It’s so amusing!

Make your own album cover! Here’s what you do: The article you get when you click this link is your band title.

The last four words of the last quote on this page is your album title (you will probably need to reload the page if you do more than one, if you’re like me.)

And the third picture, the upper right hand, will be your cover photo.

I’m adding a rule that you have to square off whatever picture you get, so that it’s a realistic album cover.

Mine after the jump:

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Defense budget (minus DoE and Iraq war): $638.9 billion

Cost of Iraq war: $141 billion

Mega lefty Chalmers Johnson on military Keynsianism.

The economy is faltering. Look out, because our leaders see it as another excuse to cut taxes for the rich. They did it in the 80s and they will do it again. The Milton Friedman conventional wisdom is that economic troubles are cause by insufficiently pure implementations of a pure free-market economy. So when times get tough they will reach for the low taxes switch. But unfortunately they won’t cut spending, they will just increase the debt. That’s because huge amounts of the budget are for defense, and for some reason cutting the defense budget is never on the table.

The economy seems to be sputtering, luckily I have found two experts that know more than I to talk about whats going on. The first is the always interesting Paul Krugman

He thinks our economy has been the beneficiary of a lot of foreign investment:

In particular, third world economies…were shaken by a series of financial crises beginning in 1997…they abruptly switched from being destinations for capital to sources of capital, as their governments began accumulating huge precautionary hoards of overseas assets.

The result, said Mr. Bernanke, was a “global saving glut”: lots of money, all dressed up with nowhere to go…

In the end, most of that money went to the United States. All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.” E.g., “Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad.”

…Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences.

What does this mean for us? After the jump, a different view:

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Well, it looks like the economy is starting to fall apart. Too much foolishness on too many levels. Profligate government spending, very lax credit standards, “creative” investing and of course a housing bubble. (thank you, ownership society). I don’t know enough to be able to say if this could have been avoided. At this point I suspect that their isn’t much that can be done to stop it.

What will be the consequences? Certainly that will affect the election, it will be very interesting to see how.

Until about yesterday I was thinking to myself that Mitt Romney would be a great opponent because he had almost no chance of winning. Mitt Romney is, in my opinion, a transparent panderer. Right now he is on the campaign trail trying to out-bigot and out-hawk all the wingnuts in the field. This is a guy who was pro-choice, signed a (flawed) universal health care bill in massachussets and was governer when same-sex marriage was made legal there. This was all in the last five years, not twenty years ago.

But then it occured to me…dishonesty can work. This is a guy who managed to get elected in Massachussets. If he gets the nomination he will run to the center as fast as he can. He will suddenly be the reasonable candidate. And with our useless political press he might even get away with it.

This article made me feel ill:

The big showdown between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could come down to California’s “beer-drinking Democrats” versus its “wine and cheese” liberals - with the Bay Area playing a pivotal role in the outcome.

Can we stop talking about politics in the terms of beer, pizza, coffee or other class markers that may or may not exist? Gah.

When I read third tier right wing blogs I have a lot of trouble figuring out what they are talking about. I was reading this guy’s feeling that the US Navy should have sunk a few speed boats in the straight of Hormuz so we don’t look like pussies when I stumbled across this graphic, which outlines the evil plan of the left to revive socialism:

So, Clinton wins (barely) in NH, splitting the early primaries. The good news is that super tuesday will be wide open and a lot of Americans will actually get some input on who will be the next president. California in particular will be a critical state to win on February 5th.

I like Obama a lot more than Clinton, she has too many of the Terry McAuliffe election losing triangulators around her. I am sick of that team that has been rushing the party towards the mythical center for years while the republicans tore the country apart. I would love to see their influence gone.

The other story is that Ron Paul is doing about as well as Rudy Guilliani. I personally think Ron Paul is a crackpot, but if he runs as an independent in the general election he will pull away enough republican votes to give us the really close swing states.

Obama and Huckabee take an early lead. I like Obama the most of any viable candidate and it is very good that all of the Democrats in the field roughly agree on a platform way to the left of the “centrist” platforms we had to deal with before. Not as left as I would like of course, but good.

The big nightmare for the republicans is that the rubes they were pandering to actually found a true believer in Huckabee. But at this point it looks like the only candidate that has any chance in the general election–Mccain–seems to be way behind. Also Ron Paul’s relatively strong showing makes me think he might make an independent run, if he can fund it. So at the risk of being horribly, horribly wrong I am going call this election for the democrat, who I suspect will be Barack Obama or John Edwards.