Home prices fell because they were absurdly high. Throughout human history, housing prices have always been 2-3 years income. Seriously, this is pretty constant, and actually one of the way of figuring out the 'value' of money in different eras. The only thing that alter to 'cost' of a house is the cost of other necessities, make a house proportionally more or less expensive.
The median income was $45,000, which meant the average house (Well, the 'median' house, whatever that means.) should have cost $90,000 to $135,000.
Instead, houses were selling at a median of about $250,000. (Which, thanks to how we pay off houses, is not 175%, but more like %250 once you figured the added interest. In fact, thanks to way we pay off houses, the $90,000-$135,000 is already too much.)
That's 'why' the bubble ended...it was a bubble. It was a fucking obvious bubble. I'd been talking about it for years, and explaining why I wouldn't buy a home, and that people who thought 'housing prices always go up' were literally delusional, and everyone thought I was crazy. (Now everyone thinks I'm psychic, and for some reason think I predicted this crash. Well, no, I just saw skewed prices, that's all. I had no idea it would take down the banks.)
You should care about why bubble happen, not why they end. They end no matter what.
If you want to say this particular one ended when banks stopped extending credit, well, okay, I won't disagree. Seems likely, in fact.
But that wasn't really the 'cause' of anything. Bubbles always end. It's like asking which ten feet of road 'caused' you to run out of gas.
The government did absolutely nothing at all you accused them of doing in your post.
The government does not 'mandate bad affirmative-action loans', whatever the racist fuck you mean by that. There's no such thing as 'affirmative action loans'.
You're right, but this is subtly different, because sane Republicans in Congress can't come out and pretend the loony ideas are loony, or they'll offend their base, aka, the Tea Party.
As such, they're going to have to pretend to go along with it, but 'the Democrats killed it'. In the House, they'll make sure the bills are so crazy the entire Democratic Senate will vote against it. (So all the Republicans there can vote for it, because it won't pass anyway.)
I see them doing this with, for example, undoing the health care law.
This tactic will work for many things, but sadly won't work for impeachment, which requires only the House to actually impeach. The Senate is required for, and would stop, any 'conviction', but at that point the damage is done, and the damn Republicans clearly impeach for no reason, as they've now done it twice.
Alternately, the House kills it, and 50+ Republican Congressmen have to put up with primary challenges for voting against it.
You want to rail against the insurance mandate, complain to the HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY.
Shut up shut up shut up shut up, he'll catch on.
No, Notquitecajun, you go ahead and complain to congress, and demand they go ahead and remove that unconstitutional mandate they've been complaining about. Go right ahead.
(See, oh_my_080980980, this is where it gets funny. I urge all Democrats to hold the Republican's feet to the fire, to constantly remind everyone of what the Republicans promised to do.)
God, Gays, and Subpoena's, are about the best way for Republicans to knock themselves out of the House control in 12, as in, lean into any of those areas too far and the voters will show them the door.
The next 2 years are going to be fucking hilarious watching the Republicans try to do damage control from members of their own party.
The Senate does not get 'tied'. The VP come in if it's tied, and the VP is Democratic.
Most of the time that doesn't matter, but it does matter when picking leadership, as that vote is almost pro-forma....you vote that your party has control. So in a 50/50 Senate, the VP's party always ends up in control.
You do realize a multiple seat majority isn't going to change anything, right?
At least, in theory. People have forgotten that Joe Lieberman is one of those 'Democratic' seats, and I'd pay anything to see the Democrats win by at least two seats and throw Lieberman out for not voting with the Democrats on anything in the last two years after promising to in order to keep his seniority.
Throw him out, give him the two years seniority in the 'Connecticut for Lieberman' party he deserves, and thus give him no committee chairs.
The really goddamn hilarious thing is what you touched on: TARP worked, and the Republicans did it.
Hey, look, an actual successful Republican, or at least bipartisan, political program.
But they can't even take credit for it because of their decades of 'The government, and especially government spending, is the problem' and the fact that their base has decided to come after them. (Which I guess is bound to happen if you keep telling them government is the problem...and you're the government. Real smart, guys.)
The weird thing is so many people conflate the economy and the national debt, as if there is a direct correlation between the two.
Indeed, and thus we get absurd things like 'We'll fix the economy by reducing wasteful government spending'.
I'd say 'Yeah, good plan, you go do that, see how that works.', except that I, um, live in the same economy as these idiots.
The weirder thing is in response they vote in the party that has historically run up the deficit more often.
I must disagree. I don't think it is possible to judge which is weirder. People who are in favor of electing Republicans in this country for economic reasons have long since passed a weirdness event horizon, and it's impossible to judge what is actually going on in their head or what is weirder.
Ironically, hilariously, those two might actually cancel out. Perhaps Republican are lying, like always, and do as much or even more wasteful spending as before, and actually help things.
Although they tend to run up the deficit with wasteful non-taxing, instead.
The weirdest thing is the Republicans have said they won't touch social security, medicare, or military spending, which constitutes the bulk of this country's financial obligations; the rest is comparatively small, and if you eliminated everything else except spending on those things it wouldn't change too much.
No, the weirdest thing is that their opponents haven't called them on this nonsense.
*holds hand to ear*
Oh, their opponents were Democrats, who wouldn't call people on nonsensical political positions if they were in a calling people on nonsensical political positions contest and assisted by the US Calling People On Political Nonsense Olympic team. Because Democrats are fucking incompetent spineless cowards.
The economy did pretty well under GWBush with a Republican controlled congress until the massive nonsense the banks had been getting away with under that administration blew up and the economy required huge taxpayer funded bailouts to avert the next great depression..
It wasn't some 'housing bubble' that just magically happened. The bubble was a symptom of the orgy of 'securization' of home loans that banks nonsensically invented and built an entire universe out of totally nonsense.
The mortgage crisis just caused them to, Wiley Coyote-like, to look down, realize they were standing in midair, and immediately start hauling back all the asserts they could, to build a bridge to where they were standing...which left the other banks even worse off...and so on, and so on.
Don't let the banks blame this on 'the housing bubble'. You can have bubbles without economic collapse (We had one in the stock marker in 2001 or so), and we eventually would have had this collapse even if the housing bubble somehow wouldn't have happened, it would have just been in slow motion.
The collapse happened because of massive security fraud, it happened because banks invented a new thing to manipulate and the government didn't step in to regulate it, but instead made the manipulation even easier. (Despite parts of it being actually illegal, to do with real estate, which is now coming back to bite us in the ass. Google MERS.) So they did that until the mortgage crisis made them reappraise their total nonsense, at which point the banks fucking panicked, called in their loans, and almost blew up the economy unless we gave them lots of money.
It was laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act that encouraged banks to lend to low income consumers who were high credit risks to begin with.
You're a goddamn imbecile.
The CRA had nothing, period, at all to do with the collapse at all.
I love the idea that you can 'encourage' banks to make a bunch of failing loans, which were not made under the CRA, by forcing it to make other 'bad' loans. (Note: CRA loans generally outperform other loans, simply because banks pay more attention to who they give them out to.)
It's the same way that businesses are forced to collect sales tax, so they often collect even more money from customers and throw it out afterward. That's how businesses work, right?
The CRA 'covered' about 25% of all institutes making mortgages, and maybe 1-2% were actually 'required' under the CRA, a law which is essentially pointless at this point in history, because banks don't red-line anymore.
As has been pointed out repeated, the economy failure wasn't even caused by mortgages. It was caused by banksters suddenly realizing they'd built castles in the air on total nonsense and had no idea how to value any of it, so functionally had no money on their balance books.
That realization wasn't caused by mortgage failure, it was caused by failing home prices, which meant their assets went down. Even if the American people magically had enough money to keep paying the mortgage, the collapse still would have happened unless housing prices magically stayed absurdly high forever.
You have the bankers who were too short-sighted and optimistic about how those loans would play out in some cases, and openly deceitful in passing off packaged securities to investors while understating their risks in others.
By 'openly deceitful', of course,you mean 'committing fraud on a massive never-before-seen level'.
There is such a thing as personal responsibility. Americans shouldn't have tried so hard to get the best possible homes and realized when a something was simply more than they could afford. If there weren't any homes they could afford they should have stuck with renting.
Fuck. You.
Our real estate broker is legally our agent. It is criminal fraud for them to work against our best interest. They are not allowed to sell people property they can't afford, anymore than your investment banker could sell you an investment he knew was going to decrease in value.
It is also illegal for banks to make loans they know can't be paid off. It is illegal for them not to clearly explain the terms of any loans they are issuing.
But people were 'helped' through the process by people who, under law, were required to tell the truth, and under law were required not to give them loans they knew would fail, or even required to be on their side and instead told the people to lie or even just took blank applications, had the person sign it, and lied themselves.
Then there's all the people who made the situation worse by refusing to continue making mortgage payments they could easily afford simply because they owed more than the house was worth. I consider them every bit as greedy and immoral as most of the bankers we love to vilify.
Ah, the last Republican talking point. So, statically, the one out of ten thousand people who are doing this are important? Becuase no one's actually doing this.
And immoral? Corporations have no morality, I don't really see why anyone has any morality when dealing with them. Corporation kick people of their house all the time when moral people would not. When dealing with corporations, you do the terms of your agreement, nothing more.
Those people are agreeing with the terms of their loan agreement. Either they pay the money, or the bank gets the house. Those were the terms from the start. Perhaps I should quote you 'No matter how sleazy the salesman, you're at least partially to blame if you fall for a scam.'
I wasn't thinking 'anonymity' as much as 'longer time until getting caught'.
Pulling off a drive by would be like trying to pull off a bank robbery...everyone's looking for the getaway car. If this was an episode of 24, the terrorists would have magical car swaps set up under overpasses while helicopters flew around above, but in reality, once the police figure out the car, it's all over.
Whereas with the DC Sniper, it took forever to even figure out what car it was.
A clever organization could have multiple teams even in the same city, to keep the cars from being noticed. I mean, sure, that incredibly common model car was at four of the shootings, but there wasn't any car like that at the other two.
If people are going the explosives route, they should throw them at bridge supports. Under bridges are a bad place for car accidents anyway, there's never any space to get around the accident...and there's always the chance it will damage the bridge itself. Even small explosives would result in the bridge being shut down until it can be checked out.
I know they aren't ready for them because I read the book, watched the movie, or played the game already.
And in this area, the game rating system is probably the most useful. It's easy for a parent to watch a movie (2 hours), or read a book. (5 hours)
It's a lot harder to figure out all the content a game might have in it.
I mean, right now, I'm playing Fallout New Vegas...and I've been playing for about 30 hours. After about 25 hours of playing I first got to the Strip (I could have gotten there faster, but I explore.), and what do I find but topless women wearing pasties? And hookers to hire. (Which is just a fade to black.) This is after 25 hours of somewhat 'conservative' towns and conversations while roaming post-apocalyptic Nevada.(1)
I don't mind either of those, but it did take me more than entire 24 hours of playing to get to them. If I was a parent checking this game out for someone I'd be unlikely to be able to spend the time on it. (Of course, if I were a parent, I'd have probably stopped at the first dismembered corpse, but whatever.) You can even play as a pimp and hire hookers to work for a casino.
Or maybe it was drugs I objected to, of which Fallout has plenty.
Or swearing...just like real life, a lot of people don't, some use bowdlerized swearing like 'Gosh', and some have every sentence have 'Fuck' in it. I don't know when I ran across the first of the later, but it could be pretty far in the game.
But it is rated M by the ESRB, with Blood and Gore/Intense Violence/Sexual Themes/Strong Language/Use of Drugs, and hence I wouldn't have to play it at all. I'd already know what was in it.
1) Can I just give some props here? Fallout New Vegas has a hell of a lot more interesting social setup than Fallout 3. The people in the DC wasteland were all in survival mode fighting the land, whereas the Mojave is actually doing quite well with actual functioning communities, and just fighting other communities.
Uh, no. 'anti-social' behavior isn't the only reason to label things.
In fact, the entire 'violence' nonsense was entirely due to politicians trying to come up with some justification for the law to step in, when there really isn't.
That does not mean the rating system is 'pointless'. Parents still want a way to judge a game before buying it, and do not want children to be able to buy certain games without their permission.
It's just 'pointless' for the utterly imaginary problem it was 'trying' to solve, it's really useful for judging games before buying. Actually, in reality, it was invented to stop the government from stepping in and solving that imaginary problem.
So, in that sense, the game rating system has only been partially successful at its real goal: Stopping the damn government from unconstitutionally banning 'violent' video games. (And, no, I don't give a fuck what the Supreme Court says, it's still unconstitutional.)
That's not what the GP meant about 'more success'. It's not about how many get rated, it's how easy it is to get around.
It is harder for a 15 year old to buy an M rated game than an R rated DVD. There are people who go out and test these things, and the game industry is always right near or at the top.
Using underaged shoppers, the FTS found that 20% of them were able to buy M-rated games.
To compare, stores allow underaged shoppers from buying R-rated DVDs 60% of the time. That's right, more than half the attempts by children to buy R rated DVDs worked.
And explicit CDs? 70% of those attempts worked.
Theaters should deserve some credit at letting underaged people into R rated movies only 30% of the time, aka, 150% the failure rate of video game stores. (Note this was a test of ticket buying, not sneaking into the wrong movie.)
OTOH, a theater is dedicated to selling a few specific products, which 25% or so shouldn't be sold to children, so really should know better, whereas a lot of video games are sold at retail outlets where they're selling everything and the cashier sells maybe one video game every two weeks. The dedicated video stores did even better than the 20% the entire industry did.
Fuck the assholes who think the game industry is at fault. The game industry is the best media industry at keeping inappropriate stuff away from children.
This entire issue is due to the damn media that for decades pretended video games were only for children, so parents blithely went out and purchased computer games for them that (For some utterly inexplicably reason)(1) their kid needed an adult to buy. And then were shocked when they happened to glance at the screen and saw people being dismembered or whatever.
1) Which is the point Child Protective Services should step in and take away their kid. Sorry, if society has said 'children cannot buy something', and your child asks you to go and buy it for them, and you do so without checking why society said that, you should lose your children and be castrated so you can't have more.
I mean, I have sympathy for parents in today's world, and I do understand you can't control everything, and I'm okay with 'adult-only' checks to help with that. But if you're just blithely ignoring adult-only checks and then complain when the exact thing the adult-only checks were implemented for then happens, well, fuck you.
I'm not talking about poorly labeled stuff. If you read 'mild sexual content' on the box and it's got a sex mini-game and that doesn't seem 'minor' to you, well, that's a valid complaint. We should try to label things correctly. But apparently there's a whole group of parents who think all video games must be for children, and don't even bother to look at the box to figure out why the cashier requires an adult to buy the game.
The real joke is that the established media goes out and whines about violent video games, when they are, of course, making plenty of violent movies.
And the reason is that kids want violent video games and get them, whereas they don't get violent movies. And the reason parents buy violent video games? Because the media stands there and pretends that all video games are for kids.
All the parents now with 20-25 year olds, who are 45-50 years old, just missed the cutoff for game consoles. The NES came out in 85, when they were 20-25. They've never had video games. Video games were always what 'kids' were playing. Maybe they played a NES a few times, but they've never, since 1990, actually gone out and purchased a video game.
Those were the people who were bitching about 'violent video games', a decade ago, when their 11 year old got them to buy GTA.
And the media never bothered to update their view of video games, because TV writers were the same age or older. Video games were for kids.
So now there's an entire range of people who were utterly misinformed about video games and got upset because they're wrong. And the media, who have happily misinformed people about video games until very recently, get all weepy and won't-anyone-think-of-the-children-y when it's their fucking fault.
We've been putting up with this shit for two decades now, and the video game industry keeps trying to fix it. Absolutely no one can buy age inappropriate games anymore, but that doesn't help because the parents buy them, because the parents are totally uneducated about video games.
Although that's not true, either. Those people, the uneducated people, now have grown children. 99.999% of the people with currently underaged children are under 40, which means they almost certainly grew up with computer games.
So the good news is the newest parents, the ones with kids who are now trying to buy violent video games, grew up playing video games, and know damn well that some are age inappropriate. I have a nephew who's turning one in a few days, and his father sure as heck will be buying only video games he can handle as he grew up, because his father has played Quake and other games and currently plays WoW. (I don't know about his mother, but I suspect she did the same thing.) He actually knows video games are aimed at different ages. 35 and under all understand this, probably 40 and under. (And no one older matters, statistically.)
In fact, this problem is already solved, as the video-game-knowledgeable people grew up and are now in charge of children.
So, of course, it's exactly the time for this court to assert it's legal to ban violent video games, and have numerous states do so. The really ironic thing is doing 'Won't someone think of the children?!' when actual parents of actual children now utterly disagree on this issue.
Yeah, but drive-bys are usually located in specific areas. The whole point here is to spread the panic out. Even have a few in very small towns, so everyone feels included. (Statistically, this is nonsense, of course, but people are horrible at estimating risk.)
The DC Sniper's car had a hole cut in the trunk and a backseat removed so that the sniper could lay in the trunk backwards and shoot out the back. Which would also muffle the sound. (I'm assuming the person in the trunk wore ear protection.) At least, I'm remembering it that way.
There are actually cars with seats that fold down to allow you to put long stuff in the trunk which that would need minimum modifications. A bunch of 90 midrange cars did it, mine, a 92 Pontiac Sunbird, does. (I've actually considered trying to sleep back there before. At an angle, with the front seat pulled forward, it should work)
So if you have one of those, all you have to do is cut out a piece of the trunk and mount it on something that lets you put it in place and remove it from inside the trunk.
Use the driver as a spotter to say when people are back there, flip down the cut out part of the trunk, fire off a shot, and put it back.
Technically, you don't need to cut out part of the car...people could simply have lumber or something in the trunk that 'required' the trunk to be open a few inches, and shoot out there, then perhaps throw a blanket over themselves. The point is to shoot out the trunk and immediately vanish, while the driver looks as confused as anyone else and drives off.
The whole thing about drive-bys is everyone see the car that did it. Whereas the whole premise of this is that no one knows, and the sniper team can just move from place to place. (In fact, with the DC Sniper, people weren't even sure it was from a vehicle. People always seemed to get shot near parking areas, and that was all the clue anyone had.)
I actually forget how they caught the DC Sniper team, but I don't think it was recognizing their car, I think it was some third party who knew realized what was going on and turned them in.
Burning down parts of a city don't really accomplish anything.
If you're going to be throwing explosives at things, throw them at highway bridge supports and power substations. (I've talking about the giant bridges areas, like the I-285/I-85 interchange in Atlanta, aka, Spaghetti Junction, and I'm sure the equally absurd setup in other cities.)
Infrastructure, man, infrastructure. Screw housing. The city would just open a stadium as a shelter or something.
Oh, no, as I've said in other places in this discussion, if you want to cause random fear, you just start pumping out DC Sniper-ish teams.
Nearly unstoppable if done correctly:
1) Setup a car modification location in the US, and a mechanic who can do it.
2) Send one guy over, who buys a used car, and then leaves it and the keys in a known location. He then just hangs out in a motel room for a week. (Don't want him to leave the country, that looks suspicious.)
3) During that, finish up training a second guy as a sniper, and tell him where to get the car and the location of the other guy.
4) Send second guy over, car gets dropped off, he grabs it, meets with the first guy.
5) They stay in motels, each day they get up, go out, drive to some nearby city, shoot someone, pick a different nearby city, drive there, and stay the night there. (In fact, each group should have a different pattern, with different levels of randomness. Some groups might stay a week, some might be in small geographic areas, some might go cross country, etc. Some might have actual randomness in the form of dice rolls. But perhaps I've been watching Numb3rs too much.)
6) Go back and repeat 2-5 whenever. Have multiple groups at once, wait until one is caught and have another instantly show up, whatever. Used the tried and true method of prearranged messages in hotmail accounts to control them, if they need orders.
Which each team could eventually be caught, no one could actually stop the process, because none of the teams knows anything. The car is in their names, they don't know where the modifications were made (The mechanic could just take a bus halfway across the country, pick up the car, and then put it back when done.), they don't know anything at all about the other people.
$500 is really low. Hell, if people really cared about 'no regard for their own lives', can't they take out another damn mortgage? Or rob a bank?
As I said in the other post, the most obvious one would be a 'DC Sniper' style attack, writ large. Have multiple teams, operating independently and randomly, moving from city to city after a few days. You could shut down most major cities, and it's an attack that is, by the very premise, segmented into teams of two, so it has perfect operational security and catching a team won't affect other teams. It requires no communication with anyone.
All it requires is X guys who can drive, X guys who can shoot, X sniper rifles, and X used cars. Scale it up or down as required.
I don't know whether Al Qaeda 'exists' or not either, or what that means for a group where it's clear that people are just taking the name without 'permission'.
I do know that I can trivially think of much more devastating and/or spectacular attacks then they've tried. In fact, we've seen one of them, the DC Sniper. And that was two fricking people!
Get 20 people doing that, 10 teams, 4 on the west coast and 6 on the east. Have them roam from city to city, moving every couple of days, killing a person a day at least two hours away from where they're staying. Make sure none of them have any idea of where or who the others are. Bring in more people as they get caught.
This isn't some plan I thought of...we already had this attack,with two people. All you have to do is find 10 guys who can shoot and 10 guys who can drive, and give them 500 each to buy a used car!
I want people to think about that situation for a moment and how America would react, and how they'd react when the first person got caught and it turns out this wasn't over.
I used to think AQ wasn't doing stuff like this because we'd done exactly what they'd wanted: Started wars so they could recruit people to stop us.
However, right now, with the wars winding down and the American people no longer panicked, would be the perfect time to launch another attack...and they did, and it was the most pathetic attack ever.
They apparently don't even have people who can get into the US at all. It looks like 9/11 was it. Those 19 guys were all the competent, American allowed, guys they had. That was it.
Incidentally, that woman whose phone it was that was arrested? She was released....they just stole her identity to ship the package. So they aren't totally stupid. They just appear to have no resources at all.
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Home prices fell because they were absurdly high. Throughout human history, housing prices have always been 2-3 years income. Seriously, this is pretty constant, and actually one of the way of figuring out the 'value' of money in different eras. The only thing that alter to 'cost' of a house is the cost of other necessities, make a house proportionally more or less expensive.
The median income was $45,000, which meant the average house (Well, the 'median' house, whatever that means.) should have cost $90,000 to $135,000.
Instead, houses were selling at a median of about $250,000. (Which, thanks to how we pay off houses, is not 175%, but more like %250 once you figured the added interest. In fact, thanks to way we pay off houses, the $90,000-$135,000 is already too much.)
That's 'why' the bubble ended...it was a bubble. It was a fucking obvious bubble. I'd been talking about it for years, and explaining why I wouldn't buy a home, and that people who thought 'housing prices always go up' were literally delusional, and everyone thought I was crazy. (Now everyone thinks I'm psychic, and for some reason think I predicted this crash. Well, no, I just saw skewed prices, that's all. I had no idea it would take down the banks.)
You should care about why bubble happen, not why they end. They end no matter what.
If you want to say this particular one ended when banks stopped extending credit, well, okay, I won't disagree. Seems likely, in fact.
But that wasn't really the 'cause' of anything. Bubbles always end. It's like asking which ten feet of road 'caused' you to run out of gas.
The government did absolutely nothing at all you accused them of doing in your post.
The government does not 'mandate bad affirmative-action loans', whatever the racist fuck you mean by that. There's no such thing as 'affirmative action loans'.
You're right, but this is subtly different, because sane Republicans in Congress can't come out and pretend the loony ideas are loony, or they'll offend their base, aka, the Tea Party.
As such, they're going to have to pretend to go along with it, but 'the Democrats killed it'. In the House, they'll make sure the bills are so crazy the entire Democratic Senate will vote against it. (So all the Republicans there can vote for it, because it won't pass anyway.)
I see them doing this with, for example, undoing the health care law.
This tactic will work for many things, but sadly won't work for impeachment, which requires only the House to actually impeach. The Senate is required for, and would stop, any 'conviction', but at that point the damage is done, and the damn Republicans clearly impeach for no reason, as they've now done it twice.
Alternately, the House kills it, and 50+ Republican Congressmen have to put up with primary challenges for voting against it.
I can't buy any insurance, they won't sell it to me.
You want to rail against the insurance mandate, complain to the HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY.
Shut up shut up shut up shut up, he'll catch on.
No, Notquitecajun, you go ahead and complain to congress, and demand they go ahead and remove that unconstitutional mandate they've been complaining about. Go right ahead.
(See, oh_my_080980980, this is where it gets funny. I urge all Democrats to hold the Republican's feet to the fire, to constantly remind everyone of what the Republicans promised to do.)
God, Gays, and Subpoena's, are about the best way for Republicans to knock themselves out of the House control in 12, as in, lean into any of those areas too far and the voters will show them the door.
The next 2 years are going to be fucking hilarious watching the Republicans try to do damage control from members of their own party.
The Senate does not get 'tied'. The VP come in if it's tied, and the VP is Democratic.
Most of the time that doesn't matter, but it does matter when picking leadership, as that vote is almost pro-forma....you vote that your party has control. So in a 50/50 Senate, the VP's party always ends up in control.
You do realize a multiple seat majority isn't going to change anything, right?
At least, in theory. People have forgotten that Joe Lieberman is one of those 'Democratic' seats, and I'd pay anything to see the Democrats win by at least two seats and throw Lieberman out for not voting with the Democrats on anything in the last two years after promising to in order to keep his seniority.
Throw him out, give him the two years seniority in the 'Connecticut for Lieberman' party he deserves, and thus give him no committee chairs.
That 'plan' is the only way I'm ever going to get health insurance.
The really goddamn hilarious thing is what you touched on: TARP worked, and the Republicans did it.
Hey, look, an actual successful Republican, or at least bipartisan, political program.
But they can't even take credit for it because of their decades of 'The government, and especially government spending, is the problem' and the fact that their base has decided to come after them. (Which I guess is bound to happen if you keep telling them government is the problem...and you're the government. Real smart, guys.)
The weird thing is so many people conflate the economy and the national debt, as if there is a direct correlation between the two.
Indeed, and thus we get absurd things like 'We'll fix the economy by reducing wasteful government spending'.
I'd say 'Yeah, good plan, you go do that, see how that works.', except that I, um, live in the same economy as these idiots.
The weirder thing is in response they vote in the party that has historically run up the deficit more often.
I must disagree. I don't think it is possible to judge which is weirder. People who are in favor of electing Republicans in this country for economic reasons have long since passed a weirdness event horizon, and it's impossible to judge what is actually going on in their head or what is weirder.
Ironically, hilariously, those two might actually cancel out. Perhaps Republican are lying, like always, and do as much or even more wasteful spending as before, and actually help things.
Although they tend to run up the deficit with wasteful non-taxing, instead.
The weirdest thing is the Republicans have said they won't touch social security, medicare, or military spending, which constitutes the bulk of this country's financial obligations; the rest is comparatively small, and if you eliminated everything else except spending on those things it wouldn't change too much.
No, the weirdest thing is that their opponents haven't called them on this nonsense.
*holds hand to ear*
Oh, their opponents were Democrats, who wouldn't call people on nonsensical political positions if they were in a calling people on nonsensical political positions contest and assisted by the US Calling People On Political Nonsense Olympic team. Because Democrats are fucking incompetent spineless cowards.
Almost there.
The economy did pretty well under GWBush with a Republican controlled congress until the massive nonsense the banks had been getting away with under that administration blew up and the economy required huge taxpayer funded bailouts to avert the next great depression..
It wasn't some 'housing bubble' that just magically happened. The bubble was a symptom of the orgy of 'securization' of home loans that banks nonsensically invented and built an entire universe out of totally nonsense.
The mortgage crisis just caused them to, Wiley Coyote-like, to look down, realize they were standing in midair, and immediately start hauling back all the asserts they could, to build a bridge to where they were standing...which left the other banks even worse off...and so on, and so on.
Don't let the banks blame this on 'the housing bubble'. You can have bubbles without economic collapse (We had one in the stock marker in 2001 or so), and we eventually would have had this collapse even if the housing bubble somehow wouldn't have happened, it would have just been in slow motion.
The collapse happened because of massive security fraud, it happened because banks invented a new thing to manipulate and the government didn't step in to regulate it, but instead made the manipulation even easier. (Despite parts of it being actually illegal, to do with real estate, which is now coming back to bite us in the ass. Google MERS.) So they did that until the mortgage crisis made them reappraise their total nonsense, at which point the banks fucking panicked, called in their loans, and almost blew up the economy unless we gave them lots of money.
Plus, we've got some actual goddamn loons in there now.
I expect an impeachment to start before the middle of next year.
On what grounds, you ask? They don't need any grounds. I'm sure it will be something like asserting health care is unconstitutional.
It was laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act that encouraged banks to lend to low income consumers who were high credit risks to begin with.
You're a goddamn imbecile.
The CRA had nothing, period, at all to do with the collapse at all.
I love the idea that you can 'encourage' banks to make a bunch of failing loans, which were not made under the CRA, by forcing it to make other 'bad' loans. (Note: CRA loans generally outperform other loans, simply because banks pay more attention to who they give them out to.)
It's the same way that businesses are forced to collect sales tax, so they often collect even more money from customers and throw it out afterward. That's how businesses work, right?
The CRA 'covered' about 25% of all institutes making mortgages, and maybe 1-2% were actually 'required' under the CRA, a law which is essentially pointless at this point in history, because banks don't red-line anymore.
As has been pointed out repeated, the economy failure wasn't even caused by mortgages. It was caused by banksters suddenly realizing they'd built castles in the air on total nonsense and had no idea how to value any of it, so functionally had no money on their balance books.
That realization wasn't caused by mortgage failure, it was caused by failing home prices, which meant their assets went down. Even if the American people magically had enough money to keep paying the mortgage, the collapse still would have happened unless housing prices magically stayed absurdly high forever.
You have the bankers who were too short-sighted and optimistic about how those loans would play out in some cases, and openly deceitful in passing off packaged securities to investors while understating their risks in others.
By 'openly deceitful', of course,you mean 'committing fraud on a massive never-before-seen level'.
There is such a thing as personal responsibility. Americans shouldn't have tried so hard to get the best possible homes and realized when a something was simply more than they could afford. If there weren't any homes they could afford they should have stuck with renting.
Fuck. You.
Our real estate broker is legally our agent. It is criminal fraud for them to work against our best interest. They are not allowed to sell people property they can't afford, anymore than your investment banker could sell you an investment he knew was going to decrease in value.
It is also illegal for banks to make loans they know can't be paid off. It is illegal for them not to clearly explain the terms of any loans they are issuing.
But people were 'helped' through the process by people who, under law, were required to tell the truth, and under law were required not to give them loans they knew would fail, or even required to be on their side and instead told the people to lie or even just took blank applications, had the person sign it, and lied themselves.
Then there's all the people who made the situation worse by refusing to continue making mortgage payments they could easily afford simply because they owed more than the house was worth. I consider them every bit as greedy and immoral as most of the bankers we love to vilify.
Ah, the last Republican talking point. So, statically, the one out of ten thousand people who are doing this are important? Becuase no one's actually doing this.
And immoral? Corporations have no morality, I don't really see why anyone has any morality when dealing with them. Corporation kick people of their house all the time when moral people would not. When dealing with corporations, you do the terms of your agreement, nothing more.
Those people are agreeing with the terms of their loan agreement. Either they pay the money, or the bank gets the house. Those were the terms from the start. Perhaps I should quote you 'No matter how sleazy the salesman, you're at least partially to blame if you fall for a scam.'
Indeed.
Either the terrorists aren't there, or they don't want to attack us.
I wasn't thinking 'anonymity' as much as 'longer time until getting caught'.
Pulling off a drive by would be like trying to pull off a bank robbery...everyone's looking for the getaway car. If this was an episode of 24, the terrorists would have magical car swaps set up under overpasses while helicopters flew around above, but in reality, once the police figure out the car, it's all over.
Whereas with the DC Sniper, it took forever to even figure out what car it was.
A clever organization could have multiple teams even in the same city, to keep the cars from being noticed. I mean, sure, that incredibly common model car was at four of the shootings, but there wasn't any car like that at the other two.
If people are going the explosives route, they should throw them at bridge supports. Under bridges are a bad place for car accidents anyway, there's never any space to get around the accident...and there's always the chance it will damage the bridge itself. Even small explosives would result in the bridge being shut down until it can be checked out.
I know they aren't ready for them because I read the book, watched the movie, or played the game already.
And in this area, the game rating system is probably the most useful. It's easy for a parent to watch a movie (2 hours), or read a book. (5 hours)
It's a lot harder to figure out all the content a game might have in it.
I mean, right now, I'm playing Fallout New Vegas...and I've been playing for about 30 hours. After about 25 hours of playing I first got to the Strip (I could have gotten there faster, but I explore.), and what do I find but topless women wearing pasties? And hookers to hire. (Which is just a fade to black.) This is after 25 hours of somewhat 'conservative' towns and conversations while roaming post-apocalyptic Nevada.(1)
I don't mind either of those, but it did take me more than entire 24 hours of playing to get to them. If I was a parent checking this game out for someone I'd be unlikely to be able to spend the time on it. (Of course, if I were a parent, I'd have probably stopped at the first dismembered corpse, but whatever.) You can even play as a pimp and hire hookers to work for a casino.
Or maybe it was drugs I objected to, of which Fallout has plenty.
Or swearing...just like real life, a lot of people don't, some use bowdlerized swearing like 'Gosh', and some have every sentence have 'Fuck' in it. I don't know when I ran across the first of the later, but it could be pretty far in the game.
But it is rated M by the ESRB, with Blood and Gore/Intense Violence/Sexual Themes/Strong Language/Use of Drugs, and hence I wouldn't have to play it at all. I'd already know what was in it.
1) Can I just give some props here? Fallout New Vegas has a hell of a lot more interesting social setup than Fallout 3. The people in the DC wasteland were all in survival mode fighting the land, whereas the Mojave is actually doing quite well with actual functioning communities, and just fighting other communities.
Uh, no. 'anti-social' behavior isn't the only reason to label things.
In fact, the entire 'violence' nonsense was entirely due to politicians trying to come up with some justification for the law to step in, when there really isn't.
That does not mean the rating system is 'pointless'. Parents still want a way to judge a game before buying it, and do not want children to be able to buy certain games without their permission.
It's just 'pointless' for the utterly imaginary problem it was 'trying' to solve, it's really useful for judging games before buying. Actually, in reality, it was invented to stop the government from stepping in and solving that imaginary problem.
So, in that sense, the game rating system has only been partially successful at its real goal: Stopping the damn government from unconstitutionally banning 'violent' video games. (And, no, I don't give a fuck what the Supreme Court says, it's still unconstitutional.)
That's not what the GP meant about 'more success'. It's not about how many get rated, it's how easy it is to get around.
It is harder for a 15 year old to buy an M rated game than an R rated DVD. There are people who go out and test these things, and the game industry is always right near or at the top.
Using underaged shoppers, the FTS found that 20% of them were able to buy M-rated games.
To compare, stores allow underaged shoppers from buying R-rated DVDs 60% of the time. That's right, more than half the attempts by children to buy R rated DVDs worked.
And explicit CDs? 70% of those attempts worked.
Theaters should deserve some credit at letting underaged people into R rated movies only 30% of the time, aka, 150% the failure rate of video game stores. (Note this was a test of ticket buying, not sneaking into the wrong movie.)
OTOH, a theater is dedicated to selling a few specific products, which 25% or so shouldn't be sold to children, so really should know better, whereas a lot of video games are sold at retail outlets where they're selling everything and the cashier sells maybe one video game every two weeks. The dedicated video stores did even better than the 20% the entire industry did.
Fuck the assholes who think the game industry is at fault. The game industry is the best media industry at keeping inappropriate stuff away from children.
This entire issue is due to the damn media that for decades pretended video games were only for children, so parents blithely went out and purchased computer games for them that (For some utterly inexplicably reason)(1) their kid needed an adult to buy. And then were shocked when they happened to glance at the screen and saw people being dismembered or whatever.
1) Which is the point Child Protective Services should step in and take away their kid. Sorry, if society has said 'children cannot buy something', and your child asks you to go and buy it for them, and you do so without checking why society said that, you should lose your children and be castrated so you can't have more.
I mean, I have sympathy for parents in today's world, and I do understand you can't control everything, and I'm okay with 'adult-only' checks to help with that. But if you're just blithely ignoring adult-only checks and then complain when the exact thing the adult-only checks were implemented for then happens, well, fuck you.
I'm not talking about poorly labeled stuff. If you read 'mild sexual content' on the box and it's got a sex mini-game and that doesn't seem 'minor' to you, well, that's a valid complaint. We should try to label things correctly. But apparently there's a whole group of parents who think all video games must be for children, and don't even bother to look at the box to figure out why the cashier requires an adult to buy the game.
The real joke is that the established media goes out and whines about violent video games, when they are, of course, making plenty of violent movies.
And the reason is that kids want violent video games and get them, whereas they don't get violent movies. And the reason parents buy violent video games? Because the media stands there and pretends that all video games are for kids.
All the parents now with 20-25 year olds, who are 45-50 years old, just missed the cutoff for game consoles. The NES came out in 85, when they were 20-25. They've never had video games. Video games were always what 'kids' were playing. Maybe they played a NES a few times, but they've never, since 1990, actually gone out and purchased a video game.
Those were the people who were bitching about 'violent video games', a decade ago, when their 11 year old got them to buy GTA.
And the media never bothered to update their view of video games, because TV writers were the same age or older. Video games were for kids.
So now there's an entire range of people who were utterly misinformed about video games and got upset because they're wrong. And the media, who have happily misinformed people about video games until very recently, get all weepy and won't-anyone-think-of-the-children-y when it's their fucking fault.
We've been putting up with this shit for two decades now, and the video game industry keeps trying to fix it. Absolutely no one can buy age inappropriate games anymore, but that doesn't help because the parents buy them, because the parents are totally uneducated about video games.
Although that's not true, either. Those people, the uneducated people, now have grown children. 99.999% of the people with currently underaged children are under 40, which means they almost certainly grew up with computer games.
So the good news is the newest parents, the ones with kids who are now trying to buy violent video games, grew up playing video games, and know damn well that some are age inappropriate. I have a nephew who's turning one in a few days, and his father sure as heck will be buying only video games he can handle as he grew up, because his father has played Quake and other games and currently plays WoW. (I don't know about his mother, but I suspect she did the same thing.) He actually knows video games are aimed at different ages. 35 and under all understand this, probably 40 and under. (And no one older matters, statistically.)
In fact, this problem is already solved, as the video-game-knowledgeable people grew up and are now in charge of children.
So, of course, it's exactly the time for this court to assert it's legal to ban violent video games, and have numerous states do so. The really ironic thing is doing 'Won't someone think of the children?!' when actual parents of actual children now utterly disagree on this issue.
Yeah, but drive-bys are usually located in specific areas. The whole point here is to spread the panic out. Even have a few in very small towns, so everyone feels included. (Statistically, this is nonsense, of course, but people are horrible at estimating risk.)
The DC Sniper's car had a hole cut in the trunk and a backseat removed so that the sniper could lay in the trunk backwards and shoot out the back. Which would also muffle the sound. (I'm assuming the person in the trunk wore ear protection.) At least, I'm remembering it that way.
There are actually cars with seats that fold down to allow you to put long stuff in the trunk which that would need minimum modifications. A bunch of 90 midrange cars did it, mine, a 92 Pontiac Sunbird, does. (I've actually considered trying to sleep back there before. At an angle, with the front seat pulled forward, it should work)
So if you have one of those, all you have to do is cut out a piece of the trunk and mount it on something that lets you put it in place and remove it from inside the trunk.
Use the driver as a spotter to say when people are back there, flip down the cut out part of the trunk, fire off a shot, and put it back.
Technically, you don't need to cut out part of the car...people could simply have lumber or something in the trunk that 'required' the trunk to be open a few inches, and shoot out there, then perhaps throw a blanket over themselves. The point is to shoot out the trunk and immediately vanish, while the driver looks as confused as anyone else and drives off.
The whole thing about drive-bys is everyone see the car that did it. Whereas the whole premise of this is that no one knows, and the sniper team can just move from place to place. (In fact, with the DC Sniper, people weren't even sure it was from a vehicle. People always seemed to get shot near parking areas, and that was all the clue anyone had.)
I actually forget how they caught the DC Sniper team, but I don't think it was recognizing their car, I think it was some third party who knew realized what was going on and turned them in.
Burning down parts of a city don't really accomplish anything.
If you're going to be throwing explosives at things, throw them at highway bridge supports and power substations. (I've talking about the giant bridges areas, like the I-285/I-85 interchange in Atlanta, aka, Spaghetti Junction, and I'm sure the equally absurd setup in other cities.)
Infrastructure, man, infrastructure. Screw housing. The city would just open a stadium as a shelter or something.
Oh, no, as I've said in other places in this discussion, if you want to cause random fear, you just start pumping out DC Sniper-ish teams.
Nearly unstoppable if done correctly:
1) Setup a car modification location in the US, and a mechanic who can do it.
2) Send one guy over, who buys a used car, and then leaves it and the keys in a known location. He then just hangs out in a motel room for a week. (Don't want him to leave the country, that looks suspicious.)
3) During that, finish up training a second guy as a sniper, and tell him where to get the car and the location of the other guy.
4) Send second guy over, car gets dropped off, he grabs it, meets with the first guy.
5) They stay in motels, each day they get up, go out, drive to some nearby city, shoot someone, pick a different nearby city, drive there, and stay the night there. (In fact, each group should have a different pattern, with different levels of randomness. Some groups might stay a week, some might be in small geographic areas, some might go cross country, etc. Some might have actual randomness in the form of dice rolls. But perhaps I've been watching Numb3rs too much.)
6) Go back and repeat 2-5 whenever. Have multiple groups at once, wait until one is caught and have another instantly show up, whatever. Used the tried and true method of prearranged messages in hotmail accounts to control them, if they need orders.
Which each team could eventually be caught, no one could actually stop the process, because none of the teams knows anything. The car is in their names, they don't know where the modifications were made (The mechanic could just take a bus halfway across the country, pick up the car, and then put it back when done.), they don't know anything at all about the other people.
$500 is really low. Hell, if people really cared about 'no regard for their own lives', can't they take out another damn mortgage? Or rob a bank?
As I said in the other post, the most obvious one would be a 'DC Sniper' style attack, writ large. Have multiple teams, operating independently and randomly, moving from city to city after a few days. You could shut down most major cities, and it's an attack that is, by the very premise, segmented into teams of two, so it has perfect operational security and catching a team won't affect other teams. It requires no communication with anyone.
All it requires is X guys who can drive, X guys who can shoot, X sniper rifles, and X used cars. Scale it up or down as required.
I don't know whether Al Qaeda 'exists' or not either, or what that means for a group where it's clear that people are just taking the name without 'permission'.
I do know that I can trivially think of much more devastating and/or spectacular attacks then they've tried. In fact, we've seen one of them, the DC Sniper. And that was two fricking people!
Get 20 people doing that, 10 teams, 4 on the west coast and 6 on the east. Have them roam from city to city, moving every couple of days, killing a person a day at least two hours away from where they're staying. Make sure none of them have any idea of where or who the others are. Bring in more people as they get caught.
This isn't some plan I thought of...we already had this attack,with two people. All you have to do is find 10 guys who can shoot and 10 guys who can drive, and give them 500 each to buy a used car!
I want people to think about that situation for a moment and how America would react, and how they'd react when the first person got caught and it turns out this wasn't over.
I used to think AQ wasn't doing stuff like this because we'd done exactly what they'd wanted: Started wars so they could recruit people to stop us.
However, right now, with the wars winding down and the American people no longer panicked, would be the perfect time to launch another attack...and they did, and it was the most pathetic attack ever.
They apparently don't even have people who can get into the US at all. It looks like 9/11 was it. Those 19 guys were all the competent, American allowed, guys they had. That was it.
Incidentally, that woman whose phone it was that was arrested? She was released....they just stole her identity to ship the package. So they aren't totally stupid. They just appear to have no resources at all.