Follow this link to an audio recording of a conversation among Vice President Walter Mondale, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, and moderater University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs.

The evening of great conversation was titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis”.

In this audio, Seymour Hersh revealed new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.” I am sure that we will be hearing a lot more about this story, but the 1 hour conversation was so much more valuable than just this single revelation.

The discussion ranged over abuses of power from President Johnson in the Viet Nam War to the the unprecedented abuses of the Bush/Cheney administration. I think you will learn a lot about what went on and how these things finally get stopped.

You can follow this link to see how the story was covered by Eric Black on MinnPost.com

Follow this link to the videos of Jim Cramer’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

This is one of the finest examples of bulldog reporting since the heyday of Mike Wallace in the 1950s.

Jon just will not let Cramer wriggle out of his (and the media’s) responsibility for bad reporting.  Cramer keeps trying to cop to a lesser charge, but Jon just will not let him get away with it.

The Town Common newspaper facilitated a debate among the Sturbridge Board of Selectment candidates.  It was broadcast live over the cable public access channel tonight, March 12, at 7:00PM.

I want to record for our own reference in the this blog the conclusion that we will use in the election Monday, April 13.

We think the two best candidates are James Ehrhard and Thomas Creamer. Our third choice would be Priscilla Gimas. We would not choose Edward P. Goodwin.

We think our top choices are more likely to get our town unstalled from its current malaise. It is tough to choose based on one debate.  We treat the debate as our first chance to actually hear the candidates speak to us.  This is now a good jumping off point for our further research into the positions, qualifications, and past history of these candidates.

The Town Common promises to have excerpts of the debate on their blog site tomorrow.

Follow this link to an interview with Jim Cramer.

In this 2006 interview that is now on YouTube, Jim Cramer descibes how he  manipulated markets when he managed a hedge fund.  He admits that he committed illegal acts that he got away with because the SEC didn’t understand what was going on.

In 2006, he probably felt safe making these admissions, given that the SEC was run by the Bush administration. He must not have known much about YouTube back then because he thought this interview would not be aired on TV.

I was quite wrong yesterday, when I said that Jim Cramer missed the boat on his Bear Stearns predictions.  Not only was he on the boat, he was steering it.

If Martha Stewart could be jailed for what the government claimed she lied about doing, do you think Cramer could be jailed for admitting what he has done?  Too late to hide behind the 5th ammendment now.

Follow this link to see Jon Stewart prove that Jim Cramer really missed the boat with his predictions of  Bear Stearns’ future.

If you followed the discussion at the time when people were trying to hold Cramer to account, Cramer was artfully able to claim that if you listened to his words very closely, you would have no cause to complain about what he said.

In this video, Jon Stewart seems to be going down that very same path of previous critics.

Never give up on Jon, though.  Wait for the final coup de grace.

Follow this link to a 40 minute interview with Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz is a Nobel economics laureate in economics.  He is a professor at Columbia University and the former chief economist at the World Bank. He is the co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

This discussion is in the same vein as the other two items I posted today. In an interview like this, Joseph Stiglitz gets a much better chance to go into some details than Paul Krugman can do in a short column.

Follow this link to Paul Krugman’s latest column where he criticizes the Obama administration’s non-plan for bailing out the banks.

Perhaps it is not coincidence that I am finding many knowledgeable economists and financiers that are saying similar things.

Here is my fantasy positive spin on what the Obama administration is doing.  They really know what needs to be done, but they are having a hard time selling it politically. They keep proposing ineffective solutions until all the experts demand that they do what the administration wants to do anyway.  Then Obama can come around and say, “I really don’t want to take over the banks, but if you absolutely insist, then I guess I’ll have to do it.”

Follow this link to hear the interview of Simon Johnson on the bank bailout plan.

Simon Johnson helped shape the International Monetary Fund’s response to worldwide financial turmoil as the organization’s economic counselor and director of the research department, a position he held from March 2007 until August 2008.

Now a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Johnson is also the co-founder of BaselineScenario.com, a Web site that chronicles the global economic and financial crisis.

Johnson joins Fresh Air to analyze the bank bailout plan and its alternatives.

In the interview, he discusses other bailouts in history.  Some were successful and some were not. He analyzes the reasons for both success and failure.

I have previously blogged about Simon Johnson in the post Global Crisis Orientation.

In an earlier post, Musings on Mark-To-Market, I talked about the problems of this accounting rule in the current economic crisis.

RichardH commented that valuing assets is more of an art than a science.

I know this is anathema to accountants, but perhaps a company ought to be able to say, “We don’t know what our assets are worth”.  In this environment, that is probably a truer statement than putting almost any kind of misleading number on it.

Other possibilities would be to allow companies to state a range.  They might be able to say to their creditors, “if you make me sell all my assets today they are worth $100, but if you let me sell them over time and after the economy recovers they are worth $1,000.”

I remember a discussion with an ex-boss of mine who asked me to tell him how long a software-development project would take.  He then asked me if I was 95% certain about this number. I could not honestly tell him that I was.  After berating my poor abilities to manage a software project after my 40 years of experience, he asked me again how sure I was.  I told him I was 95% sure.  He then proceeded to ask me that if I was not 95% certain 5 minutes ago, how could I be so certain now?  I told him that I was just trying to give him the answer that he wanted to hear. I guess I should have waited more than 5 minutes to change my answer.

RichardH’s comment on the earlier post indicates that he has similar stories to tell from his world.

I’ll have to ask my daughter, the accountant, if there is any parallel between my experience and that of the accounting world.

Follow this link to the article in The Atlantic magazine

On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

Reader GarlandB has brought this article to my attention.  I haven’t had a chance to read the complete article yet. I save the link here for my own reference so I can get back to it after supper.

Now that I have competed reading the article, I see that there are a lot of ideas in there to contemplate.

One of the interesting ideas is the purported delitirious effect on the economy of too large a percentage of home ownership. This comes very near the end of the article.  The author’s arguments sound plausible to me.  I think they deserve some time to digest before deciding if they make sense or not.

What do you think?