Understanding the Financial Crisis

For many the underlying causes and the correlation between Wall St. and Main St. has been confusing, and very poorly reported or explained.

This video does a fantastic job of explaining the Financial Crisis, and recognizing the blame that is to go to all parties - not just poor, stupid people.

This excellent video is produced by Jonathan Jarvis, a designer based out of Los Angeles.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Alan Greenspan, the lack of regulation, Wall St. greed, irresponsible lenders, homeowners both fiscally irresponsible and responsible, and the unending optimism, that housing values will always rise, did indeed create a Perfect Storm for this financial crisis. We are all in this together, and we must all work to get out of this together.


In order to stem this crisis, it will be critical to stop the hemorraging in the foreclosures and stablise the housing market, but listening to the over-the-top idiot reporters like Rick Santelli, with his mindless, sycophantic rantings, I've come to realize that overwhelming self-indulgent greed continues to rule the minds of these morons. All they can think about is themselves and their perception of how life is unfair.

What's really pathetic is that Rick Santelli, and many like him can only shout about how terrible President Obama's plan to stop the continued foreclosure crisis is, yet have no real solution or alternative. Until they have a better idea, they should just sit in their corner and take a chill pill.

Which makes this video, where Robert Gibbs smacks Rick Santelli, something to savor.

I’ve watched Mr. Santelli on cable the past 24 hours or so. I’m not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives or in what house he lives but the American people are struggling every day to meet their mortgages, stay in their jobs, pay their bills, send their kids to school," Gibbs said. "I think we left a few months ago the adage that if it was good for a derivatives trader that it was good for Main Street

"Mr. Santelli has argued, I think quite wrongly, that this plan won’t help everyone," Gibbs said. "This plan helps people who have been playing by the rules....I would encouraged him to read the president’s plan....I’d be more than happy to have him come here to read it. I’d be happy to buy him a cup of coffee—decaf," the press secretary said, in a not-so-subtle jab at Santelli’s frantic style.

Did you know - Shift Happens 3.0

I saw this last year at a presentation at an internal townhall meeting within my company.

What's clear is that information and the way we use and access information is changing at unbelievable speed, that it begs the question, how are we prepared to meet the challenges of tomorrow? In what way are we prepared to continually innovate?

Quite frankly, if the Republicans had their way, we'd still be operating in the dark ages, with their disdain for science and research. Think of any funding for science, and they will find a way to make fun of it, and call it "pork" or act outraged because there is some innocuous sexual connotation. To them, the Theory of Evolution is hocus pocus.

I was reminded of this when coming across this on TIME

Variations of this video, called Did You Know?, have been floating around for years. It is the product of Karl Fisch, a school teacher from Colorado, and Scott McLeod, a professor at Iowa State University.

Valentine's Day Special

Not exactly a Charlie Brown type special, but still an amusing clip about finding true love - for conservatives.

There was a diary on DKOS that talked about Hannidate, and it reminded me of this hilarious sketch from The Daily Show:




I was able to spend Valentine's day with someone special, and hope everyone else had someone special to spend the day with!

Bizarro World

It seems Frank Rich and SNL, and many others are channeling the same thoughts as I am. The Republican Party and the Washington Beltway Pundits are living in - as Jerry Seinfeld would put it - "bizarro world".

In his weekly NY Times editorial, Rich offers this interesting take:

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later.

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president.

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.” Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

Saturday Night Live, also offers this political sketch that satirizes and lays bare how out of touch the GOP thinking and strategy is. Personally I thought Dan Akroyd's portrayal of John Boehner was dead on!