Hale Stewart on the Bear Stearns situation:
The Federal Reserve is scared shitless.
Sort of gets your attention, doesn’t it? Hale understands financial stuff and explains it better than I can, so see him for details. See also Paul Krugman.
I’m still watching the Tibet crisis on the other blog. Per my agreement with About.com I cannot cross-post, but today I wish I could. Chinese bloggers are weighing in, and they do not understand why the Tibetans are so ungrateful for being liberated. You’d think they’d be greeting the Chinese with flowers and candy, after all. Oh, wait …
The Chinese are really cracking down now. They are going house to house in Lhasa, arresting people and parading prisoners through the streets. I suspect the protests will either taper off after today, or they’ll get a lot worse. See also the Peking Duck, here, here and here.
Marc Ambinder catches Bill Kristol in a major flub. See also Balloon Juice.
Scott Helman reports for the Boston Globe that Republican voters are coming out for Clinton.
For a party that loves to hate the Clintons, Republican voters have cast an awful lot of ballots lately for Senator Hillary Clinton: About 100,000 GOP loyalists voted for her in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and about 38,000 in Mississippi, exit polls show. …
… Spurred by conservative talk radio, GOP voters who say they would never back Clinton in a general election are voting for her now for strategic reasons: Some want to prolong her bitter nomination battle with Barack Obama, others believe she would be easier to beat than Obama in the fall, or they simply want to register objections to Obama.
Now that McCain has sewed up the Republican nomination, Republicans in remaining primaries could really do some mischief. Pennsylvania has a closed primary, meaning only registered Dems can vote in the Dem primary, which should help. And I’m sure the pro-Clinton bloggers who have alleged there’s something sinister about Obama’s appeal to Independent and moderate Republican voters will take note and … oh, wait. They won’t. Never mind.
Oh, and happy Saint Patrick’s Day. Image above copyrighted — © Jeannel | Dreamstime.com
Beautiful artwork of St. Pat. If only he could help us drive the snakes out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
About 100,000 GOP loyalists voted for [Clinton] in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and about 38,000 in Mississippi, exit polls show.…
I’ve been wondering about those shenanigans (there’s a nice Irish word). As a registered Democrat since 1976, I’ve never felt even the slightest inclination to cross party lines in order to f*** up the Republican results in the primary. On the contrary, I’d feel like I was committing election fraud. Am I the only one with such a qualm? Maybe open primaries are a bad idea as long as the GOP’s still fascist?
No such luck, joanr16… 🙂 I hear Cheney just slithered into Baghdad, so I guess St.Paddy drove him out temporarily
You know China organized those protests in Tibet. It is relatively easy to do, just pay some agitators and have your intelligence forces direct events. Obviously, there has to be some underlying issues to get it going, so they just provided the fuel. The obvious time to protest and get maximum attention would have been during the Olympics, not now.
The also staged the hijacking by Islamic terrorists from their
Xinjiang region which is home to some 8 million Uighurs,
The motive is to give them an excuse to put both Tibet and Xinjian region in lockdown mode until after the Olympics, and discourage of prevent any tourism until it is over.
China has learned a lot from Bush, as well as our CIA activities over the last 60 years. Glad we are exporting our values.
You know China organized those protests in Tibet.
That’s absolute nonsense. This is the last thing China wanted to happen just before the Olympic Games.
That was no flub by Kristol. NewsMax is a notorious dumping ground for smear campaigns, and Kristol is just doing what he always does, passing it on down the line. The Republican noise machine rolls on and on…..
Wasn’t the Hillary vote Rush’s idea? Because the show must go on, and he’s nobody without somebody to hate.
I commented here on Ohio’s primary day how some Repub friends of mine told me they voted for HRC. He actually claimed it was because he thought it would be a more exciting contest with her against McCain. Cough.
On the Chinese matter, my wife is Chinese, she is home right now and has not heard of what is happening in Tibet. The general attitude of the Chinese people is that it is one China, what don’t they get about that. This is what they have been taught their whole lives. Repetition makes it true. The same goes for Taiwan. I do not discuss the issue with her. You might as well tell a southern boy that the south will rise again is something that is not gonna happen.
And no, the Chinese government does not want this to happen right now. They have gone so far as to try to affect the weather so it is sunny for the olympics. They are shuttting down industrial production in Beijing so the air quality improves. They want perfection.
Well before the convention, the nastiness of the current battle for the Democratic nomination will be forgotten. Instead, everyone will be focused on the nastiness of our economic collapse. And we’ve run out of easy answers, as Krugman also notes. New Schrute Buck hits new low, while former Wizard says our bubble economy wasn’t his fault Remember when the Wizard of Oz took off in his balloon and left Dorothy behind? At least she could tap her magic slippers together and wake up from her dream. We don’t have any magic slippers, and we seem to be trapped in an economic nightmare with no end in sight.