Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | Percent | |
| S&P Futures | 1659.7 | 6.7 | 0.41% |
| Eurostoxx Index | 2779.6 | 5.4 | 0.19% |
| Oil (WTI) | 109.1 | 0.7 | 0.66% |
| LIBOR | 0.256 | -0.002 | -0.66% |
| US Dollar Index (DXY) | 82.13 | -0.499 | -0.60% |
| 10 Year Govt Bond Yield | 2.89% | -0.10% | |
| Current Coupon Ginnie Mae TBA | 103 | 0.7 | |
| Current Coupon Fannie Mae TBA | 102.6 | 1.0 | |
| RPX Composite Real Estate Index | 200.7 | -0.2 | |
| BankRate 30 Year Fixed Rate Mortgage | 4.67 |
Stocks and bonds are higher after a disappointing jobs report. Bond investors were clearly leaning short in a big way going into the report. The 10 year was trading above 3% before the report, but has moved back down to 2.89%
The jobs report was relatively weak, although the headline unemployment number dropped to 7.3% from 7.4%. Payrolls increased 169k, lower than the 180k the Street was looking for. The prior two months were revised down by a total of 74k. The unemployment rate dropped from 7.4% to 7.3%, while the labor force participation rate dropped to 63.2% from 63.4%. For those keeping score at home, the last time the labor force participation rate was that low, “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones was the #1 song on the hit parade. Weekly earnings rose .2% while weekly hours ticked up by 6 minutes. Overall, a disappointing report.
Where does this report leave us with tapering QE? Since the default path is to start tapering, and some of the other reports are showing strength, I would expect the Fed to make at least a symbolic decrease in purchases, probably in Treasuries and not MBS.
Filed under: Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
I’m reading that the State Department is evacuating staff from Mideast embassies. So, this Obama Bombing Brown People Again (OBBPA) which will not involve us further in ME war(s) and will degrade Assad without toppling him (though that is a goal) requires evacuations?
But there is negative consequences for doing nothing?
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I don’t know who this guy is, but it made for fascinating reading on Syria.
http://wartard.blogspot.com/
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I thought the Liberals over at PL loved Tomasky. Does this change the equation?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/voxbox/michael-tomasky.html
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Sigh. They don’t get us at all:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-05/libertarians-are-the-new-communists.html
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Brent:
Sigh. They don’t get us at all:
Yeah, nova linked to that yesterday. I think the real problem is that they don’t want to get us.
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We’re cartoon characters to the left.
Sigh.
Somalia!
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The debate over at Reason’s message boards on the sudden attention to libertarians is whether or not this is a sign that we are a potential threat. or if just beating on the dorky kids. I don’t ever recall seeing the word “libertarian” in a major newspaper a few years ago. and in yesterday’s post (or the day before) 2-3 columns on the op-ed page were about “oh noes, the libertarians are coming, the libertarians are coming”
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Desperate attempts to explain the Tea Party Republicans and why all the old incentives of expanding government won’t work in getting them to fall in line. The panic is from the left and the establishment right along with the banks and corporations.
Notice how when government spending is not increasing fast enough we get story after story about how the political system is broken?
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Dude.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/us-military-planners-dont-support-war-with-syria/2013/09/05/10a07114-15bb-11e3-be6e-dc6ae8a5b3a8_print.html
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Somalia!
Dr. Cowbell has found some new competition in the strawman-shredding contest.
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I love how the UN is suddenly “paralyzed.”
I blame Bush.
Can we defund it and expel it from New York now? Hell, move it to Moscow!
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Hah, now you guys know what it feels like to be a “dirty fucking hippie”.
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LMS, did you see my comment with link about the questions marathon swimmers are seriously raising about Nyad’s swim?
Scott, if (as it has been for me) being a dad is a priority, marriage looks much better. Marrying a woman who qualifies as a close friend also outrates available multiple sex partners somewhere past the age of 25, for most men I know.
The marital risk for adults, male and female, is that we change. Changing in different directions erodes the friendship and trust. Of course, that assumes having picked well in the first instance. Marrying out of loneliness or for security or for mere sex is almost a Rx for failure. Marrying for flash and adventure won’t cut it either.
But raising kids can be an unsurpassed joy. I divorced twice, but kept the kid both times. When my second former wife said she could take me to the cleaners, I said big deal, so what, you can’t get my law license and I’m not divorcing my [step]son.
Rosanne and I have now been married 17 years and have never had an actual fight. We truly like and respect each other. I raised her two daughters like my own and they think of me as dad.
I’ve told this story before: when Rosanne and I were dating in 1993, I drove around and got lost but like most guys would not ask for directions. When I said to her “I think it is a mile over there” she said “no worries, it’ll be at least an hour before I have to pee.” Litmus test passed! We still love to drive cross country together. We still love our Saturday night dates. We both wonder if we would have been so well attuned if we had begun dating ten years earlier or if we learned from our “experiences”. But that is idle speculation. We share values, but have very different tastes in music and the like. And here’s the rub – we dated a long time because neither one of us wanted to be married, neither one of us were lonely, both of us were financially secure, and neither one of us were going to produce more children. So I think marriage can be good even without raising children as a driver. Your mileage may vary.
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Mark:
I totally understand all the benefits/joys you point to (I’ve been married only once, to the same woman for 22 years and counting, with 3 kids), but my only point is that marriage as marriage is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to supply any of those benefits/joys. There is no intrinsic value to being married. It can be necessary if the woman you want to be with makes it so (“Mary me or I am gone”), but absent that there is no compelling reason that I can see to get married. One can enjoy all the things you mention, including kids, without the marriage license.
Of course, the marriage license can become important, but ironically only in the event that one wants out of the marriage. And, generally speaking, the marriage acts as a restraint on the man, while it acts as a protector of the woman, particularly in cases where the woman has and is raising their children. Which is why I said earlier that marriage does provide advantages to women who want children, but not to men. On the other hand, as McWing and the article I linked to point out, as the law changes to grant the same legal protections to people who are not married as it does to people who are married, that license becomes a lot less relevant to everyone involved.
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Scott, I see your point.
All:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/09/05/two-senators-mulling-alternative-syria-resolution/?wpisrc=nl_fix
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Mark, I did see that but haven’t had much time to comment lately. I think things have finally leveled off here to acceptable chaos. I’m only an open water swimmer (on a very minor scale) for leisure and the exercise, so didn’t realize there were so many rules………..sheesh. I will continue to think she is remarkable and would rather not really spend too much time questioning the supposed missing hours. That sounds like sour grapes to me.
And btw, my husband and I are happier together all the time. I can’t ever imagine my life without him. I wouldn’t be lonely so much as just unhappy.
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Marriage only really benefits women and/or children. Is that morally right?
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McWing:
Marriage only really benefits women and/or children. Is that morally right?
I think so, yes. In fact it seems to me that is the primary point of marriage. It serves to 1) give some measure of security to the person who, by virtue of taking on the responsibility of bearing and raising children, is less able to provide that security herself and 2) provides a framework for protecting the interests of children in the event that the marriage that produced them comes apart.
It is essentially a contract. The woman agrees to bear children, and the man agrees to provide support to the woman and the resulting children. Since the man’s part of the bargain is performed after the woman’s, the contract necessarily exists to protect the woman’s interests. This is why I have always said that marriage, especially in a time of equal employment opportunities for women, makes no sense at all outside of the context of having and raising children.
Of course, to the extent that the law provides the same protections even in the absence of marriage, then marriage itself becomes an irrelevant anachronism.
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I honestly don’t understand why Goldberg thinks Obama should Bomb more Brown People.
http://m.nationalreview.com/corner/357834/moral-hazard-jonah-goldberg
Ideas? What is his rationale then?
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troll — that’s odd. his emailed column (The G file, which i’ve deleted and can’t find) seemed to indicate he was opposed to a strike.
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nova:
The relevant section of the G-file:
Dear Reader (and make no mistake, your credibility is on the line),
Of all the lies this administration has told recently, the one that infuriates me the most is the claim that delaying a strike is of no military value to Bashar Assad.
You should see the look of utter contempt that crosses the faces of the generals and other experts I’ve talked to every time I ask about this. It’s an ugly, disgusting lie.
Assad is moving soldiers into schools and wrapping war prisoners around harder-to-move military sites.
Now, we’re talking about war, and evil men will do evil things to protect themselves and advance their interests (that’s usually how we know they’re evil; good men occasionally have evil thoughts, but evil men do evil deeds). And, while I would find such tactics deplorable, I would not hold them against this or any administration. Delays are often necessary in the preparation for war. But what I find so grotesque and damning is the way the White House refuses to admit this basic fact.
Why’d we make such a fuss about Pearl Harbor if advance notice wouldn’t have made any difference? I guess Indian raids on wagon trains would have been no worse if the braves dropped by a couple days early and said, “Greetings. We just wanted to give you a heads up. Around dawn on Wednesday we’ll be swinging by to take all your women and scalp the men. It’ll be bloody awful — for you guys, naturally. Have a great day and we’ll see you Wednesday! If you need further details, you can check out the event page we made on Facebook (it’s called “Settler Slaughter Wednesday”).
There are any number of reasons why the administration is pushing this lie. Politically, it’s toxic to admit that his vacillation makes an attack less effective and/or will result in more innocent casualties. In fact I suspect they were so scared of this criticism they simply got ahead of themselves and preemptively declared this criticism invalid. Psychologically, it’s not exactly a newsflash that Obama has trouble admitting any flaws or downsides to his decisions. And, ideologically, Obama and his crew love the technocratic “precision” side of modern war. Drones, Special Forces, cruise missiles, nifty satellite relays in the Situation Room (at least when the HHS guys let the military brass use it): This stuff appeals to people who think the president can run hugely complicated matters from his desk.
When these three elements — the psychological, the political, and the ideological — merge you have the essence of the Trinitarian Unity of The One. Everything is different for this guy. Even the million-year-old laws of warfare no longer apply.
Screwing Up a War Out of Spite
Many members of the Obama cult in the media hailed his decision to pass the buck to Congress as Mt. Rushmore-quality statesmanship. For the fun of it, here’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s take at the time:
POTUS is politically brilliant here. Making the case, but making Congress accountable. He really is #LongGameObama #BallsInYourCourt113th
Walter Shapiro applauded Obama’s “history-defying decision,” saying it “may well be the most important presidential act on the Constitution and war-making powers since Harry Truman decided to sidestep Congress and not seek its backing to launch the Korean war.”
This idea that Obama was breaking with the precedent of the Bush administration is really, really, bizarre. It misses two really important factors. First, the precedent Obama is breaking with is his own. Obama launched the Libya War without consulting Congress. Second, Obama’s supposedly Congress-flouting predecessor — the unilateral warmonger George W. Bush — actually sought Congress’s approval for his wars. He also got a huge coalition, went to the U.N., and all that. In fairness, it’s true Bush couldn’t win over France, which is apparently the real key to multilateralism. As Rich Lowry (Praise be upon him) says:
It used to be that if dozens of foreign countries signed onto a U.S. military intervention, but not France, we were “going it alone.” Now, if we have a military coalition consisting exclusively of France, we are leading the world.
It’s all so otherworldly.
Anyway, on planet Earth, the evidence is pretty clear that Obama’s decision wasn’t about the “long game” or restoring the constitutional order. It wasn’t even about his stated desire to make America stronger by speaking in one voice. (Because, you know, American cruise missiles have much bigger explosions when fueled with a sense of unity and common purpose here at home. This is why a top priority for the NSA is to keep weapons from falling into the hands of Up With People or the cast of Glee because there’s nothing more lethal than a Tomahawk cruise missile with a cause larger than itself.)
No, the reason Obama choked and fumbled is much more simple. Congress is in his head. Obama is Shooter McGavin and the GOP is Mr. Larsen. He’s Sheldon Cooper to the Republican Will Wheaton. Obama is Ferris Bueller’s sister.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, his decision “reflected his growing frustration with lawmakers who appeared to want to have it both ways — criticizing the president for not seeking congressional authorization, and then criticizing the decisions he makes.”
Well, welcome to the big leagues, Mr. “I voted present on everything.” Pitchers get heckled from the opposing dugout all the time, that doesn’t mean a great pitch is one that screams straight for the forehead of some guy sitting on the bench chewing tobacco. A quarterback doesn’t respond to trash talk from the stands by giving the drunk guy with the cheese-hat the ball. I’ve never responded to the endless stream of crap I get from hostile readers, “I’ve got a great idea; you can ghostwrite my column this week.” (“I’m telling you, let me give it a try!” — The Couch.)
For all of Obama’s cockiness, he is simply rattled and frustrated. And, to be honest, I don’t blame him. He’s convinced he cares about America and his political opponents don’t (he says as much all the time). He thinks his preferred policies — what economists call “Keynesian money-vomiting” — would fix everything. And he thinks all of his critics are idiots. I think he’s wrong on all that, but psychologically you can see how it might mess with your game.
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at that point, it simply become religious in nature for those who go in for that sort of thing.
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after a 2nd read, he’s only going after how obama’s handled this
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BTW, apropos of nothing at all, is Obama up for another Nobel Peace Prize this year?
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I’ve been doing this for awhile. and i’ve never. ever. heard of situation like this.
out of about 1000 calls only 4 in support of action in syria
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Why would there be any appetite by anyone to involve the US in a war in the ME, NoVA? If anyone supports it besides AIPAC they do so very reluctantly.
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The aught seven Amnesty was pretty much a thousand to one against.
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We the People don’t want to go into Syria, hope they’re listening.
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I’ve been swamped at work but have spent the last four days on an anniversary weekend. 27 years to the same woman and we are having more fun than ever. We lecture our kid that friendship is more important than love.
Marriage is friendship with benefits. Legal, social, and emotional. A marriage is an economic unit, a mini-corporation and it only works when both parties act in its best interest.
Gene Weingarten of WaPo frequently argues that people should only marry when they decide to have kids. Historically that is the more common arrangement. Before the Victorian Age few proposals predated a pregnancy. Read Jude The Obscure.
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