oh, here it is!

I've been looking all over for this damn blog. It's been months since I last posted...since well before Obama kicked Crazy John's ass in November. Odd that Crazy John is still crazy...for some reason I was hoping it was just an act meant to fire up the legions of retarded...sorry...'challenged' right-wing heartlanders.

So anyway, long story short, Obama won, Bush is gone, we've ended the war in Iraq, Afghani women are walking around in thongs and my 401k has gained back all the cash I lost on the AOL - TimeWarner merger (and hey, if I never said it before..thanks Steve Case and Gerald Levin, that was swell idea!).

Yes, things are mighty rosy for us here in the land of plenty. Except that they aren't. I mean, Bush is gone, that's true, and that's a great and long overdue relief. But as for the rest of it, well, it's about as appealing as that wildebeest piss that pours out of the back of a garbage truck when the driver puts that sucker in gear and hits the gas, leaving a trail of viscous, foul-smelling, chicken-based liquid for the kiddies to splash around in. We're in bad shape and it doesn't look as though things are going to get better anytime soon.

But on the upside it's only 54 more days till the Cubs start the '09 season...what could go wrong there?

Yikes!

Guvm'nt in our heads...

Mrs. Coop complaining that Yikes! has been absent posts recently so it's back to the typewriter-machine for me.

Last night was not a good one. I got almost no sleep. And apparently during the rare minute that I did drift off I was snoring so loudly that Mrs. Coop had to remove herself to the sofa in the living room. Now, the question is, why did I get so little rest last night? Too much pepperoni? Too little wine? No. The correct answer is my government is trying to kill me. That's right, I said it. No, they're not doing it in any kind of overt, car-bomb under the seat sort of way. They prefer to do it slowly, one nerve at a time. And good Christ are they wearing my nerves down these days.

I've sent e-mails to Senators and left voicemails for Representatives, trying to get them to defeat the bailout/handout bill. I've bothered every friend I have to please please please do the same. So Congress defeats the bill, completely defying the White House and the leadership of both parties. HUZZAH!!! I did the right thing! I fought the good fight and I won! Right? Right?

C'mon, somebody throw me a fucking HUZZAH here because I'm quickly beginning to rethink this thing as I'm lying in my bed in a cold sweat last night. Images flash through my mind: of my amazing wife and our two incredibly beautiful kids living out of the back seat of the minivan, which hasn't moved in months because gas either costs too much or just isn't available (take a look at the Southeastern U.S. for more on that!) and so the van has grass and weeds growing up through the wheel wells . Those two incredibly beautiful kids are underfed and filthy and battling severe colds because we can't afford to take them to the doctor because we no longer have any health insurance because I've lost my job because the small film studio I worked for could no longer afford to pay me or any of my fine co-workers because the line of credit that it relied upon to pay those fine employees dried up because the credit facility went bust because the bailout funds were never allocated because I sent e-mails to Senators and because I left voicemails for Representatives, trying to get them to defeat the bailout/handout bill and because I bothered every friend I have to please please please do the same. WHAT THE HELL HAVE I DONE?!?! And the sweat pours off me and I toss and I turn and every god damned nightmare scenario that I can conjure plays in my head.

But the problem is, even here in the bright light of day, I can't say for sure that what I did was the wrong thing to do. In fact, I still think it was the right thing to do! And that's where that thing about the government trying to kill me comes in. You see, nobody has yet to fully explain this unholy mess to the public. Do we need the bailout? Is it really just corporate socialism to protect the wallets of a few fat cats? The only one who has come close to explaining it all is Paul Krugman and I'm not sure I even understand him most of the time.

So I think the powers-that-be (and we know who they be) are just trying to drive us mad. Make us more irrational than we already are as a people. But to what end? They already own all the good stuff. They couldn't possibly want any of the crap that the rest of us own, it's all shit. I mean, the top 400 richest people in the US got even richer, to the the tune of $650 BILLION, during Bush's reign of stupidity. So what else do they want from us? Could it be that, having taken all else, they've come back to snatch our sanity?

YIKES!

Credit Default Swaps...What The Fuck???

I first heard this term, Credit Default Swaps, or CDS, on the radio yesterday. A "financial instrument" (read: red-hot poker...bend over please!) I had never heard of before...and now it seems that this will be the one to take down the economy of the country...and beyond.

Here's what I think may be a pretty good explanation of what CDS's are.
NOTE: This was written by Ben Stein, a right-wing apologist if ever there was one, but nonetheless a pretty smart guy. I've highlighted the section that explains CDS's.
http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/yourlife/109609;_ylt=AihYXGa_2tf9PJDeCl.2G0S7YWsA

The headlines scream doom. There are endless references to the economic situation being "the worst since The Great Depression." Immense names in finance have collapsed and sunk beneath the waves of the financial crisis. Please allow me to try to explain a bit of what's going on.
First of all, all you have to do is look around you to see that in terms of daily life, we are not anywhere near The Great Depression. Unemployment is barely about six percent. It was 25 percent at the nadir of The Great Depression. Real per capita incomes adjusted for inflation are at least five times what they were during The Great Depression. Airplanes are full. High-end restaurants are full. Prices are painfully high for food. These are not signs of a Great Depression.
On the other hand, the losses in financial products have been devastating. The Dow is off 23 percent from its high in 2007. Financial stocks even after the recent rally are off staggeringly. The biggest insurer in America has become a basket case. Most of all, there is REAL FEAR in the air. Decent, hard working people are terribly afraid as they see their life savings melt away. Retirement has become just a forlorn dream for tens of millions of Americans.
How did it happen?
Here s one big part of the answer. First, the alert reader will notice that Ben Stein said many times that the amount of money at risk in the subprime meltdown was just not enough to sink an economy of this size. And I was right...to a point. The amount of subprime that defaulted was at most - after recovery in liquidation - about $250 billion. A huge sum but not enough to torpedo the US economy.
The crisis occurred (to greatly oversimplify) because the financial system allowed entities to place bets on whether or not those mortgages would ever be paid. You didn't have to own a mortgage to make the bets. These bets, called Credit Default Swaps, are complex. But in a nutshell, they allow someone to profit immensely - staggeringly - if large numbers of subprime mortgages are not paid off and go into default.
The profit can be wildly out of proportion to the real amount of defaults, because speculators can push down the price of instruments tied to the subprime mortgages far beyond what the real rates of loss have been. As I said, the profits here can be beyond imagining. (In fact, they can be so large that one might well wonder if the whole subprime fiasco was not set up just to allow speculators to profit wildly on its collapse...)
These Credit Default Swaps have been written (as insurance is written) as private contracts. There is nil government regulation of them. Who writes these policies? Banks. Investment banks. Insurance companies. They now owe the buyers of these Credit Default Swaps on junk mortgage debt trillions of dollars. It is this liability that is the bottomless pit of liability for the financial institutions of America.
Because these giant financial companies never dreamed that the subprime mortgage securities could fall as far as they did, they did not enter a potential liability for these CDS policies anywhere near their true liability - which again, is virtually bottomless. They do not have a countervailing asset to pay off the liability.
This is what your humble servant, moi, missed. This is what all of the big investment banks and banks and insurance companies missed. This is what the federal government totally and utterly missed. This is what the truly brilliant speculators in these instruments did not miss. They could insure a liability they could also create and control. It is as if they could insure a Cadillac for its value upon theft - but they could control what the value the insurer had to pay off was. The insurer thought it might be fifty thousand dollars - but it was manipulated into being two million.
This is the whirlpool sucking down finance.
Now, we are about to have a similar phenomenon happen with commercial mortgage debt, debt from mergers and acquisitions, credit card debt, and car loan debt. Many trillions of dollars in Credit Default Swaps have been sold on all of this, and the prices of all of them have fallen and can be made to fall more.
As I said, the pit of loss is bottomless. Warren Buffett, the smartest man of all time in the world of finance, has called financial derivatives - of which Credit Default Swaps are a prime example - "weapons of financial mass destruction." And so they are. As with the hydrogen bomb, no one thought they would ever be used to end the world. But unless someone figures a way out - and maybe the new RTC is and maybe it isn't - we are in real peril. This should never have happened. Now that it did happen, should the taxpayer pay to make the billionaire speculators whole on their bets? What the heck is to be done?


Unbelievable what greed can do. Mind-numbingly unbelievable.
And, dear friends, 'YIKES' doesn't cover it anymore...

I Loves Me Some 538!

Check it out! Check it out! Check it out!
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Ahhh. There we go. The sun shines a bit brighter. The flowers smell a bit more, er, flowery. Food even tastes better today. That wasn't so hard was it? A little financial implosion is all it took to make McCrazy look like the simpleton he is.

Oh, and not knowing which hemisphere Spain resides in probably hasn't helped him either.

That whole Spain/Latin America thing put me in mind of the great Dan Quayle and his own superior knowledge of geography. I'm thinking of this: "I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix."

God I love the Republican party...they are all about the supply-side humor!

Boy, if I had signed up with the McCrazy campaign in hopes of a cush government gig, well right about now I would be thinking: YIKES!

McCrazy is NOT a hero! But he is crazy...

Seems like every day the blogosphere spends a lot of time discussing the various ads that McCrazy and Obama are running. And there is no doubt about it...McCrazy is running some of the sleaziest ads ever to air in a presidential campaign.


Now I'm not an ad expert but I would like to see the Obama camp run an ad highlighting McCain's claim that he is somebody who "knows how to win a war"...Huh? The only war that he's been directly involved in happens to also be the only war this country has ever lost.


Frankly, I'm a bit weary of hearing McCrazy referred to as a 'hero'. Is it heroic to get your plane shot out from under you? The crazy fucker crashed four (some say five) of the damn things before he was shot down. Let's face it...this guy is not a hero. He's just some silver-spoon slacker who never should have been allowed in the cockpit of a U.S.-owned aircraft, but got a pass because of who his daddy was. Granted, the loss of one of the planes was not his fault. On July 29, 1967, soon after he was assigned to the USS Forrestal as an A-4 Skyhawk pilot, McCrazy was seated in the cockpit of his aircraft waiting his turn for takeoff when an accidently fired rocket slammed into his plane. He escaped from the burning aircraft, but the explosions that followed killed 134 sailors, destroyed at least 20 aircraft, and threatened to sink the ship. McCain has said of this incident "I guess God had more for me to do." Yeah, so I guess it follows that God was pretty much done with the 134 guys that were killed that day. They apparently had nothing to live for.

Also, a bit off topic, but it was nice to see Bob Schieffer hawking his book on CNN this morning. This is the man who will 'moderate' the last of the presidential debates this year. The first words out of his mouth were "John McCain is a true American hero" Well, that sure sounds unbiased, huh?

That is why it is so important for Obama to fight back hard NOW. If it comes down to a close race at the time of that last debate, McCrazy's shill will cinch it for him.

Mom of the Year...the sequel...

Can you believe that nasty polar bear-killing transvestite-looking Alaskan pimping-out her Down Syndrome son in the hopes of pulling in a few more votes? She absolutely did.

"To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House"

So now that she has birthed herself a special-needs kid she's all for helping those families. But prior to that, back when it was just her, her snow machine-racin' stubble-faced husband and their four other kids, (one of whom was, apparently, concieved before the words "Do you, Sarah, take Tod..." could leave the preacher's lips. For the record, she did take Tod...and his business partner too if the Enquirer is to be believed), well back then, she didn't see the need, so to speak. No, back then she thought those special needs families were just freeloaders so she cut funding for those families by 62%.

It was also nice to see that, once they were done with the stricken little baby boy, after they each and everyone of them...from the shocked Levi who is being forced at shotgun point to marry the promiscuous 16 year-old Bristol when really all he ever wanted was to take a tumble in the back seat with her like all of his friends had before him, to the "Holy Christ she's frightening" Cindy 'snake-eyes' McCain (who, as friend of mine noted, looked as though she might drink the poor child's blood)...after they had each had their little photo op with little Crag or Bag or whatever effed-up name it was that they gave that kid, well they just handed him over to the youngest daughter, Piper, who clearly is the brains of the operation, to play with as a toy. I literally cringed as the camera showed that little girl pressing down on the (I'm assuming) as yet not fully-hardened skull of the baby so as to smooth its life-like hair. And then again when I saw young Piper apparently playing with the eyeball of her baby brother. Where the hell was the parental supervision? Where was Tod? Tod! Where the fuck were you you stubble-faced prick?

I'll say it again people...YIKES!

UPDATE...it turns out that 62% cut number is incorrect. My apologies for forwarding bad intel. But, in my favor, the woman does look like a transvestite. No offense meant to actual transvestites.

Mom of the Year...

I took an extended hiatus from the blogging due to the overwhelming amount of vitriol spewing forth from my hi-tech typewriter here (which, I'm sure, is exactly how you have to describe a computer to Crazy John McCain lest he give you that Republican caught in a lie..think Tom Delay's mug...stare of his). This election cycle has filled me hatred for some of my fellow humans. Okay, okay. Those of you who know me know that last bit was a false statement. I have hated many of my fellow humans since long before this election cycle. Let's say then that this campaign season has magnified, or intensified, my loathing of some people.

Which brings me to the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States of America. Second highest office in the land. A heartbeat away from the Presidency. That's right, I'm talkin' about the second runner-up in the Miss Alaska 'beauty' pageant...Tammy Faye, er, Sarah Palin.

I know my friends Kevin and Lisa are both fans of the Rude Pundit, but for those of you who may have missed this...this piece speaks to my feelings about this whole thing...

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2008/09/bristol-palins-vagina-considered-let-us.html

It's not about the 16 year-old girl being preggers. It's about the judgement of the polar bear-killing mother that put the teenager in the national spotlight to begin with. Dumbass. Again, the mother, not the daughter. And hey, it's a good thing Palin took a hard line on a question in 2006 from the conservative Eagle Forum Alaska:...

Q: Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?

Sarah Palin: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.


Sounds like a solid plan. Why educate your children about sex when you can just tell them "Hey, don't do that!"? Because it is well-known that teenage kids listen to that kind of insightful advice from adults. You can lock them in a room with a table full of soda and cookies and say "Oh, by the way, don't drink that soda or eat those cookies because, while being very damned tasty, they might spoil your appetite for dinner, which is five hours from now...but I'm sure you can wait." Sure enough, those kiddies will probably not pay any attention to the wonderful sugary-goodness sitting on a table just a few feet from thier soda and cookie-starved bodies. They will probably not notice how seductive the soda looks with the little dew drops glistening on the can, trailing ever-so-slowly down the side of the can to pool at the bottom in a moist, beckoning stain on the tablecloth. Or how fantastic those fresh, young cookies smell in that just-out-of-the-oven way that young cookies have of luring one in. No they won't pay any attention to all of that. Will they? Or will they, once the door is closed and the adult is out of the room, throw themselves upon the waiting tasty treats and have their way with them, devouring every last damned cookie crumb and slurping every can of soda?

But if, on the other hand, you were to point out to the kids that by eating all of those cookies and drinking all of that soda they are going to add pounds to their mid-sections, increase their risk of diabetes and generally make themselves feel poorly, that if, instead of eating and drinking all of that nasty shit they simply nibble a bit and they shouldn't have any health issues, well, then the kiddies can make an informed decision about what it is they want to do...eat, don't eat, eat just a few cookies, take just a sip of soda...whatever.

But no. Sex is bad dammit! It must be bad because my pastor told me so...

These people are cretins. Talk about your bridge to nowhere!

YIKES!