Vandals in Muncie tagged the Republican headquarters. Nick Werner of the Star Press assumes they were Obama fans. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were nothing more than vandals looking for attention. It’s even possible they were following the footsteps of Republican uberstrategist, Karl Rove. Rove famously bugged his own office to smear his opponent. Judging from the crap coming out of Delaware County in the past year, I wouldn’t rule out anything. The first thing out of the mouth of the Delaware County Republican Party chair was how this was going to energize local Republicans.

This is a pretty awesome explanation:

• Lehman Brothers was like the little kid pulling the tail of a dog. You know the kid is going to get hurt eventually, and so no one is surprised when the dog turns around and bites the kid. But the kid only hurts himself, so no one really cares that much.

• Bear Stearns is the little pyro — the kid who was always playing with matches. He could harm not only himself, but burns his own house down, and indeed, he could have burnt down the entire neighborhood. The Fed stepped in not to protect him, but the rest of the block.

• AIG is the kid who accidentally stumbled into a bio-tech warfare lab . . . finds all these unlabeled vials, and heads out to the playground with a handful of them jammed into his pockets.

Just a reminder for anyone wishing to cast a vote in November, October 6, 2008 is the deadline to register to vote in Indiana. You can verify your current Indiana voter registration status and get information about how to register here.

The Interim Committee on Immigration Issues had another meeting. They were trying to figure out how much illegal immigrants cost the government but did not come up with much concrete information.

Medicaid has to pay $5 million per year to pay for emergency medical care related pregnancies. There are some unknown expenses related to education, but it’s not known how much illegal immigrants also pay in property taxes. The Department of Correction incarcerated 504 foreign born nationals but had no information on how many are here illegally. Also, apparently no word on sales taxes, income taxes for which no refund is collected, or other potential entries on the positive side of the ledger.

Sen. Mike Delph is apparently not terribly concerned about the profits and losses; characterizing this as more of a “matter of principle.”

How, exactly, does this work? The Federal Reserve is close to a deal where it will essentially acquire 85% of AIG in exchange for an $85 billion loan. Where does the money come from? Where does the authority come from? We’re essentially nationalizing one of the world’s largest companies here, right?

Until this week, it would have been unthinkable for the Federal Reserve to bail out an insurance company, and A.I.G.’s request for help from the Fed of just a few days ago was rebuffed.

But with the prospect of a giant bankruptcy looming — one with unpredictable consequences for the world financial system — the Fed abandoned precedent and agreed to let the money flow.

The fundamentals of our economy being as strong as they are, according to Mr. McCain, I guess now we’re just strengthening the hell out of them. If we’re not careful, we might pull something.

Dispatches from the Culture War has a good summary on the issue of using U.S. forces to conduct raids in the Pakistan tribal areas where al Qaeda is believed to have strongholds.

To summarize the summary – Obama got all kinds of crap from McCain and Clinton when he said:

[H]e would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government, a move that would likely cause anxiety in the already troubled region.

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said.

McCain, in particular, said that Obama’s position was “naive.” Now Bush has ordered such raids, just as Obama had suggested. No word from McCain on whether Bush’s actions were “naive.”

This weekend’s unnerving events on Wall Street does nothing to allay my feeling that, for a long time now, we have been mining our economy rather than growing it. Generally speaking, to grow an economy, I’d think that you have to concentrate on inventing new things, improving old things, or producing old things more cost effectively than before. On the other side, you need a sufficient number of people who are inventing, improving, or producing other things. In a sense, each inventor, improver, or producer swaps some of his stuff for some of the other guy’s stuff.

But, since it’s cumbersome to engineer a person-to-person swap; we have currency which stores value in much the same way as a battery stores energy. However, whereas batteries store energy pursuant to scientifically observable physical laws; currency is a whole lot less reliable. Currency works on trust and reputation. People accept currency in return for their stuff or labor because they believe that the value of that currency will be there when it is time for them, in turn, to go and acquire stuff or labor of their own.

Seems like, instead of inventing, improving, or producing; our economy has been focused more on doing funny things with currency, e.g., elaborate schemes with mortgages founded on unreliable notions about the ability of the mortgagor to make payments as agreed. We’ve been draining that currency battery and, after awhile, the jumper cables aren’t going to work anymore.

It’s been tough getting a straight answer out of McCain as to what he proposes with respect to Social Security, but according to this Wall Street Journal article, he apparently favored Bush-style privatization.

Something to keep in mind as we ponder the stagnant stock market, government bail outs of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, and see what the future brings with respect to the likes of Lehman Brothers, and AIG.

Although, at this rate, rather than making social security assets private; we’re going to convert all the private liabilities to public ones. So I guess, one way or another public money is going to get together with private debt. Privatize the profits, socialize the debts.

This is a nice graphic demonstrating the primary reason for my shameful (in the eyes of many of my friends and family) transition from “conservative” to “liberal”:

No Republican president has balanced a budget in close to 40 years. I can’t remember which budget that would have been, but it was some time during the Nixon administration. Ford didn’t do it. Reagan didn’t do it. George H.W. Bush didn’t do it. And George W. Bush didn’t do it. Since 1980, Republicans Reagan, Bush, and Bush have had 20 opportunities to preside over a balanced budget and have not managed it once. For Reagan, I’ve been told that the Democratic Congress was the problem all 8 years. For Bush the Elder, again, it was those darn Democrats. When Clinton presided over balanced budgets, then it was because of the Republican Congress. But when Bush the Younger had a Republican Congress to work with, deficits hit record highs. It’s time to face the fact that, with Republican administrations, budget deficits are not the exception, they are an iron-clad rule.

Rap freestyle translated into plain English:

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