The oil futures contracts get bid up higher and higher by these hedge funds using insane amounts of leverage to do so.

I thought credit was supposed to have dried up. How are they managing to over-leverage now?

The USA is now effectively BK. No one wants our shitty paper.

We gave them a lot of our jobs, so I guess now we have to give them lots of Weimar dollars. Fun fun fun!

I wonder if Nancy is reconsidering setting the table.

“He’s just killed the Republican brand.”

The morons in the GOP just don’t get it. “He” didn’t kill the Republican brand; “they” did–the whole bunch of them from Bush on down to the lockstep voting members of Congress. It took the whole party to do this, not just one idiot President. They could have helped themselves, but instead they sat there watching the Titanic sink beneath them while cheering on the brave captain for boldly speeding up when approaching the iceberg.

Rats jumping off a sinking ship and pointing fingers at the ones still aboard.

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win the race you’re still a rat.” — Lily Tomlin

Certainly we can’t rule out another possibility: better living through chemistry. After all, the capstone to his utterly bizarre visit to New York on Friday was, according to one observer, a death-grip on-stage hug administered to Henry Kissinger.

I’ll take an Irish whiskey. Better make it a double.

http://www.harpers.org/archive…..c-90002661

“Q: The National Republican Congressional Committee has some audit issues. Has that caused you to make sure your books are in order?
A: When I took over, I ordered a full audit last year. We hadn’t had an audit in the building in 13 years, a full-blown audit, in 13 years … We found it was clean.”

Clean books after thirteen years without an audit? I doubt it.

In addition, it’s a lie. The audit found that $1 million of the funds had been misappropriated by their Treasurer for 2005 and 2006 alone. The Treasurer, who had been given exclusive signatory power to shift allocations of funds between the NRCC and affiliated campaign committees AND supposedly unaffiliated independent political groups like the Swiftboaters, had created fake audits for over a decade.

The “audit” Ensign’s referring to is the very one (for ONE year) that exposed the fraudulent series of audits. There are likely several million dollars missing, and illegally allocated…which could result in major fines from the FEC. This could end up draining those political campaign committees that are still active, and that of the NRCC to pay for the illegal shifts to inactive or unaffiliated groups.

“Republican”
“NeoConservatives”
“Michele Bachmann”
” Sally Kern”
“Hate Speeches”

GUD!

You don’t. Their buddies at JP Morgan, et. al. do.

You are right, but what I was driving at is that the regulatory agencies allow it. They set margin requirements in the financial markets.

MSNBC: Lawsuit filed against Bear Stearns on behalf of all who’ve bought stock since 12/06.
Pile on.

I should hope so. These executives knew the truth about their solvency and they lied to investors and the public. They need some serious jail time. No out on bail stuff, either. These guys are making Enron look like a bunch of amateurs. For these criminals the rest of us pay! And take the Carlyle Group down too.

This is the greatest transference of the people’s wealth to a handful of gutter thieves.