Internal Monologue

Atrios' explanation for what's happening with housing : While it's rather obvious, sometimes I think the "how'd it happen" of the housing bubble isn't explained clearly. The short answer is that cheap money was made available to more and more people. Potential home buyers for the most part don't really care what the sticker price is on the house; they care about the monthly mortgage payment. In the early days of the house price boom, the "culprit" was simply low long term interest rates. People with good credit were getting cheap 30 year fixed rate mortgages, allowing them to buy a more expensive home for a cheaper monthly payment. As housing prices started to go up, subprime lenders started to jump in and widened the pool of people for whom cheap money, at least temporarily, was available. Uncle Alan Greenspan blessed the use of ARMs, and lenders began offering very low teaser rates that would balloon after a few years. People either didn&#

According to Bob Novak (yes, the same Novak who originally outed Plame as a covert operative): The morass in Iraq and deepening difficulties in Afghanistan have not deterred the Bush administration from taking on a dangerous and questionable new secret operation. High-level U.S. officials are working with their Turkish counterparts on a joint military operation to suppress Kurdish guerrillas and capture their leaders. Through covert activity, their goal is to forestall Turkey from invading Iraq. (HT: quaoar on DailyKos ) This whole Turkey-Kurd conflict has been simmering for some time. A skillful U.S. might be able to finesse it and keep these two allies from going at it. But now it looks like we might be taking sides. Of course, this carries big risks: Edelman's listeners were stunned. Wasn't this risky? He responded that he was sure of success, adding that the U.S. role could be concealed and always would be denied. Even if all this is true, some of the briefed lawmakers

The game is up : In a breathtaking announcement today, Rabbi Soyvitch Goldberginsky told a slightly confused gathering of End Timers at a How to Dress for the Rapture: Boxers, Briefs or Dangler’s Puffery seminar in Las Vegas, Nevada that the basis for their religion, the founding gospels of the New Testament were in fact part of an elaborate gag perpetrated by “…a few wisenheimers back in the day. The guys were sitting around, tossing shrimp at pigs for who-knows-why, when one of them says “Hey, what if we say that God shtupped a zaftig and Jr. will give everyone a Get Out of Hell card? And they will have to sing ass-kissing songs and feel bad a lot of the time, just like us.” Isn't this kind of similar to Nietzsche's conception Christianity: a vehicle for spreading slave morality and ressentiment to the gentiles? Of course, there's a lot more to Christianity than belief in the idea that "God shtupped a zaftig", but that is a central tenet of orthodox (with a

This diagram, from a DailyKos diary, was made with this online applet . Unfortunately, it is impossible sometimes to get the areas proportional to your data: The applet draws Venn Diagrams with 3 circles. It attempts to make each of the zones (the set intersections) proportional to the population (value) assigned to the zone. Note that, in general, the areas will be approximate, as an ideal solution is generally not possible using circles.

Iraq's prime minister, Maliki, doesn't like Petraeus arming the Sunni militias and has asked Bush to remove him : Relations between the top United States general in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, the country’s prime minister, are so bad that the Iraqi leader made a direct appeal for his removal to President George W Bush. Although the call was rejected, aides to both men admit that Mr Maliki and Gen David Petraeus engage in frequent stand-up shouting matches, differing particularly over the US general’s moves to arm Sunni tribesmen to fight al-Qa’eda. One Iraqi source said Mr Maliki used a video conference with Mr Bush to call for the general’s signature strategy to be scrapped. “He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias,” said the official. “Bush told Maliki to calm down.” What are we doing in Iraq again?

Image from KCRG.com Seems young folks are turning away from the Republican party in a pretty big way. Given this reality, one would think Republicans would jump at the chance to engage young voters by having a YouTube sponsored debate like the one the Democrats had. But it look like it might not happen: NYT : The Republican CNN-YouTube debate , scheduled for Sept. 17 in Florida, may move to another date, given reservations that some of the presidential candidates have expressed about both the date and the format. Xinhuanet.com (why does China's official news agency often come up first in Google searches about American politics?): Four days after the Democratic presidential debate hosted by CNN/YouTube.com, only two of the nine Republican presidential candidates have agreed to participate in a similar debate for their party on Sept. 17. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and congressman Ron Paul of Texas are the only two that have agreed to take part in the debate,

Photo by Kristyn Stroble