There's room at the top, they're telling you still...

[tiurin]

Comments

[akiko]

Because Really, I don't know why there's no liberal party in this country. doesn't need the rest of the sentence behind it. There is no liberal party in the United States.

And I'm not saying that because I'm a leftist. The "liberals" in the US are centrist or slightly rightist compared to political parties in Europe.

[dolohov]

There hasn't been much complaint about the Bear Stearns bailout because it was fundamentally a good idea. It went down because BS was otherwise going to default on their overnight loans (don't get me started on that practice) -- having a major investment bank go under with almost no warning would be Very Bad for the economy. If that had turned into a wide-scale equivalent of a bank run, we'd have lost savings, pension funds, the works

[dolohov]

I still maintain that it was a choice, though. Whatever the banks did to persuade people, they still had to walk through those doors in the first place, and they still needed to sign their names on the forms. They may have chosen out of ignorance or vanity or misapplied optimism, but they still chose, and that still has to count for something

[londo]

I'd be more pleased with the Bear Stearns bailout if the Fed, in return for taking any potential loss, also demanded increased profit from JPM.

As it is, every time the Fed does something like this, they send a signal to aggressive bankers that they'll do it again next time, which is of questionable value.

[theotherjay]

The problem is, if we changed the system so as to allow for more parties beyond the hegemonic two (campaign-finance rules that gave third-party candidates a greater advantage, &c.), you'd get a real liberal party, but you'd also get a real conservative one. For every Portlander who longs to vote for a Green party Senator, there's someone out there who thinks that the Constitution party would really be ideal, but they'll settle for the Republicans. America is, a few liberal enclaves notwithstanding, a very conservative country. Our democratic system of government doesn't fail by reflecting that, it succeeds. We don't need more political parties so much as we need a change in public attitudes.

[evwhore]

The suckers are, by and large, either happy to be suckers, or because they are suckers, don't realize they are suckers, and either way, telling them they're suckers only breeds defiant resentment. So as a strategy that seems kinda lacking :-)

[dolohov]

Actually, his policy on the Strategic Oil Reserve seems to me to primarily be stubbornness over the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge: my guess is that he's going to make it basically unavailable so that Congress is pretty much forced to authorize drilling. That, or he's betting a whole lot of his fiscal legacy on northern-border fields like that Bakken Formation -- if that pans out the way some people are fervently hoping, it could seriously shake up politics in this country. It could also very well mean a disintegration of relations with Canada, which would be fun too. I would not be at all surprised to see McCain start talking about it in the next few months, after the USGS upped its estimate of recoverably oil by 25 times the previous amount.

[tiurin]

The mindblowing stupidity of not expanding the SPR back in 2002-2003 when the price of oil was fairly low astounds me. Personally, I suspect part of it was because nobody in the administration had any idea what Peak Oil was- or, if they did, they disregarded it because it wasn't a happy political thought to have, given that we're a country reliant on cheap oil.

I'm waiting to see what kind of crap starts flying about drilling in the Arctic Ocean. I expect we'll start stealing Canada's oil via slant drilling if the Bakken Formation works out.