Follow this link to view Jon Stewart’s extended interview with Lou Dobbs.

Although the discussion was intellectual and did not resort to shouting, it still left me with the feeling that there was an opportunity lost.

I think I finally figured out what was bothering me about this interview.

Jon never got to the point of asking Lou Dobbs whether what Lou did on his own show could have possibly helped bring governance to the center of political beliefs in this country as Lou claimed was his desire?

They then could have had a discussion of whether or not exacerbating the inherent xenophobia in people was helpful in any way? I feel that Lou Dobbs spent an inordinate amount of his time on CNN being a dishonest rabble rouser and not trying to be helpful at all.

Watch the following videos of Vice President Joe Biden appearing on The Daily Show.

He does an even better job of explaining things than Elizabeth Warren did in my previous posts. In fact I would love to see the two of them discuss the wisdom of the original bank bailout. He raises the kinds of questions that I did when I heard Warren’s interview.

Follow this link to see the discussion on the Huffington Post article about this Daily Show appearance.

Watch this video interview of Elizabeth Warren as she discusses her role as the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Follow this link to the Huffington Post coverage of this interview.

I thought that most of the interview was absolutely wonderful and the points she made were great. She explains how you can be a strong proponent of capitalism and want the markets to be run transparently. In fact, if you are a strong proponent and have faith in the way it is supposed to work, then you ought to want such transparency. She explains why you need regulations to insure that such transparency exists.

The only part where I have a little disagreement is in her comments about how the bailout was done. Her analysis of the problems with it are unarguable. She says she wouldn’t have voted to do it the way it was done. What is missing is an an explanation of what she would have done and the impact her method would have had on the world economy.

If she could explain what she would have done differently, how she could have passed such a plan through the political system, and make a plausible case of what the outcome would have been. Then that would be an improvement over just saying that she didn’t like the way it was done.

Follow this link to another interview with Elizabeth Warren. This interview is on the NOW program on PBS. It covers some new ground compared to the above interview. To be fair, I caught a few journalistic tricks that were used to over emphasize her points. However, there is still a lot of valuable information in the interview.

Follow this link to the New York Times piece by Paul Krugman.

In the article he mentions several policies that Germany has used to minimize the job losses in this recession.

Follow this link to the discussion of his article in Huffington Post.

There are pros and cons on Krugman’s suggestion, but the point is that there are more things that can be tried that have not yet been tried.

A look at the later post, Eurocrisis: “Democracy is Not a Given”, may have you rethinking what you read here.

Follow this link to the Huffington Post article on the report.

I posted my initial reaction before I have had a chance to read the report.  Follow this link to see my first response.

This response was in two pieces which I quote below.

(Geithner’s team ended up paying top dollar for toxic assets — “an amount far above their market value at the time,” the report notes.)

If anyone has a memory long enough to reach back before the Obama administration, they might remember the great conundrum of the time. If we paid the then market value for the securities, the whole financial system would collapse. That was the exact problem at the time – the securities had a market value that had fallen to far less than their initial price.

So we could have got a tremendous bargain and entered into a decades long depression or we could have paid more than they were worth, staved off a collapse, and be criticized for it at the time and in the future.

I’ll wait for cooler heads to judge what happened before I decide what reward Geithner deserves. There is no worry after all, we know that no good deed goes unpunished.

Let me see if I can put this another way.

You don’t need an entity with huge, deep pockets to step in and solve a free market problem by paying free market prices. The free market was quite capable of doing that.

The whole point of the intervention was to do what the free market could not do. That is to pump in money that made no sense for any single free market player, but made a whole lot of sense for the only entity that could protect the whole system from collapse.

That is Keynes’ great insight to what happens during a depression.

I posted a response to another comment that lamented that Wall Street did not learn its lesson because of Geithner’s intervention.

You are right. Wall Street will never learn if they don’t pay the price. The paradox was that if Wall Street got an object lesson, the rest of us would have paid a great price in enduring a financial collapse and decades of depression.

If we staved off a collapse and a depression, Wall Street would not get its object lesson.

Which of these two choices would you have picked?

Apparently, now everyone would have chosen the path of collapse.

My ability to continue to feed myself is the result of not choosing the path of collapse. Nobody else may, but I appreciate the choice that was made. We need to find other ways to give Wall Street the lesson it deserves.

After breakfast, I will try to read the actual report to see if it matches the HuffPo headline and story.

I still haven’t read the entire report, but I did find the following on page 15:

In the final analysis, the Federal Reserve and Treasury believed that the risks of not rescuing AIG outweighed the risks associated with rescuing the troubled insurance company, and on September 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve Board authorized an $85 billion credit facility for AIG.

Follow this link to read Thom Hartmann’s review of R. Crumb Illustration of the Book of Genesis. The most startling thing he says may be in the following excerpt:

According to one of the two different creation stories in Genesis, Adam and Eve gave birth to Cain and Abel, but after Cain killed Abel, he went to a nearby city and found a wife. Another city?

I don’t think my sister, the Jehovah Witness, ever told me about this version.  I am going to have to do a little research before I ask her about it.

Is there a bible expert among my readers that can confirm or refute this?

Follow this link to the Jehovah Witness’s web site to see some quotes from their translation of the bible.

Here you are actually driving me this day from off the surface of the ground, and from your face I shall be concealed; and I must become a wanderer and fugitive on the earth, and it is certain that anyone finding me will kill me.” 15 At this Jehovah said to him: “For that reason anyone killing Cain must suffer vengeance seven times.”

Who are these other people?  Where did they come from? I’m sure I’ll be sorry for asking.

Follow this link to the article by Fareed Zakaria in Newseek.

I have made a few comments on Huffington Post about this article.

As of this posting, the above comment link will take you to these maunderings of my feverish mind.

I think some people are missing the point.

Of course you cannot predict when specific innovations will occur. You cannot even predict what innovations will be (or they wouldn’t be innovations almost by definition).

However, you can figure out what factors help foster innovation as Fareed Zakaria has tried to spell out in his article.

There are some factors we can control and some we cannot. If we can figure out which ones we have some control over and then try to do something positive about them, we will get farther ahead than if we don’t.

Having government actions in this area decided by a president you’d like to have a beer with instead of someone who actually understands the value of technology and innovation is not the place to start. Having a president who puts political operatives in top science related agencies to rewrite the reports of scientists so that they are more politically palatable is not a good way to start. Deriding scientific study by our media, our citizens, and our political leaders (followers), is not a good way to start.

Cutting research funding to universities because they are bastions of liberalism, is not a good way to start. Tilting the tax structure so you can make billions in finance and only paltry millions in science, technology, and engineering, is not a good way to start.

Any other bright ideas from the peanut gallery?

By the way, how much do you think Sarah Palin knows about science and technology?

How much do you think the creationists and intelligent design people know about science and technology?

How much advantage do startup technology companies have in countries where health care is paid for outside the workplace?

It is all connected, people.

Why are people so stupid? Turns out it’s a virus spread by an Obama-hating monkey. He’s responsible for birthers, the people who equate health care reform to the Holocaust, and Rush Limbaugh.

Watch the video.

Follow this link to the HuffPo article that introduced this video to me.