I'm sure Pixy is passed out drunk working on the problem and we'll return shortly.

In the meantime, please feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

I'm pretty sure the site outage has nothing to do with the economy's 3.8% contraction in 4th quarter contraction of 2008.

Posted by: DrewM at 12:23 PM | Comments (52)
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There are two bright spots. 1982's contraction wasn't merely sharper, it was greatly sharper. And analysts had predicted a 5.4% contraction.

The economy shrank at its fastest pace in nearly 27 years in the fourth quarter, government data showed, sinking deeper into recession as consumers and business cut spending.

The Commerce Department on Friday said gross domestic product, which measures total goods and services output within U.S. borders, plummeted at a 3.8 percent annual rate, the lowest pace since the first quarter of 1982, when output contracted 6.4 percent. GDP fell 0.5 percent in the third quarter. These were the first consecutive declines in GDP since the fourth quarter of 1990 and the first three months of 1991.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast GDP contracting 5.4 percent in the fourth quarter. The U.S. economy slipped into recession in December 2007, driven by the collapse of the housing market and resulting global credit crisis.

There are other optimistic signs. As already noted, the credit crisis is either passed or at least substantially abated:

But back to the market problem overall: Investors continue to ignore one of the very brightest spots in the firmament: Namely, the credit freeze is thawing, according to all manner of key interest rates and spreads. In fact, LIBOR is around 1 percent now, back to where it was in the early summer of 2007 before the crunch started. This means that much of the uncertainty about lending, borrowing, investing, and hiring is receding from the market. This is a very positive sign. While retail sales and jobs are lagging indicators, the credit-market improvement is a leading indicator — pointing to recovery in the economy sometime this spring or summer.

The Fed, too, thinks a recovery is possible later this year:

The Fed was very gloomy in its Open Market Committee statement today. It suggested a gradual recovery could begin later this year, although there are plenty of downside risks. The Fed will keep its target rate near zero, and will keep expanding its balance sheet by purchasing plenty of government-sponsored debt and mortgage-backed securities. Its so-called TALF plan to finance consumer-related bonds will begin soon. It might even buy Treasuries, even though it canÂ’t quite make its mind up on that. Taken together, these actions will keep injecting more cash into the financial system.

...

ThereÂ’s a lot of talk that a government bad bank could be modeled after something like the old Resolution Trust Corp. But this would require regulatory accounting forbearance of the punitive mark-to-market approach. It could be done if the SEC would work in connection with a new bad bank. And it might help get private investors engaged in buying toxic assets from the bad bank if the capital-gains tax was suspended for a couple of years.

Meanwhile, important forward-looking economic indicators suggest we have seen the bottom — believe it or not.

First and foremost, stocks bottomed in late November and are about 15 percent higher today. Raw commodity indexes have bottomed. 10-year Treasury rates have bottomed and yields today are about 50 basis points higher. Oil prices have bottomed. And the dollar bottomed many months ago. Plus, the FedÂ’s monetary-base expansion has produced about a $550 billion increase in the M2 money supply, which could start raising the economy as early as this spring.

If the turnover rate of money — that is, velocity — moves back to its 10-year average, then we could all be surprised by a substantial economic rebound starting this spring or summer.

That's Larry Kudlow, who is an indefatigable optimist, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. More often than not he's right. And the Fed itself agrees that a late-2009 recovery is quite possible.

So why are we possibly slitting our economic necks with this "stimulus"? Do the Gods of Money Multipliers demand a blood sacrifice?

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (23)
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How big is the "stimulus"? Well, how about bigger than any government program or war in history?

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (35)
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Good stuff. Keeping his hat in the ring.

It's all good, but here are some highlights, focusing on the stimulus and economy (though he does touch on Guantanamo, the pro-life cause, health care, etc., as well): more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:47 AM | Comments (17)
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But he is willing to work to make the bill better, which is hardly a bad thing in and of itself, but the worry is that if the Shit Sandwich becomes marginally better, McCain and the other members of he bipartisan caucus will come down with a bad case of Pride of Authorship and vote for it.

McCain's saying the right thing, and he's even doing the right thing. So why do I have the shivering douchechills about him? Ah yes: the past ten years of his history.

Posted by: Ace at 11:36 AM | Comments (43)
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Full coverage at Hot Air and Campaign Spot.

On the third fourth ballot, the vote count is:

Steele 60:
Dawson: 62
Anuzis: 31
Blackwell: 15

A Dawson victory could prove somewhat troublesome for the GOP.

If you want to watch live coverage of the potential party suicide proceedings, C-SPAN has the goods.

Update - Blackwell just conceded, endorsed Steele. Fifth round of ballots being distributed now.

Fifth Ballot Results
Steele - 79
Dawson - 69
Anuzis - 20

Anzuis Out - Endorses no one.

Ballot Six - It's Steele.

Final Vote:
Steele - 91
Dawson - 77

Posted by: Slublog at 12:13 PM | Comments (278)
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Sorry about that, everyone.

The web server dropped dead. No error messages, and restarting it just gave me more of the same. Or rather, no more of the same.

Brought out the big guns - rebooted (which failed, for reasons as yet unexplained), rebooted off a rescue kernel, ran a full filesystem check (all A-OK), even fired up the KVM-over-IP tool (which SUCKS) to watch the boot process.

Nada. Everything was fine, except for that fact that it didn't work.

Read the documentation until I found a way to run the web server in debug mode. Then, at last, it gave me an error message: File size limit exceeded. What file? What size limit? Didn't say.

But I took a guess, and there it was: the error log had reached exactly 2GB, after 483 days of operation, and down it all went. Zapped the error log and we're back on the air.

Potatoes don't have error logs.

P.S. Comments are back online now too.

P.P.S. The server was fricking down and we still seemed to get comment spam. Dust off and nuke them from orbit. Even then you can't be sure, but mushroom clouds of evaporating spammers give me the warm fuzzies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:29 AM | Comments (79)
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That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 10:25 AM | Comments (26)
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Today the Cato Institute ran full page ads in the NYT, WaPo, Cracked, Busty Lesbian Quarterly Journal and other publications refuting Unicorn OneÂ’s stimulus package. Linky to Cato and the ad (in PDF form) is here. The ad leads off with a quote from Him on January 9th, 2009, The Year of the Rainbow:

"There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy."

"Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth."

Here at the AoSHQ Foundation, we have a different plan for a stimulus package. Please to be reading the FoundationÂ’s white paper if you please.

Back when I lived in Oklahoma, we used to call that “Saturday Afternoon.” Now they have to get all fancy with the title.

Notice: Posted by permission of AceCorp LLC. Please e-mail overnight open thread tips to xgenghisx@gmail.com. Otherwise send tips to Ace.

Posted by: Open Blog at 08:03 PM | Comments (80)
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White blossoms on black limbs

above floats a gray sky

fuckin' landscape 'n shit

...

Old crone stands beside the lonely road

in one palm a golden apple; she's not

just giving this valuable fuckin' thing away

...

look at all these people I helped

I'm going to keep on fighting

I've got Kajagoogoo hair

Posted by: Ace at 04:14 PM | Comments (253)
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