News and Notes - 2 March 2009

Economics:
Must suck to work at Chystler right now:
Great Job Bill!! At this rate, by the end of the century we will have recouped the hundreds of millions of dollars AME Senior Management lost on the Patriot/Compass launch. You remember that launch. That's where AME Senior Management decided to blindly outsource the body shop and not require the supplier to follow our standards or involve our Engineers. Thank God with the new reorg we lost those managers....NOT. We couldn't afford to lose that talent now could we. You can force me to use both sides of the toilet paper if you'd like, but until we lose the no talent never waz's running our AME organization, our fate is sealed.

Stress testing mortgage CDO's. What did they learn? They're STILL massively overvalued.

Louisiana Unemployment Claims Gain Again. No more "bucking the trend."

A good investment strategy is to short whatever stock CNBC is in love with. CNBC is leading the herd off the cliff. Related Rick Santelli: just another Wall Street cheerleader who's getting taken care of behind the curtain.

Texas to legalize gambling? This would be a huge blow to Lake Charles and Shreveport. But, we can't have any real, productive jobs. We've got to have crappy service industry jobs that suck the lifeblood out of economy.

Taxes: Businesses brace for higher taxes. Related: The highest economic growth occurred when the highest marginal tax rate was over 90%. Another of US economic history from Mark Ames.

Public Colleges Get Surge of Acceptances. $40,000 tuition not the bargain it used to be?

Politics:
"Republicans aren't getting a dime more in committee money for staff than we got last year." That's the point.

US Guns in Mexico. Which is why Obama is thinking about reviving the assault weapons bill. It has become one of the hottest topics on Reddit I've ever seen.

The end of (Wingnut) Welfare as we know it.

Some rightwingers have had all the hate they can take and are taking it out on evil liberals/gays/browns/etc. I remember after 9/11 when a Sikh was beaten to death and some local "patriot" decided to throw a molotov through Mona's plate glass window. This is far worse than that. The scary thing is it has the potential to get even worse.

James Gill takes on Jindal and Harry Lee. Excellent read. H/T Oyster.

Random:
Google Maps displaying blast impacts of various nuclear weapons. Put it on your favorite address (say, City Hall on Perdido) and drop the big one.

No call of duty without the rules of war. Forcing war gaming kid to read the Geneva Convention.

Are outside volunteers helping or hurting New Orleans' Katrina recovery? I don't agree, but it's interesting food for thought.

The guy who started WikiScanner (a site that tracks anonymous Wikipedia edits to the companies, like Diebold, to their changes of their own entries) comes a fun little experiment. Books and music that make you dumb. Fun fact: there's a 67 point difference in SAT scores from "Bible" readers to "Holy Bible" readers. Note to self: listen to more Beethoven and Counting Crows.

Guinea-Bissau coup linked to drug smugglers?

Louisiana leads the nation in Incarceration. 1 in 55 Louisianians are currently behind bars. WE'RE #1! Oh, wait. Got a couple more to add behind bars. The Lorino case is particularly tragic. I didn't know him, but he had a reputation for being an extremely kind person who would give you the shirt off his back. He was killed in his Irish Channel home by someone he'd helped out before. His dad is still the CFO of Tulane, I believe.

I'll leave you with this:

How bacon is made.