they called their local bankers, as I called my local bankers, and my local bankers said, “I think things are just fine.” I talked to one banker who said, “Gosh, we’ve got money, and we’re liquid, and we’re making a profit. And we’re in the market selling loans, and we’ve got competitors trying to sell loans against us.”

So, at that point, there’s a disconnect. Secretary Paulson is claiming that this is a catastrophe of generational proportions that could go worldwide. And none of what we were hearing back home matches that. And I’m not speaking just for myself, but also for many of my colleagues who were making similar calls. They weren’t being called by their bankers, or by any of the businesses back home saying, “I can’t borrow any money”.... If, in fact, Paulson had struck a chord with the American banking community, wouldn’t you think that after he announced on Friday that there was a crisis of liquidity that threatens the entire nation’s financial solvency and Americans’ jobs from coast to coast, that my community bankers in Arizona wouldn’t have been picking up the phone by Monday morning, if not over the weekend, to say that “I share the Secretary’s concerns”?

I don't think Paulson made this up out of whole cloth (obviously not!), but he did hit the panic button and Congress has obliged him. Part of the job of the government agencies involved in the economy is to maintain for Americans a certain level of confidence. Paulson is saying that he's not confident of his ability or of private actors to keep things running. He's passed the buck. Now Congress has almost no choice but to act, at a minimum to give the impression that at least someone in Washington thinks we can avoid a second Great Depression.

Is a bailout capitalism? Well, yes and no. Ours is a mixed economy where government involvement in the markets is mainly accomplished by buying, selling, and lending to private actors. Direct intervention is rare. Even in this instance, where the proposal is for government to purchase opaque mortgage backed securities, the point is to determine their actual value and auction them back into the market. Perhaps the least capitalist provisions involve long-term caps on executive compensation of participating financial institutions and allowing mortgage instruments to be re-written to favor defaulting mortgagors.

But let's not kid ourselves. President Bush and Senate Republicans who back the bailout are putting their capitalist principles on hold. It's a pragmatic choice and its justifications come in a few different flavors.

First, there are the folks who say government is already so intertwined with the market (especially the firms in question here) that further intervention is justified and not a betrayal of anything. Government broke it, so government should fix it. This argument suffers when we look at just how much new power the bailout gives to Congress and to various executive agencies. This isn't just a modification of the broken regulations that led to the problem. This is a long-term imposition.

Second, there are the folks who comfort themselves with the thought that the bailout could potentially make a profit for the government and taxpayers. That sounds pretty capitalist, doesn't it? As I wrote the other day, people predicting a profit are wildly speculating on an investment scheme that already failed once. The point of the bailout is not profit-making and decisions by the government over just what price it will put to a particular toxic asset will be made according to how much that financial institution needs to stay afloat, not how much the government thinks the toxic asset will be worth at auction.

It's looking more likely that the the bailout will couple government purchases of toxic assets with equity warrants; that is, contingent shares in the financial institution selling them (value set pre-bailout). The idea is that if the government fails to break even on its resale of the toxic asset, it takes shares in the financial institution. Institutions which stand to forfeit stock of greater value than the toxic asset are therefore more likely to just buy back the toxic asset rather than lose the stock. Presto-chango, a risk-free investment scheme!

...Assuming, of course, that the institution still exists when the government tries to resell the toxic asset and assuming that the value of the institution has increased since the bailout. Given what I expect will be the government's spectacular failure to accurately price the toxic assets and the likelihood that even with the bailout several institutions will collapse, at the end of this we're not looking at a profit. Especially if Dems get their way about siphoning money to special programs.

Third, there are some who insist that we are preserving private financial systems in order to keep the next government (potentially a Democratic one) from taking over the financial system completely. In other words, a defensive action, but one which requires us to ignore the core principle that the market works best when it punishes failures and rewards successes. Here, the argument is that we have no choice but to protect failures from their own mistakes. The problem is that this incentivises failure. It tells those firms and industries who believe rightly or wrongly that they are "too big to let fail" that they can be more reckless than they otherwise would be.

This bailout will beget more bailouts. Count on it. Each time we are asked to save another firm or industry, we will be told that the future of our economy depends on it. Each time, we will be asked to put capitalism on hold.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:20 AM | Comments (62)
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Michelle Malkin thinks so and so does conservative film blogger Dirty Harry.

Meh, it's hard to tell if he's reading the bracelet or just stumbling over the words while looking at it. Of course, not knowing the name off the top of his head isn't great but given the setting it's somewhat understandable.

As with much of this campaign however, the bigger issues is what if McCain or Palin had done this instead of Obama? I think we all know what the reaction of the left and their house organs at MSNBC, The NY Times, etc. would be saying this morning. But since it's the Obamassiah, it's not only not an issue, it's probably racist or something to even wonder.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:04 AM | Comments (57)
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From the first Presidential Debate in Oxford, Mississippi last night, Barack Obama changes direction on missile defense quicker than an "unproven" defensive interceptor.

But while he flipped in the right direction, is this Change You Can Believe In? Video below the fold:

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Posted by: Open Blog at 07:14 AM | Comments (22)
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