EdCone.com

Gross: "Authorities must act quickly, with a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart of the problem: home prices."

Since homes are the most highly levered and monetarily significant asset that American consumers own, if they decline much further they will drag the rest of the economy with them.

More:

There seems no way that current reserve requirements for banks will not in some nearly uniform way be imposed on investment banks. Leverage and gearing ratios of securities firms therefore, will in a few years resemble those of commercial banks themselves resulting in reduced profitability for major houses such as Goldman, Lehman, and Merrill Lynch...Shadow banks will likely be forced to raise expensive capital and/or reduce the bottom line footings of their balance sheets.

UPDATE:

This illustration ran with an earlier article by Gross; it explains something about the reserve requirements discussed above.

Dith Pran obit.

His final interview is worth watching, too.

I spent some time on the phone today talking net politics with Vernon Robinson, one of the savvier people in the state on the subject.

He wonders if heavy spending on TV ads in NC by Clinton and Obama will have an impact on state races by squeezing other candidates out of the market. That could hurt McCrory, who seems more inclined to spend on television than Smith, and Moore, who may need TV to come from behind against Perdue.

Another observation, picked up during Robinson's own D5 campaign two years ago:  sites like Open Secrets makes it easier for candidates to raise money, because you can see who gives how much, and who seems to have the capacity to give more.

Almost time for the RiverRun film festival in Winston-Salem.

Here's the schedule.

You can catch RiverRun's preview road show in locations across the state, including an April 14 stop in GSO at The Green Bean.

Micah Sifry talks with Joe Trippi about the state of internet campaigning.

I'm scheduled to be on the Brad and Britt show tomorrow morning at 8:05.

I guess I'm the April Fool.

Just spoke with Teresa Sue Bratton, a Democratic contender for the opportunity to challenge Congressman for Life Howard Coble in NC 6.

Bratton comes across as smart and sensible. A pediatrician who retired from private practice a couple of years ago (she still works at a clinic), her main issues are healthcare and the environment. She favors universal coverage with a multi-payer system, and emphasizes investment in prevention and chronic disease management. "We need long-term solutions," she says.

Bratton will be introduced at an April 8 fundraiser in Greensboro by Kay Hagan. She spends a lot of time on the phone, dialing for dollars, having been told a real run at Coble will cost close to $1 million, and also puts in several hours a day doing appearances and campaign stops.

Voters can see Bratton and her primary opponents, Jay Ovittore and Johnny Carter, in upcoming debates across the district.

Lou Dobbs, responding to Condi Rice, says Americans really do know how to talk about race, immediately proves himself wrong:

Atrios: "I'm actually happy to put "cotton ..." in the 'stupid ass shit that comes out of your mouth on the teevee sometimes' category, but the rest of what Dobbs said is really what's offensive."

Jay Rosen has a long, link-rich post about the media-McCain love-in and what some Democrats want to do about it.

Summary of Paulson plan. "Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson slaughtered a number of Washington's sacred cows, proposing to merge or eliminate institutions of long standing including the Securities and Exchange Commission, and to create a controversial new role of supercop for the Federal Reserve...[T]he plan [was] originally undertaken last spring to streamline bureaucracy, not respond to the current credit crisis."

Krugman says it's just a Dilbertian org-chart dance: [R]egulation will be limited to institutions that receive explicit federal guarantees — that is, institutions that are already regulated, and have not been the source of today’s problems.

Bloomberg quotes professor and former CFTC official Michael Greenberger: "It would be Congress and the president essentially giving a blank check to a regulator over which they have very little power...allow[ing] Wall Street to do whatever they want until a crisis occurs, at which point the Fed would intervene.''

Previously: "The truisms of the Greenspan era don't look so true anymore."

WSJ: "North Carolina's seven Democratic House members are poised to endorse Sen. Obama as a group -- just one has so far -- before that state's May 6 primary."

N&O profiles Blue NC as the site prepares to host a live debate between Dem gubernatorial contenders Moore and Perdue.

Damn.

Great season, and great tourney run, for Davidson.

Pagan Christianity: "Most of what present-day Christians do in church each Sunday is rooted not in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles."

The implications are not uncontroversial for some folks (via Revolution in Jesusland).

From Eric Alterman's long New Yorker article on the devolution of the newspaper business:

[E]ven if one agrees with all of Huffington's jabs at the Times, and Edsall's critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know...

...[W]e are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.

Instapundit links approvingly to this Ed Morrissey post, which claims, without documentation, that "the media" failed to provide context for the fighting in Basra, instead reporting it as a "spontaneous eruption of rebellion."

In fact, prominent media reports did provide context and background. One handy place to see this is Paul Kiel's round-up/analysis piece from last week, which draws on reporting from several major media outlets.

From an early story in the NYT: "In the weeks leading up to the operation, Iraqi officials indicated that part of the operation would be aimed at the Fadhila groups, which are widely believed to be in control of Basra’s lucrative port operations and other parts of the city. The ports have been plagued by corruption, draining revenue that could flow to the central and local governments. But the operation also threatens the Mahdi Army’s strongholds in Basra." That's hardly a report of "spontaneous eruption."

Examples contrary to Morrissey's blanket statement abound. His sweeping indictment is, to use a phrase still favored by cranky old farts like me, objectively untrue. The credibility of the corporate media is open to question; so is the credibility of people who question it.

Meanwhile.

Frank Rich puts Hillary's Bosnia story in net campaign context:

That Mrs. Clinton's campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton — though surely knowing her story was false — thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady’s foreign trip — as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night — and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.

The Drudge Report's link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program's nightly audience...It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of "sleep deprivation" and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.

The Clinton campaign's cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start.

I rolled my eyes at a letter to Sports Illustrated complaining that Tyler Hansbrough should not have been named player of the year. Dennis Luber of St Louis prefers K State's Michael Beasley, which is fine, but rather than pumping up his guy he trashed Hansbrough as a "one-dimensional role player who can't dribble, stroke the three or mid-range jumper and is not a deft passer."

The guy doesn't seem to have watched Hansbrough much this season.

Hope he caught last night's game (photo by Jeff Siner, Charlotte Observer).

UPDATE: More from SCM.

My newspaper column is about the need to update and upgrade regulation of financial markets. I filed it before Paulson's proposals were released, but the details of his plan -- and the reactions to the plan -- seem to underscore the points I'm trying to make.

The pushback against sensible regulation will be intense because the dollars involved are so large and because a lot of people have been trained over the years to cry "socialism!" at any public action that doesn't directly line their own pockets. Pay no attention to these men behind the curtain. The financial system is broken.

Read the whole thing after the jump.

more & more public records requests (blogs?) be careful w/emails; delete emails to and from gov office every day.

From notes taken at a meeting with the Governor Easley's press office by Diana Kees, public information officer at the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources, as reported in the N&O.

No worries, though: "Andrew A. Vanore Jr., a lawyer who works for Easley [...] said the notes don't mean what they say. He also said the instructions were not followed."

Found this while looking for something else.

Still works today: "The most extreme example or action of an individual who agrees with any idea or position you favor will do just fine as a representation of your actual ideas or positions. The most extreme example of anyone or anything associated with my ideology shows that inclusiveness is a vital part of our message."

Blue NC highlights the absurdity of Easley appointing someone who doesn't know how to use a computer to head the committee on North Carolina's electronic records retention policy: "Don't try to e-mail the state about e-mail."

Way back in 2002, I was told that Howard Coble -- then sponsoring a bad net-related bill -- didn't know how to turn on a computer. Coble's staff said I was just picking on him by pointing that out, but it mattered -- someone who had never seen a click-thru user agreement wouldn't have understood the power the bill gave the recording industry.

As Rep. Rick Boucher said, "I think it is very important that members of Congress who make judgments on this have a working knowledge of computers and the Internet. Many do, but some members are technology-averse, including some, unfortunately, who are in positions of influence."

Hard to believe it's still an issue six years later.

Speaking of hard to believe -- a candidate using a blog was national news back in 2002.

League of Women Voters on protest petitions: "The Legislature will reverse this exemption, IF all members of the Guilford County delegation request it. Therefore, it is important for those delegates to hear from YOU."

(via PPIG.)

As CERN gets ready to flip the switch on its new toy, some people are worried:

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a "strangelet" that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called "strange matter."

          

What we have become: "The low-ranking reservist soldiers who took and appeared in the infamous images were singled out for opprobrium and punishment; they were represented, in government reports, in the press, and before courts-martial, as rogues who acted out of depravity. Yet the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy."

What we have created: "It is estimated that some two million Iraqis have sought refuge in neighbouring countries...The legal status of Iraqis in neighboring countries is fragile and insufficient to address their legal, social and humanitarian needs."

What we are doing: "As U.S. warplanes attacked targets in Basra yesterday, Bush administration officials acknowledged that their hands-off strategy toward southern Iraq in recent years has left them with little knowledge of the conflicts among competing Shiite groups there and few ways of influencing them."

Earlier I said the CBS Sports website is evil because it publishes user information to Facebook without user consent.

But the CBS Sports site also lets you watch all NCAA games live, which comes in handy if you find yourself in a market that doesn't show every minute of every Carolina game.

I guess Jack Handey is right: things even out.

Condi Rice says it was "important" that Obama gave his speech on race "for a whole host of reasons."

She also says the legacy of slavery as a foundational element of American culture continues to have an impact on people. "That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today."

Pat Buchanan, on the other hand, says in essence that blacks should be grateful for slavery: "It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known."

Sounds to me like Pat's the one with the birth defect.

Anyone know about more layoffs at the N&R? I'm told four or five employees were let go "quietly" right before Easter.

Previously, previously.

UPDATE: John Robinson says, "It was fewer than 4-5 and was in our production operation."

EPA chief not that interested in P-ing the E.

Ruedi Reservoir, near Basalt, CO, Tuesday.

Doug Clark caught Bill Clinton's appearance in downtown GSO this morning, says he's "still a great campaigner."

WSJ says the North Carolina primary could be more important than Pennsylvania's in the Democratic nominating battle. The article notes that our only other meaningful primary was in 1976, when Reagan beat Ford; that one made Doonesbury.

UPDATE: Obama has opened a campaign office in GSO, and is launching his first ad in the state.

WaPo: "As President Bush told an Ohio audience that Iraq was returning to 'normalcy,' administration officials in Washington held meetings to assess what appeared to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country."

I guess it depends on your definition of "normal."

RSJ: "It's a weird thing to sue a city one loves, but I guess one can think of it as tough love. Our city is off the track in understanding open government and it appears as if they won't change until a judge tells them to."

UPDATE: Here's a PDF of the suit.

Conservation Council of NC legislative scorecard.

GSO's own Pricey Harrison gets a perfect score and is singled out in the report as an "environmental champion" and an "environmental powerhouse." Go Pricey.

Guilford County legislators did pretty well overall, with Maggie Jeffus bringing up the rear with a disappointing 63.

Only one Triad-area rep, Randolph County's own Harold Brubaker, earned (?) a place on the group's "Dirty Dozen" list of least environmentally-friendly legislators.

NYT: "AEY is one of many previously unknown defense companies to have thrived since 2003, when the Pentagon began dispensing billions of dollars to train and equip indigenous forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its rise from obscurity once seemed to make it a successful example of the Bush administration’s promotion of private contractors as integral elements of war-fighting strategy."

But AEY, "a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur," has not done well with its $300 million federal contract.

[T]he company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging...Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law.

Davidson amps up the school spirit: "Any student who wants to attend the Wildcats' NCAA tournament game against Wisconsin in Detroit on Friday is free to do so, President Tom Ross said in an e-mail sent at 2:24 p.m. All they had to do was reply withinin 96 minutes and the tab -- bus fare, hotel accommodations and game tickets -- would be taken care of, courtesy of the college's trustees."

The systemic margin call extends to a portion of the market most of us actually understand: home equity loans.

NYT: Americans owe a staggering $1.1 trillion on home equity loans — and banks are increasingly worried they may not get some of that money back.

To get it, many lenders are taking the extraordinary step of preventing some people from selling their homes or refinancing their mortgages unless they pay off all or part of their home equity loans first. In the past, when home prices were not falling, lenders did not resort to these measures.

Four years, 11 months and four days ago: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.  In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Presently: "With the United States providing air cover and embedded advisers, the Iraqi government on Wednesday expanded its offensive against Shiite Muslim militias from the port city of Basra to the capital of Baghdad — and many of the provinces in between."

More here: "The fight in Basra is being billed as the Iraqi government versus the militias of Shi'ite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.  But it's just as much a fight between rival Shi'ite factions."

Stop the Hike is a blog devoted to stopping a proposed sales tax increase in Rockingham County.

The caption for this 1932 cartoon by Cliff Berryman of the Washington Evening Star has FDR saying to Herbert Hoover, "Just leave them Herb. I'll do it all after March 4th."

As the old rhyme went, "Mellon pulled the whistle, Hoover rang the bell, Wall Street gave the signal, And the country went to hell."

WSJ:

The past 10 days will be remembered as the time the U.S. government discarded a half-century of rules to save American financial capitalism from collapse...

...[S]omething big just happened. It happened without an explicit vote by Congress. And, though the Treasury hasn't cut any checks for housing or Wall Street rescues, billions of dollars of taxpayer money were put at risk. A Republican administration, not eager to be viewed as the second coming of the Hoover administration, showed it no longer believes the market can sort out the mess.

My newspaper column on Sunday is about the end of free-market fundamentalism, and the hucksters who want help from the Fed without corresponding regulation of financial markets.

WSJ:

With grain prices soaring, farm income at record highs and the federal budget deficit widening, the subsidies and handouts given to American farmers would seem vulnerable to a serious pruning...

...As Congress tries to finish writing the new farm bill, the final tab is likely to be larger than the 2002 bill, which totaled more than $260 billion...

...The agribusiness industry plowed more than $80 million into lobbying last year, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks spending on lobbying. Much of that was focused on the farm bill.

"We got rolled," says Rep. Paul Ryan.

I guess "welfare mothers" don't have that kind of lobbying muscle.

LAT: "A Los Angeles Times story about a brutal 1994 attack on rap superstar Tupac Shakur was partially based on documents that appear to have been fabricated, the reporter and editor responsible for the story said Wednesday."

The interwebs helped unravel the fraud.

Hey, if the LAT had waited a week they could have claimed they did it on purpose -- it's been done before.

My mom caught the Obama show today in GSO. She reports:

War Memorial Auditorium was full and I understand there were a lot of people in the overflow room set up in the special events center. 

Openers were Pledge of Allegiance, short welcome from local activist, welcome from Mayor Yvonne Johnson (this time she didn't say who wrote the speech), prayer by a local minister who spoke of inclusiveness but prayed in the name of Jesus, which made some of us feel not included.  To have done otherwise may have made the majority of the audience feel upset, who knows. 

Only rock star moment was his entrance and his explanation of why he was running.  He was always calm, always in control of himself, gently humorous, and always on topic.  It was, by and large, a policy speech followed by questions from members of the audience. 

He spoke about   the war in Iraq, health care, education, the financial crisis, jobs, social security, immigration. A good deal of detail.  He made reference to corporations and the super rich but he did not really explain how he was going to pay for all this good stuff. My intuition was that the immigration arguments were not entirely popular, but they seemed sensible to me.

An interesting question with an interesting response came from a young man who identified himself as a student at a Southern Baptist Bible College who was getting flak because he supported Obama--could Obama speak about his faith.  This got the biggest reaction of the afternoon. 

The candidate began with the statement (once again) that he was a Christian and believed in the redemptive power of Jesus Christ.  He said that Christians were to live their religion through both faith and deeds.  He is both Christian and American, he said, and not all Americans are both, but all good people of various religions and non-believers were worthy and necessary for the good of the land. I didn't put that well, but the meaning should be plain. 

Rev. Jeremiah Wright had to be mentioned, and was.  His ugly remarks were strongly denounced, but there was a coda in which Obama mentioned that awful as the rev's statements were, they comprised a tiny fraction of his preaching. 

A good primer on Obama policies.

I watched The Big Lebowski on Hulu the other day, just because I could. Our family is enjoying the site, although it could use a lot more content.

Slate: "For Hulu to become a true YouTube Pro—a site with complete movie and television archives—would require a historic level of corporate cooperation. For now, the site reminds us of the joys of television as a communal experience—One Nation, Under Pop Culture."

One way Fred Gregory keeps busy when he's not commenting on this blog is sending me email -- missives that cover more than the politics we hash out here, including important stuff like jokes and Carolina basketball.

In recent days, Fred's email has been on another topic entirely: the surgery his wife, Sandra, was facing, and then came through well. She's recovering now. I'm sure I speak for regular readers in extending best wishes to the Gregory family.

Doug Clark dug Obama: "He's really terrific with a live audience ... not so much charismatic as confident, comfortable and in control. He connects with people, communicates, convinces. He's got wit, personality, intelligence."

DC covers the substance, too, with which he was less taken.

Dome sez the upcoming gubernatorial forum at Blue NC shows the site has come of age.

See? All those times you yelled at them to grow up worked!

But seriouslike: "The debate will be notable in a few ways. Moore and Perdue have only squared off a handful of times in this campaign. It is also certainly a historic first for two gubernatorial candidates to debate online. And it marks a milestone in the growing power of the netroots in North Carolina."

You can comment on Blue NC and web politics at the link above for an upcoming N&O article.

What's happening in Iraq, and why.

UPDATE: Pentagon says it's good news.

Clay Shirky: "The internet isn't a decoration on contemporary society, it's a challenge to it. A society that has an internet is a different kind of society than a society that doesn't."

Chris Wallace talks about criticizing his Fox News colleagues on live teevee.