Ann Coulter’s Jaw Wired Shut

“Nasty tumble,” my ass. More like this helps her anorexia.

That pic makes him look very masculine.

Broken jaw? That’s just the byproduct of unhinging his jaw to swallow his food, er, prey whole. Sometimes prey fight back

@ManchuCandidate: More likely she can’t even get work in infomercials any more so she is doing floor shows sucking off circus animals for select crowds of pud-pounding neocons. She probably coughed, gave the animal teeth and it dislocated her jaw when it pulled back.

And she’s been hiding it for a month? People were wondering where she was around election time, now we know. How many opportunities she missed, with Palin, her form of Racist hate speech became pretty much acceptable during the panicked death throes of the republican party, and she wasn’t around to spew. Must have cost he a lot in lost opportunities, too.

Must have been quite the “tumble,” huh? Wasn’t there a nice liberal blogger or author who had the same thing happen recently, just fell down went boom and was severely injured? Whats up with that?

@Prommie: It’s a dangerous time to be a blogger.

Whatever the cause, it’s nowhere near as precious as the Charlie Rose incident.

@mellbell: That story just makes me heart Charlie Rose all the more.

And here’s another beauty, Florida Sherrifs investigate 5th grade school bathroom graffiti. They discovered that several boys snickered at the drawings of breasts and a penis: http://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/bathroom_12990___article.html/picture_wall.html

@mellbell: @SanFranLefty: That is a great story.

I don’t understand the problem. Didn’t she always talk out of her ass anyway?

@Prommie: Shocking. Next thing you know they’ll find some 3rd grader looking up “poo” in the dictionary.*

ADD: self-referential anecdote deleted at (*).

@nabisco: I was going to suggest something else wired shut, but it’s a bit early in the day to engage in gender warfare.

@nabisco: Apparently, in high school these days, taking a sexy picture of yourself with your cel phone and then sending it to your boy or girl-friends cel phone is called “sexting,” and several teens have been charged with possessing and distributing child porn for taking and sending pics of themselves.

Truly we live in a land of hysterical puritanism.

@Prommie: Ahhh, hysterical puritanism, and the criminalization and pathologizing of normal child and adolescent behavior. Florida leads the way on this with kids.

Besides the Lionel Tate trial/clusterfuck, this is a state where a 12 year old boy was smothered to death in a boot camp by the guards. And also this is also where St. Petersburg police slammed to the ground, arrested, handcuffed and shackled a 5-year-old girl who threw a temper tantrum in kindergarten and refused to sit on the reading rug with the rest of her class because she wanted to continue with her math exercise of counting jelly beans out of a jar.

@Prommie: I’m still trying to get my head around all of the various allergies we have to worry about before sending birthday treats into school. I think I should have waited until the kids were grown before coming back to this country…

@Prommie: I’m perfectly ok with teachers cracking down on that sort of thing (though I would draw the line at pressing charges). Forgive me for prematurely copping a “kids these days” attitude, but when my high school boyfriend asked to take naked pictures of me, my immediate response was, “Are you fucking kidding me?” I wasn’t going to take the risk of having them spread around school or elsewhere, accidentally or not, and it’s frightening to think how many high schoolers nowadays would just shrug off that possibility. To put it in terms to which they can relate: “Don’t you guys watch ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’? Seriously, guys.”

@SanFranLefty: Lockdown! I am still pissed that anyone dare use the word lockdown in a school, thats a fucking prison term.

My daughters high school informed us that in the event of a DHS red alert, the school would be locked down and we would not be permitted to come get our daughter. We’ll see.

Remember this, my favorite aphorism: “There is no situation on earth so bad that a cop can’t make it worse.”

Our country has been ruined by the para-militarization of the police and public’s craven capitulation to authoritarianism.

@Prommie: News story I almost used yesterday was about somebody forgetting his cellphone at a McDonald’s. By the time he picked it up, his GF’s nude pix were online.

@mellbell: I hesitate to cop the Kids These Days line, but sometimes I wonder how my childhood would have been different with the Internet, and sometimes I thank airborne food deities that I had to wait until thirtysomething for the pleasure.

@mellbell: Thats 10 years, that child porn charge, for taking pictures of yourself? Next they’re gonna charge kids with sexual assault for jerking off.

@nojo: Yeah but the evils and the injuries of this are all in the mind, and if they don’t give a shit, there’s no harm anymore, ya know? Its just embarrassment. I think thats where the kids are going with this, no matter how much the fogies try to make the intertubes a horror and a fearsome bringer of evil, there is a generation now for whom it has always been there, and to them, I think, There’s a naked pic of me online, ooops, my bad, that was dumb,” someday its gonna be considered as embarrassing as farting (when you weren’t trying to) in class.

@nojo: It’s cool, I’m just self-righteous perplexed sometimes, because I had access to both cable tv and internet at a very young age (like, as soon as I could sit still enough to watch and seven, respectively) and still turned out pretty well.

@Prommie: Again, don’t agree with the charges, but do agree with the “Don’t be an idiot” message behind it.

@mellbell: I can still recite most of the 1968 primetime TV schedule…

But allowing for technological advances, it’s the same story: For me it was all TV all the time growing up, and it wasn’t until late high school and college that I found other means to amuse myself. Plus, I was what later would be called a latchkey kid, since both my parents worked.

What it meant in practice was that I didn’t have helicopter parents, and for that I am eternally grateful. If I turned out well, it’s because my folks let me discover the world for myself, and make of it what I would. Not that they ever thought of it that way, they just waited for actual problems to arise before intervening.

Clearly these kids need to undergo years of therapy and pharmacological treatment to make sure they are reduced to the lifeless zombies this society so prizes.

Maybe I’m slow on the uptake (age does that to ya) but when my high school boyfriend asked to take naked pictures of me???

I think the most salacious of any of my instamatics are a profile of Dori McDew in a slightly rumpled flannel shirt. Of course, had I been shipped off to Nam (well, okay, Granada) I would have been a happy grunt with that pic.

@FlyingChainSaw: The therapy will inform alert them to the fact that they have been traumatized, which they might not have known, they often labor under the delusion that in life sometimes bad shit happens and you gotta roll with it, and then they will realize that they are victims, and that there are people to be blamed. people to be sued (schools, cel phone manufacturers, the parents of the other kids, the film and TV industry for promoting a sexualized culture). It is only when one has achieved Victim status that one is truly a person in Murrica.

@nabisco: Our high school had an excellent visual arts program, and he availed himself of the photography offerings. He just wanted to mess around with his camera and maybe get some intriguing pictures out of it, but I wasn’t having any of it.

@nabisco: No, no, thats what the Polaroid was for. Digital photography has nearly put them out of business. There is a photo or two from my past, the best of all being those which recorded the legendary evening forever after known as “the pinnacle of my bachelorhood.”

@Prommie: @nojo: No harm? Not in this society. They’ve already filed suit against McDo’s.

ADD: And may I just say, in regard to the original post, that I now know the true meaning of “thanksgiving.”

You’re right, SFL, Florida is teh crazy:

AP updated 9:47 p.m. ET, Mon., Nov. 24, 2008
STUART, Fla. – A student at a Florida school has been arrested after authorities said he was “passing gas” and turning off his classmates’ computers.

According to a report released Friday by the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, the 13-year-old boy “continually disrupted his classroom environment” by intentionally breaking wind. He then shut off some computers other students were using.

Bloggie, I’m glad to see you posted on this. Over at the W, they think they’re too good for it. NotMegan actually put up a post to say they weren’t going to post about Coulter and turned off the comments. She also refuses to use the ass-fucking tag that made Brand W famous to begin with.

@Prommie: This is why we need to bring back corporal punishment. It’s faster and cheaper to knock a kid upside the head than to arrest, jail and try him for his run-of-the-mill childhood stupidity.

@nabisco: Great comment!
@SanFranLefty: I hate these stories about siccing the police on little kids for minor incidents. God, where are the adults in this society? And sometime in the last year or so, there was a teenage girl with menstrual cramps who was humiliated when it was discovered that she was in possession of ibuprofen (a single tablet, I think it was).

/off topic/

Has anyone found a central list of all the bajillions that Caligutard’s minions have thrown at their buddies the financial crises this year?

I’ve been doing substantial reading, and I can’t come up with a final figure; is it $2 trillion? $3 trillion? Does that include the Citigroup nationalization and the $800 billion programs announced today?

All these deals are being revealed after-the-fact, so figuring out how much is actually being stolen spent Shock Doctrine-style is damn near impossible.

I’m just trying to figure out when to expect the final economic death spasm, so I can plan my holiday food/pot/alcohol consumption accordingly.

(Hint: Looks like it could be before our boyfriend, Black Eagle, even takes office).

@Jamie Sommers: Maybe not-Megan (or not-Ana Marie?) won’t go for it, but in a rare display of W-linking…

The Ass-Fucking tag lives!

Heck, they’re still using Butterstick every so often.

Now don’t make me go there again. Unless Jim’s stealing one of my ideas.

@Original Andrew: Last I kinda checked, that $700 billion was pretty much equivalent to total Iraq war spending. Which was somewhat in the ballpark for national health insurance.

@nabisco: Or Andy in a very rumpled flannel shirt scaling the outside wall of the upper school. ::sigh::

@Original Andrew: NYT says 3 trillion dollahs.

@JNOV: So far.

ADD: What is this “You’re posting comments too quickly. Slow down.” bullshit message from WordPress? Sheesh.

@nabisco: What do I win if I correctly guess what * is about?

@nojo:

See, I’m also wondering what’s gonna be next after the automakers go under. My bet’s on healthcare. Nearly 50 million people already don’t have insurance and can’t afford it, and their numbers are growing every year as it gets exponentially more expensive and layoffs increase. If that’s not a setup for a bursting bubble and massive losses, then what is?

The real hat-trick is seeing how “policymakers” figure out how to funnel billions to the healthcare execs while making sure that taxpayers get nothing in return.

And that’s another thing: We’re gonna soon be running head-first into certain mathematical realities that there’s just no way for the DC kleptocrats to BS their way out of.

Namely, there’s simply not enough money in the world to finance a US national debt that doubles every eight years–even China’s much vaunted reserves are only $2 trillion–so then what?

Scratches head. WTF?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-25/the-christian-sexual-awakening/

@ManchuCandidate: “Why Are Christians Having Better Sex Than the Rest of Us?”

Hmmm…

“by Tucker Carlson”

Ah. Everyone’s having better sex than him.

@JNOV: Really? I’ll have to find that WP text string and replace it with something more amusing.

@nojo: Fabulous!

@Original Andrew: I heard or read something in the past day that the Murrican car companies are at a trade disadvantage because furriners get socialized health bennies.

But what caught my attention was how it was phrased: something like “subsidized.”

And having once dealt with OPE — “other payroll expenses” — I know those bennies are a huge chunk o’ change.

So here’s the business argument: If the feds would take responsibility for health coverage, our industries would be more competitive internationally. Hey, let’s invest in our workforce!

@nojo:

See, now you’re making sense, which is TOTALLY not how our democracy works.

@nojo: Stand perfectly still. Do Not Move. The thought police will be by to arrest you in a moment.

Oh, and sorry for not being around as much this week guys and gals- va-cay for Mr. and Mr. Tommmcatt. Miss ya all, esp. Promm, Cubby, the General, SFL, FCS, and my dulcet-darling JNOV. Oh,oh,oh, and Baked, Manchu, and and…oh, fuck it, I miss all of you especally.

When I give thanks Thursday, some of those thanks will be for you people, who keep me sane and make me laugh all these long, crazy days….It’s been three years since I made my first post on Brand W, and you all have kept me coming back for more ever since. God Bless You, in case I don’t make it back on this week, and many blesssings to you and yours. See you all Monday!

PS. That goes double for you, Nojo.

Gah, I forgot to shout out Lyndon- I mean, Benedick. How could I forget him? Yeesh.

AND IanJ. I am a loser.

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: Purr, Tommcatt. You are not a loser. Happy anti-Turkey Day! I did miss you, and I miss Endy. Where is Endy? And how was your vacation?

ADD: And the other day I was reading some comments about people suffering from You Suck. You don’t suck, none of youse.

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: It’s ok, I’m used to being ignored… <sniff>

(FWIW, I never shout-out to individuals, because I always forget someone, then feel like a jerk. It’s not a lack of love, it’s a lack of a functional memory.)

@IanJ: Dude. I practically stalked you.

@JNOV:

We are still on it, darling, but it has been wonderful…we are visiting my family in Northern California, and when I say family, I mean, all four generations of it, from my Grandmother, to my parents, to my sisters’ kids. Plus the Mr. and I brought a friend from home, so we we reveling in the Norman Rockwell of it all. The only bad part is I don’t get to check Stinque as complulsivly as usual…

@IanJ:
If it makes you feel any better, I forgot Romegirl altogether, and my love for her is as boundless as the love I have for my XBOX 360. So you are in good company, my friend. As you say, it’s not a lack of love, it’s all the XTC I did back in the 90’s….

@Jamie Sommers:

Jesus, talk about Nazism!

@Original Andrew: Reserves? What a quaint concept. Do you think there was actually gold or anything tangible on deposit to support all the trillions in paper that have so recently vanished into thin air? The entire financial system is a house of cards, including the so-called national debt itself. It’s all smoke and mirrors – debt (paper) creates the money supply, not an ever increasing hoard of gold at Fort Knox.

@JNOV: I’m looking forward to the text on my phone, then. ;)

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: That sounds wonderful. I have a week of interactions with teh carazee people that share my bloodline, and I’m not looking forward to it at all. BUT tomorrow I go see my best friend who is in from Austin. I’m pretty stoked about that. I haven’t seen her for two years.

@IanJ: Hee! See, we could’ve had some fun. So sad.

More good news….Miami judge strikes down ban on gay persons adopting children from foster care. Great news!

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: Are you swinging thru Ess Eff on your way to NorCal or are you doing I-5 all the way?

@Dave H:

Damn us and our fiat currency!!

@Tommmcatt Yet Again:

Have a super vacation Tommmy ; )

@SanFranLefty:

See, now that’s great news. I swear that as soon as Black Eagle takes over, I’m gonna figure out a way to celebrate the victories as much as I mourn the defeats. (And also try to be 50% less bitter. I don’t want my face to pucker to the point that I resemble that cat’s-ass-faced hag, Maggie Gallagher ).

@JNOV:

NYT says 3 trillion dollahs.

Or is it $7.7 trillion? Fuck this is complicated.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&refer=home&sid=an3k2rZMNgDw

And thank you to Georgie Anne Geyer of all people for articulating what I’ve been mentally wailing:

And thus, the questions: Is nobody really going to pay for these horrible mistakes? Are the same people who so thoughtlessly and greedily got us into this mess now going to sit at the head of the White House team ostensibly trying to get us OUT? And, above all, how do we effectively “remoralize” our economic society, which seems to have forgotten and/or thrown aside the original moral basis of Western, and especially American, capitalism?

If one believed in the original American message to the economies of the world, to open a major newspaper any day now is to have one’s heart broken anew. One looks in vain for some American, man or woman, in this sad story who said “no.” One searches for the moralist who will ask, “Isn’t anyone going to pay?” Except, of course, us?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20081125/cm_ucgg/americahaslostsightofitsoriginalworkethic;_ylt=Atnty95N7JxnA5Z4q9zH5v39wxIF

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: @IanJ: That’s why you never name names. Someone will feel left out and get their feelings hurt. *sniff*

@Original Andrew: The important thing to remember is that it ain’t even “real” money; they just keep printing new bills, further compounding the problem.

We’re hosting family this week and I’m definitely not in a Give Thanks mood. Well, maybe thanks that I’ve still got a roof and a healthy family and enough points at Giant to score a free bird.

And thanks for youns-youse-y’all, por su-fuckin-puesto.

Oh, and @JNOV: ? Just Jr. using valuable adult computer time to find out what ‘poo’ and ‘pee’ meant. He very seriously said “but Dad, now that I’ve looked them up I don’t have to do it again!”. Pretty hard to argue with an 8 y.o.

@nabisco:

You mean like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1urV5FUIQ6E&feature=related

@nojo: Nojo, us policy geeks were working that in the 90s (that Japanese and German car companies have a far lesse burden on the health care cost). There’s another one, our car companies are older, they were much bigger, sooner, and had ridiculous retirement policies that allowed people to retire at 50, so our car companies have a far far greater proportion of retired to active employees, and pension costs are much higher. Its purely demographic, a new start-up has no retirees to support. Newt and Bush just put us 15 years behind.

@nojo: Nojo, my childhood was like yours, latchkey, free to explore, mobile on my own, I could walk or bike to the library, to the shopping center where Britts had thiss great toy department, there was a building boom, construction all around, and I had an unlimited suppply of scrap lumber to haul into the woods and build tree forts with. I was a free range child.

@nojo: The cool thing is that it looks like now, right now, the business community is ready to accept that universal health care would be good for them. For the last two decades, in secret, they have been conflicted about the issue, they knew it would be good for them, but they were afraid they’d get made fun of at the country club if they came out in favor of it. My best policy professor at grad school was ex NJ governor JIm Florio, he swore that he had a meeting with the national head of the Chamber of Commerce, which, don’t laugh, is the biggest business lobby, and the dude said he knows national health care would be good for business, it was pure ideological politics that prevented them from coming out in favor of it. Its the health insurors who hate it, of course.

@lynnlightfoot: …teenage girl with menstrual cramps who was humiliated when it was discovered that she was in possession of ibuprofen

I don’t know if this recent 9th Circuit casefrom Jamie Sommers’ land is what you are thinking of, but it was a pretty horrifying story of a 13-year-old girl in AZ being forced to strip search (including moving and shaking out undergarments) based upon an uncorroborated tip by a classmate that she had an ibuprofen. No ibuprofen was found. The actual opinion is pretty entertaining, if nothing else for the passage in the majority where the judge asks rhetorically what student would want an ibuprofen that had been stored in another kid’s underwear.

@Promnight: I thoroughly enjoyed my latchkey childhood of the ’70s and early ’80s. Nowadays, my parents would be booked by CPS for allowing me and my sister to do whatever the hell we wanted after school – go ride bikes alone, go play in the alley with the boys from down the street, try to smoke cigarettes/set leaves on fire – as long as we didn’t watch TV (it was boobytrapped), fed the dog, got home by dark, and had our homework done in time to watch Little House on the Prairie.

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: Awww, I lurves ya too! Have fun!

@SanFranLefty: I can has Childrens? Not that I really want a kid right just now, but in the future? You mean I can actually help society now? Well, at least in Florida? (I know they haven’t taken that option away from me in Georgia… yet.)

@Promnight: Mine as well. My neck of the northeast had me one block from the woods, a river and an active train line. When the developers moved in and they brought sewers, we crawled through the massive concrete pipes and I figured out how to start up an earthmover theyleft parked overnight on our street. As houses started getting thrown up and that block from the river became a new subdivision, we had thirty homes going up that were like suburban tree forts to be entered and explored on a whim. This was sixty miles from NYC and Philly, each of which seemed like other planets.

@nabisco: Banisco, there are few places 60 miles from Philly and NYC, and thats where I was, Ocean County, NJ. I lived a life of total freedom, I would go explore the marshes along the Metedeconk river, build tree forts in a cedar forest, look for salamanders under rotting logs, I would be gone from morning till dark dark was when I had to be home, when the streetlights came on. You would hear parents shouting for their children to come home. I want to raise my child that way but I fear prosecution.

@rptrcub: Wanna come be my nanny? My boy is a rare treasure, I need help with him, though. You sound like a great role model, you could also do your journalism, we gots lots of colleges around here.

@nabisco: My grandmother who raised me was the proto-helicopter parent, and look how screwed up I am. I’m advising all my young relatives to go into psychology/psychiatry because these helicoptered and home schooled kids are going to need years of therapy.

Hey, stinkers, its my fucking 47th birthday, and I am over the angst, by 10, thats a new record. I hate being old and bloated and hopeless, and stuck in a job that gives me all the satisfaction of eating cold oatmeal (gratuitous Poi Dog Pondering reference), but its OK because I am drunk now. I hate mornings, I am not drunk then, I have to wait all day to get drunk again. I got to give that up and start getting high instead.

Two of my brothers and I pretty much had our own house and a truck in high school. That was pretty cool.

tj/ This is the time of the year for Red Amerika to burn shit up with turkey fryers.

re

@Mistress Cynica: I think my freedom gave me more than my loneliness and neglect took away. But I was a smart little fucker, addicted to reading from an early age, so I liked neglect, its not for everyone, I know that.

@Promnight:
It’s a little belated, but happy birthday.

@Promnight:

Happy birthday & a digital hug from the Left Coast.

@Promnight: I was thinking of your posts from last night as I was blasting this song on the highway home tonight. Wasting My Hate

“Ain’t gonna waste my hate on you
I think I’ll keep it all for myself.”

/birthday fist bump

@Original Andrew:
Digital Bath

@Promnight: Happy birthday. I don’t have much to offer as a gift other than an aching purple starfish, so just let me know.

@Promnight: I *KNEW* it was your fucking birthday!!! Dig back a few threads and you were feeling sorry for yourself and I asked you if it was your birthday.

Happy birthday, my dear Prommie! Bring joy to others in whatever way you can. Whether it’s making me and your fellow Stinquers smile, making your exquisite son smile, or making Mrs. Prom and others melt with your food creation, you are making the world a better place than you found it.

Okay, enough mushiness. I have to help Mr. SFL go brine a turkey for Thursday.

xoxoxoxoxo

SFL

I’m gonna bone my turkey, and then brine it. Thanks, all. Ya get to an age, you don’t like birthdays much, ya knowwaddImean? But hey, fuck, another day, another dollar.

I’m gonna bone my turkey…True food porn.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

@JNOV prom: Bone.

@redmanlaw: Tee hee!

Bet the brine is sort of salty. I’ve heard it’s full of protein and cures zits.

@Promnight: Cry me a river. I qualify for AARP next April.

@Promnight: Happy Birthday!! Welcome to 47–you’ll love it.

@SanFranLefty: Thanks for the link to the girl winning her appeal. (I think you may have tipped me off to the original story of her being strip-searched. This whole thing makes my blood boil, but thank God she was vindicated.)

By the way, don’t miss checking out the issue of the New Yorker that has David Remnick’s long, very long and very good piece on Obama called The Joshua Generation. Even if you don’t read the piece, don’t miss Barry Blitt’s full page illustration in the article, page 77. The rest of the issue is full of goodies, too, several wonderful cartoons. The issue is dated November 17 and has the Lincoln Memorial at night on the front.

Well, off topic here, I just got back from DC where my pro-enviro, pro-labor pitch got shoved back in my face by pro-business members of an Obama transition team sub-sub-committee dealing with a tiny federal agency, the Fed Maritime Commission. Not good. I told a colleague of mine who then started singing “Meet the new boss . . . .”

@Promnight: Same here. Re the unlimited supply of scrap wood, we used to call it “Midnight Lumber Supply.”

@Dodgerblue: Ouch.
@Promnight: Happy b-day, and perhaps being a Manny might not be so bad after all.

@Original Andrew: $8.5 trillion is now the highest price tag I’ve seen for the cost of the bailout. 60% of GDP.

@Promnight: Feliz cumple, little brother. But really, if not for us, who would remember Poi Dog Pondering?

@SanFranLefty: Oh dude. That is seriously fucked up. I had not heard about that case at all. What the hell ever happened to just holding a kid in the nurse’s office until a parent picked him up? It’s like common sense has been banished from school.

@Promnight: Happy birthday!

@Dodgerblue: Dodge, your org should have a major donor call. Ants like us don’t count.

Bill Richardson’s contact info to send a letter to a former org heavyweight:

Office of the Governor
490 Old Santa Fe Trail
Room 400
Santa Fe, NM 87501
fax: 505 476-2200

email for deputy COS for communications Gilbert Gallegos (IRL friend of Mrs RML)

Gilbert.Gallegos@state.nm.us

@Original Andrew:

“Has anyone found a central list of all the bajillions that Caligutard’s minions have thrown at their buddies the financial crises this year?” OA

This is the best list I’ve found so far – from Reason:

# $29 billion for Bear Stearns
# $143.8 billion for AIG (thus far, it keeps growing)
# $100 billion for Fannie Mae
# $100 billion for Freddie Mac
# $700 billion for Wall Street, including Bank of America (Merrill Lynch), Citigroup, JP Morgan (WaMu), Wells Fargo (Wachovia), Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a lot more
# $25 billion for The Big Three in Detroit
# $8 billion for IndyMac
# $150 billion stimulus package (from January)
# $50 billion for money market funds
# $138 billion for Lehman Bros. (post bankruptcy) through JP Morgan
# $620 billion for general currency swaps from the Fed
# Rough total: $2,063,800,000,000

That’s a little over $6,800 for every man, woman, and child, or just under $15,000 for each of America’s 140 million taxpayers.”

This is before the next bailout for the auto industry, and the relatively modest additional $1 trillion in new spending promised by Barry. Of course, this list was only as of Nov 7, you know – back when we were still being relatively fiscally responsible compared to what has happened over the last week.

This is what I don’t get. Recall that Paulson & Bush went before Congress to get the $700B to fund T.A.R.P (Troubled Asset Relief Program), and it was only after much Sturm and Drang and two or three rejections that Congress finally approved (as I recall) about half the money in a first tranche, with much heralded strings and oversight about how it would be spent.

Since then, Paulson decides without Congress, to drop the T.A. of TARP, not actually buy the troubled assets but instead use the money to recapitalize the banks themselves. But then it gets much much worse.

Somehow over the weekend, Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner ( through some financial mechanism that I don’t understand) figure out a way to actually leverage up the TARP money, and put the U.S. taxpayer on the hook for an additional $7 trillion dollars (As a reminder a trillion is 1,000 billions)

Now – how does that fucking happen? How can that be fucking legal? How can three fucking guys who have never received one fucking vote from any fucking Americans for their fucking office, walk into a fucking room and walk out having fucking committed most of the entire fucking productive output of the entire fucking United States for a full fucking year to bail out the financial system? Without any fucking additional approval from fucking Congress or the fucking President?

Just curious.

Happy Birthday Prom.

Have a nice Thanksgiving everyone.

@String Bikini Theory: I guess because they have figured out how to print $7 trillion in new bills without anyone noticing.

@redmanlaw: this is a damned good idea.

This is my first comment. Being a perfectionist procrastinator has put me two websites behind already: I was about to debut on Wonquette when the Great Shakeup of ’08 occurred, then followed with beanie in hand
to witness the rise of Cynics’ Party like Paracutin. So…here we are with (alas) Stinque. Terrible moniker, but great people. In fact when I saw the
Ann Coulter post today, I was ready to pull the ripcord, but my heart’s not in it. She is too much of a strident harpy to bother with. What I do need to say is how grateful I am that all of you were here to witness, digest, and discuss with courage and passion the events of the bad trip that’s been the last eight years. You represent the finest practitioners of democracy alive today, and the entire nation is largely ignorant of the heroism that enabled one of its newest democratic institutions, the blog, to restore hope to the handful of passionate, thinking few who might well have managed to save the day, and this crucial election.

@String Bikini Theory:

How can three fucking guys who have never received one fucking vote from any fucking Americans for their fucking office, walk into a fucking room and walk out having fucking committed most of the entire fucking productive output of the entire fucking United States for a full fucking year to bail out the financial system? Without any fucking additional approval from fucking Congress or the fucking President?

Fuck if I know.

@EffeteHipster: Debuting by kissing up to us – I like it! Stay around and weigh in on things!

@EffeteHipster: This is my first comment.

Bring on the Synchronized Hazing Squad!

@EffeteHipster said:

“You represent the finest practitioners of democracy alive today, and the entire nation is largely ignorant of the heroism that enabled one of its newest democratic institutions, the blog, to restore hope to the handful of passionate, thinking few who might well have managed to save the day, and this crucial election.

Wait a minute. I am here too you know.

@String Bikini Theory: FSM, I have so missed you and your humor.

@nojo: Indeed, what is our hazing ritual here? @EffeteHipster: Welcome.

@EffeteHipster: + 1 for obscure Mexican volcano reference (1942, in a corn field, right?) Hi.

@SanFranLefty:

We are in the unfabulous part of No Cal, so it is 5 all the way down. We Cali stinquers need to find a good place to get together and get plastered sometime, tho. It’s a pity Fresno is so lame….I’d make the trip to San Diego, sometime, though, what do you think?

@Mistress Cynica:

Gah! Cynica! I am a loooooser! How could I forget? OA too!

Next year, no shout outs.

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: Sandy Eggo is always great, or we could meet halfway in SLO or Monterey.

@SanFranLefty: I’m in. Have Subaru, will travel. Or, Santa Monica can be quite pleasant, and we have many fine bars.

Bird’s in the brine – what are you guys doing over here? I just put up my favorite Thanksgiving graphic.

@blogenfreude: It’s too gross for me. I had a stomach virus last week and don’t want to start barfing again.

Speaking of which, the Dec 1 New Yorker has an interesting story on Clueless Ben Bernanke.

@SanFranLefty: @Dodgerblue: I will probably be at the California book fair in LA in early April. Stinquer Summit?
@EffeteHipster: Welcome! Join in the fun. Love the name.

@Dodgerblue: @Mistress Cynica: I wonder if Lux Mentis will be at the LA book fair too. Hmmmm. Santa Monica IS my favorite spot in LA County. Or there’s always Santa Barbara…

@SanFranLefty: I have relatives in SB I could crash with. I’m betting Lux will be there, as it’s one of the biggest book fairs in North America.

Jeez, you guys. What a warm welcome…thanks! It sounds as though your hazing rituals are fairly survivable. In Stage 2, however (e.g. bars of Santa Monica), the stakes are raised considerably, I should think, with an inversely proportional success rate (is pass-fail an option here?)
RML: you were very alert about Mexican volcanos of recent vintage.
I’m off with the miz to enjoy T-giving at a French restaurant owned by friends, a cherished tradition of long standing. I’m grateful that my stay at the Oberoi in Mumbai occurred in 1982, and I have much else to celebrate.
Hope everyone has a good one!

@Mistress Cynica: April is beautiful in Santa Monica, and not too touristy. I’d suggest a long walk on the beach, followed by drinks at Chez Jay, an historic local dive.

@Mistress Cynica: Back in one of my past lives as a budding indie publisher, I “attended” the L.A. book fair. Which is to say I drove down, crashed on a friend’s couch, maybe went for a day, and found better things to do the rest of the week.

But if y’all ain’t gonna simply surprise me by showing up at Twiggs coffeehouse one morning, I think I can manage a day trip to the Great Big Freeway. Especially Santa Monica.