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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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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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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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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The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 had a deep personal impact on most if not all Americans. My brother was living in Manhattan at the time, and the events obviously had a huge impact on him. I worked at the main trauma center (St. Vincent’s) on the 12th, but my experience was one of frustration since there were so few survivors to help. But spending a lot of time with the EMTs, firefighters and cops who responded in the first hours of the tragedy — all of them losing more than a few friends in the incident — changed my life forever. But seeing Ground Zero up close reinforced the repulsion I felt toward war. I knew we would soon be doing to civilians in other countries what had just been done to us, and it made me even sicker than I already was.

So many people had extraordinary or mundane experiences with 9/11 yet had profound reactions or underwent irreversible changes in perspective or awareness. We want to hear where PBMers were on 9/11, how it affected you, and how you think the so-called “war on terror” has gone since that fateful day.

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Listeners called and wrote in today to express a huge, often hilarious arsenal of ideas regarding just what journalist-turned-tool Bob Woodward is referring to when, in recent interviews about his latest book, he talks about a “true breakthrough” by the US military — some kind of “top secret… operational capabilities” that help “locate, target and kill” enemy leaders. Speculation ranged from Pete’s idea of tiny robots that sneak around and find you then somehow snuff you, to a crass idea suggested by suspiciously Tard-like caller “Drat”: Goat AIDS, which would strike Taliban fighters when they “sought comfort” on cold nights in the countryside.

So what’s your guess? Check out highlight’s from Woodward’s 60 Minutes appearance below…

(Read the article)

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So here’s the dirt, folks. What’s your take on the differences between these recent interviews?

Clips embedded after the jump…

(Read the article)

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At the top of today’s show, Aaron treated us to a dream he had in which planes fell from the sky into New York Harbor just before killer whales started jumping around and jetski-riding terrorists headed toward shore. Speaking of nightmares, it’s been a while since I took a good shot at Obama, but this just caught my eye…

More cartoons by Mr. Fish

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So Sen. Barrack Obama either just admitted he’s a secret Muslim (the worst Muslim ever, since he’s not observing Ramadan!), or he misspoke when he referred to “my Muslim faith” in an interview on ABC’s This Week.

Meanwhile, Gov. Sarah Palina misrepresented the relationship between Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and the American public at a rally in Colorado Springs. It’s not clear that she even knew what these institutions are or do, but all sorts of theories are popping up to explain what she meant to say, or why she’s actually correct if you twist truthiness just right, while others are simply insisting that a Vice Presidential candidate doesn’t need to understand the forces behind the US housing market as a couple callers insisted today.

Pete says Obama made a slip-up but Palin exposed a fundamental lack of understanding of one of the major economic issues of the moment (the biggest of the day).

Then again, Pete also referred to the war on Iraq as a “mistake” instead of a wildly immoral, patently illegal act of unjustified aggression. So maybe it’s all a matter of perspective.

So what’s the truth in either case? Obama a secret, unobservant Muslim? Palin needs to take a remedial economics course? I’m volunteering to tutor her! I TA’ed Macroeconomics 103 at The American University in 1994, so I’m clearly qualified!

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