Author: Muttrox

Our retirement accounts are down about $11,000 in the last few weeks. That’s a lot of lira. I’ve been surprised by our own reaction, we’re just not that worked up about it. We have a long term perspective, this too shall pass. And last spring, we put a large proportion of funds into money market and international funds.

I’m curious to know, what are my readers doing? Are you diversifying? Panicking? Not noticing at all? Selling financial stocks short? What’s your view on the overall economy, and what are you doing with your own pile to reflect that?

The Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome People of 2007. Always funny (especially #42).

A long interview with John Edwards. Very substanstive, mostly on Iraq.

The Legend of Cliff Young: The 61 Year Old Farmer Who Won the World’s Toughest Race

Guess what song this is. This is very cool when you finally get it.

A collection of top 10 lists about movies, books, writers, etc.

Tyler Cowen (interesting economist blogger) with two posts, what he’s certain of, what he is uncertain of, and another one does the same thing.

They meet, fall in love, get married. Then they find out they were twins, separated at birth.

Real life superheros!

In an article about consumer spending dropping:

Gia Trumpler, 37, a travel consultant who lives in Manhattan, shops at luxury chains like Saks. But she is trimming costs where she can by bringing lunch to work from home, rather than eating out.

I’d guess it takes about 50 lunches made from home to make up for one trip to Saks. If Gia wants to make herself miserable that’s her business. But why be stupid and miserable, isn’t stupid enough?

A judge ruled that MSNBC must let Dennis Kucinich in to their debate.

I’m somewhat offended that a legitimate candidate was invited to a debate and then uninvited under circumstances that appear to be that they just decided to exclude him, the judge said.

I think it’s pretty rotten of MSNBC also. I think it is only fair that Dennis Kucinich gets a chance to participate. I think a debate should have a wide range of voices and opinions.

But – I don’t see any reason that MSNBC has to play fair. They own the network, they get to make their rules. Where does this guy get off telling them how to run their network? If they “just decided to exclude him”, what business is it of his?

Early Update: One of my favorite bloggers tears me a new one.

Later Update: The judges ruling is overturned. Free speech, or some such garbage.

* Moss: Where the heck was Moss? He caught one pass for 14 yards, I don’t even remember it. Why aren’t we throwing to Randy Moss? And how can that not even be mentioned by anyone. Is he being single-covered, double-covered, what’s the story here? Could we have one camera show him on a play at some point, maybe have Phil Simms mention something?

* Jacksonville’s a good team. If they had just a little bit more talent… but they don’t.

* Rodney Harrison: This guy is driving me crazy. The last few games he’s been tagged with unsportsmanlike fouls that have had a big impact. We could have easily lost the Giants game because he can’t calm down just a little. On the other hand, he’s come up with huge interceptions in all these games. He’s driving me crazy!

* Defense: Looked very shaky. If you let Jacksonville score 20 on you, the Colts are going to paste a lot more. We’d better step it up.

* Go Chargers!

41-10 Pats. Blowout, the outcome never really in question.

Hillary: Glad to see the media got it wrong, but I’m not sure why. Oh wait, it’s because I hate almost all political coverage and think 80% of commentators and editors should be fired. At least it will be a couple weeks less of stories about Hillary the robot. My Mom voted for Richardson – oh, those quirky New Hampshirites! Don’t they know they can only vote for Obama or Hilary – or maybe Edwards if they’ve had a few first.

McCain: I don’t like McCain much anymore (see here for my thoughts from three years ago), but he’s a million times better than Huckabee. McCain is a “reasonable people can disagree” candidate. I disagree with most of his positions, and I’m sad at how he sold his soul the last four years, but he’s basically smart, intelligent, moral man, which is more than you can say about everyone else except Ron Paul and Mitt Romney.

Today is January 9th. I am not wearing a jacket today. I didn’t make a concious decision whether I needed a jacket, it was obvious.

Have fun with that whole winter thing.

For some reason I can’t get the image to load here, it’s a great picture of the cast of L.A. Law. Check out the “duh” caption.

No, you really think so?

Congratulations Obama! Not only did Obama win, but he did in convincing fashion, and did it by organizing better and bringing out new people, widening the tent. That’s a great sign for him and the Democrats in general. Many have said it, and I agree, it’s fantastic that a guy who wouldn’t been allowed on the bus a couple generations back is the early leader for President of the USA. It’s a tribute to our country. Jon Swift says it funnier.

The other big winners were white voters and white members of the party establishment. By voting for Barack Obama, they were able to prove that they are not racist. The fact that Obama is young, charismatic, inspiring, a mesmerizing speaker, has fresh ideas and appeals across the partisan divide will make no difference in the general election where it is a well-known fact that the American people will be afraid to vote for a black man with a funny name who is inexperienced and might secretly be a Muslim. By letting him win this one, and giving us a historic moment that we can tell our grandchildren about, we can all feel better about ourselves.

Huckabee: I have two conflicting views. One is that, this guy would be a terrible president. The GOP only has two candidates who are even tolerable, Romney and McCain. The rest of them are dreadful. (I love Ron Paul, and I’m glad he’s in the race, but deep down I don’t want him for president.) So I’m sad that such a terrible guy has the early lead. On the other hand Huckabee is not only a bad candidate on the merits, he’ll be easy to destroy. Any of the Dems can take him. So I’m glad that the GOP might end up with a candidate who is more likely to lose the general election.

Giuliani: Swear to god, this was his reaction to his pathetic showing, “”None of this worries me – Sept. 11, there were times I was worried,” The man is a cartoon.

Media and Framing: John Edwards came in second, narrowly beating Hillary. Saturday, the lead story was Hillary’s reaction. Page seven or so was Edwards. The lead editorial was about Hillary, no mention of Edwards. Why can’t the guy get any coverage?

The fine art of Doctor slang. When I first heard that FLK (“Funny Looking Kid”) was an actual term used on charts, I couldn’t stop laughing.

The Who play Won’t Get Fooled Again, 27 years apart, in sync. This just reinforces how key John Entwistle and Keith Moon were, and that Pete is undisputably a better guitar player than ever. (And it’s more cool than amazing, they are playing along to the same pre-recorded backing track as ever.)

Whatever your politics, this KFC sign about Hillary is fantastic.

Vinyl sleeve-heads. More entertaining than it should be.

Wait a minute…

Reviews of milk on Amazon. Legendary.

Truly inspired. Take a Garfield comic. Remove anything Garfield says or thinks. The result is a surreal comic, which appears to be commenting on life in a deep bizzare way. Also Jon is revealed as clearly psychopathic.

A manualist plays the Peanuts theme. I confess, I did not know what a manualist was. Now I wish I still didn’t. Here’s Stu Hamm doing it on bass. I saw him do this live in 1990, incredible.

An evil genius at work.

Cops with a sense of humor

New England, The Patriots & Me!!! At last! This video is so bad I can’t begin to fathom it. No wonder we were humilated by the Bears. It took New England 15 years to recover from this putridity.

The Order of the Stick. Stick figures in Dungeons & Dragons world. Start from the beginning, it’s a long trip.

I’ve given a few hundred bucks here and there to the Democrats. I gave to John Kerry in the 2004 primaries when things looked hopeless. That money was well-used, since he became the front-runner just after cashing it. I should have given him a few hundred more after primary season, that undoubtedly would have been the turning point to beat Bush! I haven’t given this primary season (all the Democrats are good enough for me), but I’ll probably chip in again during the general election.

I’ve focused more on Congressional campaigns the last four years. I’ve given a bit each year to the DCCC, the clearing house for Democrat congressional races. But I’m done with that. Two particular incidents have sent me over the edge.

1) As part of the ongoing FISA madness, Congress is trying to give the telecoms retroactive immunity from any lawsuits. That’s bad. Chris Dodd has been taking the lead in trying to stop this. He placed a hold on the bill. Harry Reid ignored it. That is very bad. These holds are incredibly pernicious (one of my father’s favorite words), in which any senator can stop pretty much anything, just by asking. They are always honored. Harry Reid decided to make an exception. The exception was for a Democrat, his own party!, who was concerned about the President breaking the law and the Constitution. Harry Reid apparently was not. Glenn Greenwald has the definitive take on this, as well as many other posts about it.

2) Hedgefund managers found a loophole in the tax code that lets them treat their income as capital gains instead of normal income. This is a much better taxrate, it nets them hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions. This is a simple loophole, an understandable oversight in complicated tax law. Not a big deal, you just close the loophole and get back to business, right? Wrong. Once again, a prominent Democrat stepped in. Charles Shumer (D-NY/Wall Street) stopped the legislation. He didn’t even try to defend what he did — he knows it was craven pandering to his donors. That’s money lost that could be used to pay down the debt, pay for Iraq for a while, get ready for the growing “unfunded liabilities”, help with the subprime crisis, all kinds of useful things.

I’m not giving them any more money for a while.