Another, and unrelated (as I permit myself past sundown on Fridays), thought on the subprime and payday vultures.

For half a century, thanks to M. King Hubbert, we have enjoyed the prospect of peak oil, and had the opportunity to watch the complicated mechanisms by which the financial wizards have turned widely-owned resources buried under crust of the earth into wealth for the few.

We have become so inured to the process that it apparently does not merit mention in the SCLM that oil prices have increased around FIVE HUNDRED PERCENT during the reign of the Current Occupant. How much have his cronies profited?

From the many according to the limit of their capacity to the few according to the extent of their control.

The Friday night thought is that subprime lending, as well as legalized payday VIG as discussed in the payday lender post, may represent the last gasp of the few to pump out the limited financial resources from the crust of the many. The math would have been beyond me back when I had the hours but didn't take the math degree, and may be beyond the Trendalyzer software that Hans Rosling recently sold to Google (I can't judge), but Krugman is surely right that the process has proceeded for a quarter-century, and will eventually reverse.

From a legal point of view, my community for the last quarter-century, the dupes who were induced to sign notes and mortgages for the McMansions they could never have hoped to pay for were only damaged to the extent that the all-interest "mortgage" payments they made were more than the rental value of the house. If their indulgence made them bankrupt, they had their moment of pleasure. The fools who invested in the pieces of their debt had no pleasure but expectation.

I suspect the real victims of the present tulip-bulb bubble of poor folks' debt instruments were those who thought themselves both rich and entitled to earn a 30% return on their no-risk investments.

No one so foolish about money as a rich man.

When you think about it, isn't the difference between a legally mandated blouse and a burkah just a matter of degree?

The underlying proposition for both seems to be that a woman must cover her body because a man can't be expected to control his.

and when did he know it?

McClellan's formulation sounds about right. There is scant evidence in the past 7 years that Uncle Dick and the True Patriots who have really been running this country would ever trust Little George with the truth.

So, pretty well given up on objective pronouns, have we?

Just asking.

is so simple that Andrew did not give it the obvious red star the first time I posted it.

Every sale of a financial instrument should be with recourse, and the new law should let the sellers litigate the post-hoc defensive implications.

Why is this so hard?

We are living in an era that proves that there is no one so foolish about money as a rich (old, white) man.

I am not rich, and therefore am not foolish, for all that I am old and white.

At some point, humanity is going to learn to shrink. If we continue to assume that an expanding population is necessary for economic prosperity, we are admitting that prosperity will someday come to an end, because the expansion surely will.

In the meantime, those of us whose neighbors are hills and trees wish to thank the rest of y'all for crowding together in your asphalt and concrete beehives.

Why, exactly, are we not celebrating Texas Charlie as the guy who led directly to 9/ll?

Mike Huckabee is the logical culmination of the long history of Republican pandering to the religious right that dates back to Saint Ronnie. After all these years, the flat-earthers are no longer willing to give up their votes for nothing; now they want to put one of their own in charge of the party.

We should all be very, very quiet (maybe not in Salon, since so few of the Huckabites can read compound sentences) until after the convention.

Ain't no one so foolish about money as a rich man.

George W. Bush is a rich man, as is every man that sits around a table with him, and as are (or were) all the geniuses who invented this latest way to trade money for tulip bulbs.

I rest my case.

But isn't this a fight that could best be fought later in the year? Closer to, say, November?

Whoever is the Republican nominee will be making every effort to distance himself from the Current Occupant. Wouldn't this give the Democratic nominee an opportunity to make him choose between Bush and the Constitution?

We fail to appreciate that Lito and his Christianist fundamentalist ilk, whether fish-eaters or not (our U.S. fundamentalists would probably predict he's going to hell anyway, since only they have Jesus in their pocket), are doing humanity a great service.

We H. sapiens seems committed to a race these last couple of centuries to demonstrate the human carrying capacity of the earth by crashing past it. To the extent that Lito and the fundamentalists accelerate the accumulation of unwanted humans unable to feed themselves, there will be less of us when the time comes to crash over the cliff, and not so many of us committed to the die-off.

Isn't that a great service?

I had paid some dues, so that I could threaten to resign.