The Obama-Biden Gaffeworks

While some people are feverishly working to prevent the next Great Depression, the campaign trail sounds like an episode of the Tonight Show's Jaywalking. The average aspiring entertainer on the streets of Los Angeles (or sometimes a teacher!) is asked "How many varieties of Heinz Ketchup are there?"

They promptly answer: 57.

"Now how many states are in the United States of America?"

Answer: "Um, 57…possibly 58." These people are hilarious.

Maybe Jay should be asking them if they are Democrats or Republicans, because this time it wasn't a topless dancer that showed she didn't know the first thing about the country she lives in, it was the Democrat's nominee for President of the United States, Barack Obama.

One mistake like that is usually enough to seriously damage a presidential nominee if that nominee were either a Republican or Hillary Clinton. Case in point, when John McCain made the far more common mistake of mixing up shia and sunni, a CNN anchor opined that if Joe Lieberman were not there to correct him on the spot, it would have meant the end of McCain's campaign. No one was there to correct Obama's Are You Smarter Than a First Grader answer, and yet his mistake has never been cited by the mainstream media. Like Clinton, Joe Biden told a tale of being under imaginary sniper fire just days ago, claiming his plane was forced down in Afghanistan by an enemy President Bush has failed to fight. That enemy turned out to be weather. Unlike Clinton, Biden has a free pass with the media burying what would ordinarily be a blockbuster of a story.

Now it turns out that Obama believes that the president takes office on Election Day itself rather than in January. In the wake of Lou Dobbs calling for the candidates to suspend their campaigns and take a leadership role in resolving the financial crisis, and McCain's surprise announcement to do just that, Senator Obama responded that keeping to the debate schedule took precedence. He added, "The public needs to hear from the person who, in 40 days will be responsible for taking care of this problem." No, Senator, the current president will still be responsible.

The second most obvious problem with that statement is that the scheduled debate is not about economics. It is a foreign policy debate. So not only does Obama refuse to participate in the domestic legislation of the century, but he instead wants to take that irretrievable moment and throw over discussions of economics for foreign policy. I contend that if the questions are not changed, McCain should refuse to go regardless of whether or not the bailout has passed by then.

Obama's gaffe-of-all-gaffes is one of omission. He claims he wants to change Washington, but he is on a plane to Mississippi at the most critical time in our nation's financial history, refusing to do his job with the puffy claim that if anyone needs him, he will get on the telephone. What Obama has chosen to do is use the financial crisis to politically launder his nineteen-month heel-dragging on debates, hoping to alchemically turn himself into the candidate that insists on a debate even if this revelation comes at the expense of the country. What he won't turn himself into is a leader of his party.

And that takes us back to the walking gaffe machine Joe Biden. His response to the crisis was to find a new fault with President Bush, saying, "In 1929 when the stock market crashed, President Roosevelt got right on television to explain to the American people what was happening." I agree that's quite a contrast to Bush waiting a couple of days. Biden's role model was a real can-do kind of guy. Although one Roosevelt was dead and the next would not be president for years, one of them quickly invented television, distributed millions of sets, and gave that all-important address to the nation.

The person that Senator Biden so admires that was actually in office at the time was in fact Republican Herbert Hoover in the first year of his presidency. Rather than the quick action Biden ascribes to that commander-in-chief, Hoover rejected the idea of corrective legislation until he was running for president again several years later. It is not rare but typical for Joe Biden for fire off a multi-gaffe because his opinions are supported by lies and informed by his breathtaking ignorance.

At a time when John McCain has taken the responsible path as the leader of his party, this well-documented dumbest team to ever run for president wants to sit back and mince words. Dramatic confirmation that Obama does not want to take the risk of having his fingerprints on anything. Does he think he can do that as president?

To the Obama-Biden ticket I say: When do "just words" end, and "just actions" begin?

A Housing Crisis in the Land of the Blind

Apparently, the media's housing crisis is like an unsolved murder: the statute of limitations on finding out about it, and beginning the investigation never runs out. If so, this one is surely a cold case.

As we watch it "worsen" with nails bit down to knuckles, lets inject a note of sanity. Falling prices means that homes will come within reach of new buyers who could not and would not touch the unrealistic prices. New home production will slow and inventories will eventually drop. That means that there are at least two groups of people who are not hurt: new buyers and long-term holders. The latter are experiencing a normal return on investment regardless of the paper gain fluctuations. In the meantime, we can learn something.

When prices were rising to levels that would have struck Salvator Dali as too surreal, few people sounded the alarm. Instead we heard platitudes like, "Buy real estate now, the best investment in the world; they ain't making any more of it," and "Don't be left behind. Turn it over and get rich." Everyone played musical chairs to the tune of "Pop Goes The Weasel," and when that bubble popped, the last buyers were the biggest losers. Remember the lyrics, "the monkey chased the weasel." When was that ever a sensible pursuit? Yet somehow when people were being conned into thinking they could afford the enormous debt, the word crisis wasn't applied. Or at best, in 2006, we saw the following headline from Barrons, "Is a crisis approaching?" And we only got that when they noticed the first "downward surprise." Am I the only one who finds it naïve that so many money mavens were so surprised? Lenders and tiger and bears. Oh my!

The rising prices, the burgeoning bubble itself, should have been described as a housing crisis before the downturn, and it never was. The experts, including our Fed chairman, got it wrong at every turn, and are on to a new phase of getting it wrong now. How many articles today, talking about "the steepest decline ever" provide any information on how it was preceded by the steepest rise in home prices ever? None that I can find. Surely we are in a housing crisis, but in the later stages of one. It cannot reasonably be measured from the time the first wave of defaults was noticed or even when prices began their long drop. I would measure it by the start of rapid price rise, out of proportion with growth of the ability to pay, or the moment lender's standards relaxed to a state of criminal irresponsibility.

Of course it is not so much a matter of what words are used, as that the reporting is indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding. Again in 2006, the Washington Post referred to an altogether different housing crisis, the issue of affordable housing, essentially misidentifying the underlying problem with an all-over-the-map indictment of "the market," and "snob zoning," while never once mentioning unconscionable and unsustainable credit.

The falling prices of today are the harbinger of the healthy economy to come. If there was panic to be had, someone should have panicked in 2006, perhaps the congress we elected that year, after the congress of 2004 ignored it. Instead, we're panicking in 2008 when we are two to four years closer to a healthy economy. Americans understand this better than the media. That's why this congress is reviled more than the President. While that dream team was hitting the minimum wage button over and over—the only thing they saw out of order on the domestic front—the extra dollar an hour wasn't going to cover the latest hundred thousand dollars added to a home price tag.

We're not suffering because the surge won't be enough and the stimulus package won't be enough. We're suffering because the poor things—congress and the media that parrot their talking points—have their crises all mixed up.

Your Private Energy News

You may want to cross your legs. At this very moment, people are looking into your urinary tract with intense interest.

You heard it here first, boys and girls. You know how in some towns we have to segregate newspapers, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and some such into their own bins? Well, one day soon, mark my words, it will be your civic responsibility to pee into one of those bins. Some time after that, instead of searching for a rest stop along the highway, you will relieve yourself directly into your car, a model which may be called the new Ford Sprinkle. Good for your bladder and good for the environment.

It's all about oil, and corn, and global warming. The global warming plan calls for preventing the U.S. from unlocking the trillion tons of oil in our shale (which releases carbon dioxide in the process) so that we can single-handedly lower the Earth's temperature by seven tenths of one percent in seventy years. No oil refineries are allowed to be built for the oil that is readily available, and we are allowing China to claim the oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

In service of those policies (like 'em or not), edible corn is being converted into alternative ethanol gasoline blends at an unprecedented rate. Now the price of corn, the price of feed, the price of meat, the price of all the other crops too relatively unprofitable to grow, will go through the roof (and you've seen those prices climbing) unless scientists find another way to produce fuel. They are racing to do so. (Hmm, shouldn't they have been working on that sooner?) There are 114 corn ethanol refineries and 80 more under construction.

Dupont wants to make ethanol from corn waste; six other companies want to make it from straw (sounds like a fairy tale); and genetic engineers from Berkeley are looking into palm tree sap, termite guts, and--as I said--the human urinary tract.

You thought Germans and Americans loved their beer before? Starting tomorrow, guzzling is going to be downright patriotic.