Poseurs

This next jam goes out to all my muthafuckin' homiez at the N-R-muthafuckin'-O!
Yeeahh, yo....come on now, lemme hear ya....
When I say "Byron", you say "York"....Byron....[crickets]....Byron....

K-Pod rocks the mike at the Teen Choice Awards.

Were it not for K-Lo's hourly pantomimes, The Corner would be but a mere husk patiently awaiting the noon burnoff of the other kids' Vanilla Coke/Mike 'n' Ike/Pop Rocks hangovers. It's like watching virtual grass grow.

Exhibit A is the aforementioned K-Lo's endorsement of a rather silly press release from noted metal crank Dave Mustaine of the band Megadeth. Mustaine is one of the more literate metal musicians out there (and no, I'm not going to damn him with faint praise by slamming the genre by association -- there's a hell of a lot more reading there than in the world of "popular" music), but it's not by any stretch a political endorsement either way. Last I heard, despite his sobriety and conversion to Christianity, Mustaine was still essentially a libertarian-leaning Democrat.

"I was watching TV and saw the trucks that said 'UN' on them and said, 'Man, you are so uncool, ineffective, anything," the singer/guitarist said in a recent Billboard interview.

"I thought, 'Wow, I've got to run with this. I got it -- United Abominations, 'cause it's an abomination what they're doing!"

See, that's just not fair, 'cause I was planning to title my next album Untied Seminations, and that may confuse all the kids out there. Oddly, I got my title the same way Mustaine got his -- jerking off in front of the TV.

Anyway, apparently K-Lo's tepid gushing (can you gush tepidly?) prompted a small, sputtering barrage of electronic Katyushas from the wankerati, which of course she had to post. Just had to.

Next is CNBC econ-tool Larry Kudlow, who may be the only economist I've ever seen who just refuses to let all those silly numbers and projections curb his enthusiasm.

Will business pick up the economic slack created by the housing drag? That’s the big question separating economic optimists from the cult of the bear. Today’s factory report on the production of durable goods answers that question with an emphatic yes.

Spurred by record profits and low tax rates on capital, business other than the ailing Ford and GM looks really strong. Major categories of new orders, shipments, and unfilled orders for non-defense non-aircraft capital goods surged in July at a double digit annualized pace. Over the past year, orders are up 13 percent, shipments increased 10 percent, and backlogs rose 14 percent. These are very big numbers.

....

There’s no question that the housing boom is leveling off. But supply-siders know that it is business that creates jobs and consumer incomes for spending.

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It is also worth noting that while housing construction is in the doldrums, business building of plants, equipment, office buildings and shopping stores is booming.

Congressional Republicans should heed President Bush’s advice by emphasizing the strong low tax economy. And here’s an added bonus for that argument: gas prices in the futures markets are falling on a daily basis. Pump prices are just beginning to reflect this. By the time we get to November, pump prices could be down to $2.75.

Think of it.

Kudlow's "economic optimism" might be roughly compared to the PNAC's "foreign policy optimism". We can see the results of endless foreign policy cheerleading; why would economic cheerleading be any better? The scenario he envisions is possible, but it's also "possible" that Katherine Heigl shows up on my doorstep tomorrow, buck-ass naked and mistaking me for Brad Pitt. Shit happens, but we're talking about a lot of things having to go just right.

Barry Ritholtz has been featuring some fairly scary news in the housing market. Sales of existing homes are way down, because of the glut of new construction, which in turn accounted for some of the low unemployment rates. Now new home sales are down as well, and building is also plummeting, despite what Tigger the Economist tries to bounce past you.

Saying "business except for Ford and GM" is like saying "TV networks except for NBC and CBS". It's just dumb. There's been what, 35,000 layoffs in the past nine months from those two companies? That's huge, and even without that, the monthly new-jobs added rate hasn't met the over-under all summer. Consumer confidence is waning, and the real war on Christmas this year may be people just keeping their wallets shut, sensing bad times on the horizon.

Kudlow's solution, natch, is to just keep them tax cuts hummin'. And if he's right about gas futures, then that just means that something else is getting sold short. I don't buy it. There's no reason for gas prices to come down in the foreseeable future; between infrastructural repairs and risk premiums for Middle East instability, any downward adjustment is just going to be a short-term lagging indicator, a mild market correction for six quarters of record profits. Gas is not coming appreciably down for any significant period of time, possibly ever, and certainly not in the near future.

Or so we sang in unison at the last Cult of the Bear Country Jamboree.

Cliff Clavin -- uh, I mean, May, registers his disclavin -- no, dammit, his dismay -- at a sorta kinda friend colleague person he thought he knew.

[Saad] begins by railing against what he calls the “cynical exploitation” of post-9/11 sympathy for the United States by “so-called neoconservatives to advance hegemonic designs.” Bush’s statements about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq were, he asserts, “dishonest.”

In his view, it is not the Islamists who are hostile to the U.S. and Israel but quite the reverse. He adds: “Now the cold war on Islamists has escalated into a shooting war, first against Hamas in Gaza and then against Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

He goes on, atonishingly [sic], to call Hezbollah a “model actor in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics.” He has kind words, too, for both Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas. These “groups, parties and movements are not inimical to democracy,” he says, adding: “They have accepted electoral systems and practiced electoral politics, probably too well for Washington's taste.”

This does not sound like the Saad Eddin Ibrahim I have heard and read before. Maybe his views have changed and he is simply calling it the way he now sees it. If so that is distressing. Or maybe he feels the winds blowing from a new direction now and has trimmed his sails to weather the coming storms. That, too, would be an ominous sing [sic].

Awww. Or, perhaps Ibrahim is technically telling the truth. Yes, Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are radical organizations with fundamentalist aims. But they have dipped their toes into populist politics, and found that they likes the water just fine, much to our democracy evangelists' disclavin. It's about the only realistic shot at co-opting them from violent terrorism. We keep thinking al-Qaeda with them, when we should be thinking IRA.

In the Arab world, the mullahs push candidates into councils and parliaments, or just get in themselves, and try to impose their regressive morality on the poorest, most ignorant members of the population. Here we have Sam Brownback and James Inhofe, and we dare not float a nominee for the nation's highest court without first receiving the imprimatur of James Dobson and Jerry Falwell. We have Pat Robertson, a certifiably insane man who set up sweet little extraction deals with animals like Mobutu Sese Seko and Charles Taylor, and who ran for president not twenty years ago, and still feels free to weigh in on vital issues from time to time.

But they're all fuckin' cray-zay, man.

Finally we have the Little Daddy himself, the hair that launched a thousand quips. Sir Byron of York weighs in on Mark Warner's pimptabulous party at the Yearly Kos convention. You know, back in June.

Well, it turns out Warner was trying even harder than anyone knew. Recently-released campaign finance reports indicate Warner's political action committee spent nearly $70,000 on the affair, writing a $25,000 check to the Stratosphere on June 2, and another for $44,588.95 on June 9. And that was just the Stratosphere. Warner clearly spent money in other ways — T-shirts and the like — trying to win Kossack favor, so it's not completely clear what his final YearlyKos expenditure was.

Well Byron, he could have rented you to piss Ketel One into a giant gold tureen all night, and still come in roughly $2.25 million under Dennis Kozlowski. Rush Limbaugh blows seventy grand on a Dominican sex tour, not including oxy and Viagra.

So there's your tour of the neighborhood for this week, folks. Tune in next time for more comedy hijinks, when K-Lo gets her Romney on, and York loses his coke-bottles and briefly can't tell the difference between J-Pod and Pantload (not that we can tell much difference anyway).

[Update: Scarcely 12 hours later, K-Lo takes our advice. Now it's Little Lord Dorkleroy's turn.]