9:40 I've been camped out on Twitter all night. Time to pay attention to the old blog.
So, we've lost the House. Good-bye, Nancy. I can't believe that one of the many pundits said that Pelosi wasn't liked, because she was too well "coiffed."
Women are voting Republican tonight. Why?
10:00 The Democrats did a lousy job of talking about how successful the stimulus was. There is a widespread belief that Obama gave Wall Street a lot of money and the brokers went off and bought a bunch of nice cars and that was it. The stimulus prevented the country from going into far worse economic tailspin. The money was paid back with interest. This message should have been driven home over and over again. It wasn't.
Looks like the Dems are still going to control the Senate, but it's shaky.
I'm going to have to put down the wine glass at some point and go to bed.
10:11 Check out the NYT Election map. Lots of red.
10:23 Momentarily distracted by other shiny objects. Damn, I have short attention span.
Are the red states getting more red? Well, not West Virginia. And North Carolina still has some nice pockets of blue in there.
Can we just be happy that Palladino and O'Donnell lost? The voters aren't totally insane.
10:43 Senator Feingold, Dem-Wisc, is projected to lose. That hurts.
11:11 On Twitter, I'm Laura11D.
Sorry, guys. I'm so media-fractured right now. I'm watching four different TV stations, tweeting, and texting. Believe it or not, I don't have a laptop w/wifi, so I have to run upstairs to blog. Sloshing my wine glass as I go.
The Sestak/Toomey race is very tight. Fox gives a slight edge to the Tea Party candidate, Toomey. The NYT gives a slight edge to Sestak. They aren't going to know until the morning.
Fox says the House is going to pick up 60 seats.
The Twitter people say the Senate is safe. Boxer won.
Power outage in NV. Going to delay results.
Funny Tweet: "Semi-homemade Sandra Lee is now First Girlfriend-Elect of New York. #worstfoodnetworkpersonalityEVER" Here's the dirt.
12:03 I know it's the geek super bowl and all, but I'm beat. Signing off until tomorrow.
Apt. 11d 
Yikes… not following anything, really. Will read your twitter posts when I’m done writing my post for today. š¦
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The money that has been “paid back with interest” was the TARP money. The ARRA money (aka the stimulus) hasn’t been paid back. TARP was a Bush/Paulson program. Why does Obama suddenly think he can get credit for TARP, which wasn’t his program, among financial services employees like my wife and me?
Obama expanded TARP to cover the auto companies, money that isn’t going to be paid back and comes directly out of our pockets via higher taxes. Why would we vote for that?
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ARRA isn’t supposed to be paid back. It’s supposed to stimulate the economy.
TARP was supposed to be paid back. Meanwhile, the US owns the auto companies, no? Or at least GM.
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Do you mean you’ll be reading Twitter, posting there, or both? I tried to find a link to a Twitter feed for you (would like to follow you) but was unable. It’s probably right in front of me, but I just don’t see it…
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Why does Obama suddenly think he can get credit for TARP, which wasn’t his program, among financial services employees like my wife and me?
I blame him for TARP, along with the Republicans. Obama supported it and it wouldn’t have passed without Congressional Dems. Stimulus isn’t supposed to be paid back. Whether it is pointless or not is a different matter.
But, I’ll consider the Wall Street portion of the TARP paid back just as soon as a bank lends me money at prime when I have a negative net worth and no income.
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y81,
See. You said something so stupid I had to agree with Wendy.
(On owning GM, that is going to be re-privatized for a loss.)
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“The stimulus prevented the country from going into far worse ectonomic tailspin.”
I don’t think we’ve really even gotten started on the housing crash. There are 13 trillion dollars in US mortgages, and with a number so large, if even 1 in 10 of those go bad, it’s a big deal. The federal government has essentially taken over mortgage lending, and thanks to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the US taxpayer is now the creditor for 5 trillion dollars in mortgages.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2010/0817/Fannie-Mae-and-Freddie-Mac-reform-Would-it-add-5-trillion-to-US-debt
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Wendy, I only meant that politically.
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I know. š
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MH, isn’t your quarrel with our hostess? On your telling, nothing has “been paid back with interest”: not TARP, not ARRA, not anything.
But you are probably too stupid to know what you are saying.
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Boys, behave!
Yes, I know the difference between TARP and ARRA, just typing too fast last night, Y81, to explain what I was meant. I know the difference between the two, but most Americans don’t. They just know that a big check went to Wall Street and not to them. It may have begun in the last months of the Bush administration, but it will forever be connected with Obama.
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I never said there was no interest paid back for TARP. I said that the interest rate was a gift. You go broke and see who’ll lend you money at 5%.
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“You go broke and see who’ll lend you money at 5%.”
I’m pretty sure my father falls into that category. He declared bankruptcy in 1993 and bought a house in 1998. Not 100% sure of his interest rate, but it wasn’t bad.
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Five years on is a different thing.
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I would agree with y81 that there is a difference betwen the TARP funds and ARRA. The later was mostly written by Pelosi and has become a real boondoggle. Sure, we all get o see nice signs on our freeways and road construction crews are busy, but where’s the longterm job creation? Where is the accountability? I think if the GOP is smart hey will focus hard on this over the next 2 years. John McCain got the ball rolling over the summer.
http://mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=07809d54-2616-4867-b6a0-e8ac3ceeded7
Some highlights:
$554,763 for the Forest Service to replace windows in a closed visitor center at Mount St. Helens
$762,372 to create āDance Drawā interactive dance software
$62 million for a tunnel to nowhere in Pittsburgh, PA that even Governor, Ed Rendell called āa tragic mistakeā
$1.9 million for international ant research
$89,298 to replace a new sidewalk that leads to a ditch in Boynton, OK
$3.8 million for a āstreetscapingā project that has reduced traffic and caused a business to fire two employees
$16 million to help Boeing to clean up an environmental mess it created in 2007
$200,000 to help Siberian communities lobby Russian policy makers
$39.7 million to upgrade the statehouse and political offices in Topeka, KS
$760,000 to Georgia Tech to study improvised music
$700,000 to study why monkeys respond negatively to inequity
$193,956 to study voter perceptions of the economic stimulus
$363,760 to help NIH promote the positive impacts of stimulus projects
$456,663 to study the circulation of Neptuneās atmosphere
$529,648 to study the effects of local populations on the environmentā¦in the Himalayas
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“Five years on is a different thing.”
Yep. Also, Wendy’s dad probably had a federally backed loan, so it’s a smaller version of the same thing. Let’s rephrase MH to say something like, “You go broke and see what private entity will lend you money at 5% and hold onto the note rather than getting it off their hands as quickly as possible.” But that’s considerably less elegant.
(Personally, I think the whole notion of a lending anybody money for 30 years at 5% is nuts.)
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The later was mostly written by Pelosi and has become a real boondoggle.
TARP is worse than a boondoggle. It was an active ill done to society by a bipartisan elite that can accomplish nothing beyond being marginally less odious than the other side in an election. TARP (and the other bailout actions taken by Treasury and the Fed) shielded those who crashed the economy from the worst consequences of their decisions while doing nothing to protect the rest of us from a repeat. It was a net transfer from more modest workers and savers to the wealthiest.
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“$554,763 for the Forest Service to replace windows in a closed visitor center at Mount St. Helens.”
I was at Mt. St. Helens this summer with family during high season (late July) and although there was very good traffic at the main visitor center, the general impression was that interest in the site is way down and the site is currently way overbuilt (outside of the main visitor center). Demolition would actually make a lot more sense than new windows.
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You guys don’t really get the point of a stimulus, do you? It’s to create jobs so that people can work and spend money, which then goes into the economy.
When rich people whine that it’s good for the economy for them not to be taxed because then they can spend all that money on hiring people at sub-minimum wage and redecorating their unnecessary houses, you applaud. But the same concept also applies to government stimulus, you know.
I spent Halloween trick or treating with my realtor (mom of my daughter’s friend) and she was telling me about the couple buying an $800K+ house as a weekend retreat in the next town over. He’s a cardiologist; she’s an oncologist. Guess they were banking on a GOP win.
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Wendy,
If that Mt. St. Helens building is the one I’m thinking of, funding a weekend home for a medical couple would be a much more rational use of taxpayer dollars. Maybe we could persuade the doctors to dial it down to $554,763? It would have the very same stimulative effect.
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Dance Draw looks pretty cool. They use a logitich wireless mouse to convert dancer’s movements into visual displays that are back-projected behind the dancers. That’s the kind of WAPA project I wanted to hear about in ARRA, that there never seemed to be enough of.
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When rich people whine that it’s good for the economy for them not to be taxed because then they can spend all that money on hiring people at sub-minimum wage and redecorating their unnecessary houses, you applaud. But the same concept also applies to government stimulus, you know.
As Althouse wrote, “It’s so sad for the Democrats. They gave us so many things. Gifts. Expensive gifts. That we didn’t want. That they bought with our money.”
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