Obama Announces $2B Fund for Startups

The uranium from Niger was maybe not real after all but even if real likely not very important: As I recall, that uranium chemical is a standard industrial item. E.g., one use of uranium is to color plastic lenses for cars or some such. Getting uranium is not so tough; enriching it enough for a bomb is. Running a uranium reactor is not so tough; getting the plutonium, 239 as I recall, and don't want 240 or some such, is tougher. Then to separate the plutonium, use just chemical means. Then to compress it enough to have a critical mass is tricky and likely needs some testing, and tests are now essentially impossible to hide.

The media should have helped make it clear that the evidence that Saddam was close to any very serious WMDs was very thin stuff.

W invaded Iraq on very thin stuff. The media should have made that fact very clear to the voters.

Okay, maybe we should have dumped Saddam. Maybe. I would have tried making him an offer he couldn't refuse, but maybe we're not supposed to do that. So, maybe we should have dumped him.

Getting to Baghdad took, what, 23 days? Then the big mistake started: Bremer decided to do 'nation building'. And his first step was to fire the Iraqi army -- dumb, dumb, dumb. Nearly every common thug criminal, gang leader, organized crime leader, terrorist leader, out of work soldier, Shiite leader, Sunni leader, Kurdish leader, Iranian politician, etc. saw how dumb it was and took advantage. Nearly the only one in Iraq who didn't 'get it' was Bremer.

Our media didn't keep us informed.

On China, it's simple: Our media didn't keep us informed. We still don't know the actual flows. First cut we need to know the flows.

Sometimes the media is silent; sometimes they pay attention to an important topic but make a mess, out of bias or just sloppy work; often they assume that the audience wouldn't want to know; usually it's just a lot cheaper to do sloppy reporting. Whatever, we're, net, getting the mushroom treatment from the media -- keep us in the dark and feed us BS.

Actually likely and apparently quite a lot of quite solid information is available. Likely a lot of it is on the Internet. I keep looking and hoping to find good sources although finding them is not my full time job.

I upchuck at FOX, NYT, LAT, WaPo, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, and about everything else I can find. Law, medicine, engineering, etc. -- in none of these do we try to get by with the mushroom treatment we get from the media. If an airplane were designed with the information quality of the media, then it'd never get off the ground which, net, would be a good thing.

My concern is not partisanship but stupidity.

As voting citizens, we need solid information. With solid information, there's no way we'd be in the mess of The Great Recession or two wars each 10 years old.

As for even AIG getting a 'bailout', I don't quite agree with that. Yes, they did get a ton of money, on seemingly 'cheap terms', but the logic is the same. If the insurer of all these financial instruments can't honor it's contracts...imagine the implications for the economy as a whole. Not only would they be reneging on contracts, enshrined in law, but many firms that purchased all sorts of insurance (not just on CDOs) - GE, Walmart, etc - on various assets/products would instantly be SOL.

So even if you take just the financial firms and their tanglings there out of the picture, in terms of getting back 100 cents on the dollar on their CDS Swaps, if AIG can't honor ANY of their contracts at a time when companies (all throughout the country in hundreds of industries) are experiencing softer aggregate demand and falling revenue, just that alone would be catastrophic beyond anything we have ever seen.

So I don't see it as an 'AIG bailout', but rather saving the US economy. Besides, they will be able to recoup their investment once they finish selling the useful assets and repairing the balance sheet over the long term.

Also, it's not just Fannie and Freddie that are to blame - as Bernanke said the exhorbitant global imbalances with countries running massive current account surpluses that creates an incentive for investors to put money to work. China doesn't want it's $3T sitting in cash, even just $100B sitting in cash could cost China about $2B - $10B/year depending on where it is sitting (just in inflation alone). So the pressure to at least do something to protect it against inflation is immense and that's just China.

Suffice it to say, there are many factors (from the mortgage tax credit to Fannie & Freddie to global imbalances to misaligned incentives on Wall St.) that are to blame. The damn media likes to play on the most populist and it's annoying.

One of the things I can say, is that I am impressed that people like Bernanke and Paulson can hold their nose and go against EVERYTHING they believe in (i.e. non-intervention in markets) and everything they have been taught and learned over their entire professional careers and completely violate these beliefs in a matter of days/weeks. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and vilify these people for their actions, when you don't quite understand the implications of non-action and even how tough it was for them to make those decisions. The fact is, these people ignored their beliefs and acted in the country's interest.

I am not even American and I can admire their actions.

Edit 1: To put their actions into perspective, it's the equivalent of being a 'pro-lifer' your entire life and in order to save the entire country you have to personally sanction wide-scale abortions. How many people would be able to do that? Might be a little dramatic, but I believe the parallels are similar.