patrick.net

illegal immigrant presidential pardon

I wouldn't put it past him. God help us (and by 'God', I don't mean St. Shrub, Jeebus's self-appointed representative here on earth).

astrid Says:
Somebody hand me a piece of aluminum foil.

I predict the next bubble will be in Aluminium and large companies in the tinfoil-industrial complex will be referred to as Big-Al (tm)
:-)
SP

But seriously, if you really want a conspiracy, there is a real one going on right now - big banks are effectively colluding to keep CDO's from getting properly valued at a fraction of par. And they aren't even being particularly discreet about it. And the ratings agencies are playing along for the time-being, so they can do damage control on their own reputations.

The thing I haven't quite figured out is - now that the cat's not only out of the bag but has also dragged in a couple of dead birds into the parlor, who are they going to unload this on? The glib answer is 'pension funds', but why on earth would a pension fund manager not ask for a steep discount as well?

SP

By the way, I heard someone talking about 'The Borat Funds', with reference to Bear-Stearns' High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund and High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund.

I recall a few days ago, someone on this forum had also called them High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage For Make Benefit of Kazakhstan Fund. Looks like that meme is going places.

SP

Looks like that meme is going places.
I still find the
tramp stamp comment from Pimco's Bill Gross extremely coincidental, given that it was a "thread diversion" a couple of weeks ago.

I forgot to put this in my Anecdotes from the East Bay entry. Some folks I know in El Cerrito (bought around 2005) recently had their property taxes reassessed downward.

I still find the tramp stamp comment from Pimco’s Bill Gross extremely coincidental, given that it was a “thread diversion” a couple of weeks ago.

I thought the same thing! Not to give ourselves too much credit, but it's obvious that the analysts at various institutions are monitoring blogs like this one for the "word on the street."

"Bush wants the illegal immigrants in this country but does not want to give them full citizenship rights. So he can commute their sentence of deportation into a payable fine and limit their political rights (such as minimum wage or OSHA protection)."

Interesting concept. I'll send it over to the guys at National Review to chew over.

Weird. My very own meme.

Speaking of the Kazakhstan fund, the Uzbeki fund went back stateside a couple of days after I dined with him, so rumours of his flight from justice, debts and his partner were greatly exaggerated...

More seriously, the word “conspiracy” was introduced twice in this thread, both times by Brand, essentially in the context “stop invoking conspiracies”.

hmm, he also invokes straw men and tells me to "stop invoking straw men" a lot too... and, more mysteriously, I can't recall ever constructing any!

Different Sean Says:
I can’t recall ever constructing any [strawman arguments]!

It is difficult to make a man recall something when his argument depends on him not recalling it. :-)

SP