Recently, in the comments under my posting of the Sarah Palin debate flowchart, I called on our readers to point me to some good anti-Obama graphics. Adam in Texas, who calls in to the show and posts comments here regularly, took the challenge to heart by actually creating one of his own. And I have to say, I think his Barack Obama Associations Flowchart pretty damn clever and very well-constructed. Judge for yourself…

Click to Enlarge!

There is one glaring factual inaccuracy, which is the suggestion that Bill Ayers tried to murder people with his bombs, or that he has stated he wishes he had committed murders. That’s quite far from reality, as Adam well knows, but I guess in this age of propaganda, it’s what we wish our adversaries said or thought or did that matters, not so much the truth.

Anyway, I still thought that was a damn good graphic. If anybody else has treats to share, send them to me at myfirstname @petesbigmouth.com (my first name is Brian).

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For those of us who knew the Wall Street bailout package rushed through Congress last week was going to be a huge, unilateral gift to the same wealthy scumbags who screwed up in the first place, proof of our suspicion is already emerging. This is what happens when you don’t stop and ask questions about just how $700 billion will be managed. And you don’t stop and ask questions, of course, if you are foaming at the mouth with excitement about handing your rich backers a huge gob of taxpayer money to play with.

From the London Telegraph:

But the US Treasury does not have the staff to make the decisions about which banks and which debts to buy up and will instead spend the next few weeks hiring Wall Street experts to do the buying for them.

Experts warned the approach is laden with financial pitfalls, since it may be impossible to find independent contractors who do not have a vested interest in which debts to buy and the price at which they buy them.

The companies hired to identify and buy the bad debts will have to make decisions that affect the same firms whose shares they own. In some cases they might effectively be buying up their own bad debts.

This is quite possibly biggest domestic crime in US history, and they’re doing it right in front of our noses. The corporate media and the politicians don’t give a shit what we think. They’re not afraid of us, because they know their “democratic” system insulates them from our wrath while offering us the illusion of control.

Now our leaders have eagerly doubled down on our behalf, placing one more bad bet — this time with public money — on the very same dirtballs that got us into this conundrum.

If you aren’t outraged, you definitely aren’t paying attention. (Or maybe you’re a dick.)

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Funny and astute, this blogger’s insightful flowchart says it all.

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Okay, kids, just click the Play button on the box below and you’ll be able to follow along with the liveblog. You may submit comments or queries if you choose, but please understand these will be moderated to make sure chat doesn’t get too flooded. So by all means speak up… just remember there are a lot of people participating, so be judicious with your remarks.

The panelists are…

• Pete “Big Mouth” Dominick
• Brian “Big Brother” Dominick
• “Jackbooted” Joe Salzone

Helping out and chiming in…

• Sean “Surfboard” Bertollo
• Aaron “Hellraiser” Hodges

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You know you are gonna watch the Vice Presidential debate Thursday night. Just like you slow down to check out that car crash. Just like you watch David Blaine, secretly hoping he drowns. Just like you look at gay porn every single night. Let’s face it, Palin and Biden are both going to hang themselves… and we’ll be there with sticks to poke their twitching remains like political piñatas. And you’re invited to take a few wacks yourself! Just come to http://petesbigmouth.com/blog just before the debate starts at 9pm Eastern and join the fray!

Pete and I have asked PBM blogcaster and Blog Bunker host Joe “Slaughterhouse” Salzone to join us in liveblogging the debate. (As a special feature, Joe and I will be attempting to diagram Sarah Palin’s sentences in real time to determine if they have any syntactic validity whatsoever.) We’ve also gotten commitments from Sean “TV Dinner” Bertollo and Aaron “Buster Lover” Hodges… so now all we need is you.

Now, if you’re like my brother, you might get halfway through the debate, wondering the whole time what you were forgetting, and then go, “Shit! I’m missing the Pete’s Big Mouth liveblog simulcast extravaganza!” Or you might get caught up looking at gay porn and forget the debate altogether! So to make sure that doesn’t happen — and to make sure you never miss any of Pete’s events (like national TV appearances and other cool stuff) — you should go subscribe to Pete’s new Twitter feed. Whenever we post an update to Twitter, you’ll get it, and that way you won’t miss the next time Pete goes on Comedy Central to deliver his hack jokes about funny things that supposedly happened at the gym.

If you don’t want to deal with Twitter, you can use the email form below to schedule a reminder message. Got it? Good!

Then we’ll see you Thursday night. The party will get started around 8:50 pm, I imagine. You can join the discussion any time. Pete will figure out the software around 9:45 pm. And if you’re the type who listens but never calls, don’t worry, you won’t be expected to make comments — most people are just going to be reading along to add some humor to the hellishness of the evening.

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We spent a couple hours on the air today talking about where the problems are rooted, but it’s decidedly harder to decide what to do than to decide who is at fault. So now that we’ve pointed some blame, can we point out solutions? I have not found any ideas that thrill me in particular. Here are a few that don’t seem entirely stupid, but I’d love to hear yours (or have you link to alternatives).

I’ll kick it off with a reference to one of the few people who said this crisis was coming way back when (as mentioned in a previous post). Dean Baker offers several “progressive conditions for a bailout,” which I find a little weak and watered down, ut which are probably more severe than anything our Congressional representatives will come up with.

This blogger whose work I’m not otherwise familiar with seems to think we should be letting the government handle credit, since Wall Street just proved itself entirely incapable:

The U.S. government is now the ultimate home mortgage lender, and consequently mortgage rates have fallen. The government has lending facilities for student loans, farm loans, small business loans, and myriad others. The task now is to pick up the pace. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve have been quite creative in setting up new lending facilities for the benefit of investment banks and broker-dealers. How about a lending facility for businesses to replace the commercial paper market? How about a lending facility for consumers to ease the pinch from credit card debt?

Here’s a quick analysis of the proposed plan as it stood this morning. Details always changing, but the important thing is, we should see some details before our rulers move forward on it, no?

Paul Krugman offers a pretty moderate view of the bailout, but he makes some critical points that everyone should understand:

And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.

These recommendations that economist Robin Hahnel referred to on the show the other day deserve another look, though once again I think they’re really bland. Maybe I’ll write my own ideas down soon so you all can thrash them. For now, I’ll let you all go at it over these proposals, or offer your own, in the comments.

Oh, and here’s an article on the credit default swaps that one caller brought up. They’re not super hard to understand, but they’re difficult to explain. This article does a decent job. These instruments constitute one of the major variables in this whole crisis, which is why I was saying news on just how bad off they are may be the next wave of the catastrophe

Last but not least, please enjoy this important message of peace from the Techno Viking…

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American University economics professor Robin Hahnel was on to talk about the mortgage/Wall Street crisis. He recommended this article by Robert Weissman, one of the economists who has been most prophetic about the coming crisis that we’re now in the middle of, and one of the people with true alternative paths for us to collectively ignore as we hurl free money at scumbag CEOs and investors. And here’s a link to Robin’s books on Amazon.

Here’s the Sam Harris article on Palin and elitism that Pete got a chubby over.

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The state of Georgia is about to execute a man who is almost certainly not guilty. Seven out of the nine witnesses who provided all the evidence in the case have recanted their testimony. Prominent figures all over the world, including Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict and former FBI Director William Sessions are standing behind accused “cop killer” Troy Anthony Davis, who will be executed Tuesday evening unless the Georgia Board of Pardons intervenes.

NPR had some great coverage of the situation this morning. And Davis’s support group has a site with tons of material about the case.

We urge you to contact the Georgia Board of Pardons and demand they issue a stay of execution, at the very least. Tell them the whole nation — indeed the world — is watching as Georgia prepares to murder a man who most witnesses say did not commit the crime of which they helped convict him.

Call: 404-656-5712
Fax: 404-651-8502
Email: clemency_information@pap.state.ga.us

Update (9/23): For those who haven’t heard, The US Supreme Court granted Davis a stay of execution until they can consider ordering new hearings on the matter. So he’s still alive, for now.

From WaPo:

The stay of execution will remain in effect while the Supreme Court considers Davis’s appeal. Davis wants the high court to order a judge to hear from the witnesses who recanted their testimony and from others who say another man confessed to the crime.

See also this horribly headlined AP story, or this from AFP.

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My laptop screen busted on me today and I’ve been running around like crazy trying to figure out whether to pay to get it fixed or buy a new machine. All the while losing precious hours at work and not listening to the show. But you don’t care about my computer, you care about the issues, except I don’t know what’s going on because now I’m using one of those old-fashioned CRT monitors that’s glowing in my face and I can’t stand to stare at it any longer. So have at if, folks!

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If only someone could have seen this financial crisis coming, say, in 2003. If only there was an economist who predicted the housing bubble. If only there had been criticism of subprime lending years back. If only someone had discussed the wider implications of the housing bubble and the financial deregulation that spurred it on. Wasn’t there some wild-eyed radical to speak up and say financial mechanisms like derivatives hedges are putting us all at risk? I mean, the only experts the media can rely on are people who were totally surprised by the meltdown. They happen to be the same folks who missed the late-’90s stock-market bubble bursting, but since they uphold elite interests, they’re going to keep their jobs as primary news sources. I mean, really, who could have known?

If only someone could have written something like this years ago:

This situation is frightening for two reasons. First, as a short-run matter, if housing prices fall sharply in some of the areas where the effects of the bubble are largest… new home buyers (and those who recently refinanced their mortgages and took money out) could find they have negative equity in their homes. … When this happens, there is a huge incentive to just let the mortgage holder foreclose on the home. If this were to happen on a large scale, the survival of many banks and financial institutions would be at risk.

I mean, that person would probably be the most sought-after economist in the news today, right? He would be a household name, and major news outlets wouldn’t be turning to Alan Greenspan to explain why everything is falling apart.

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