Every year, just before Thanksgiving, my kid's school has a special day called "Great Friends Day." It's a big deal, complete with cookies and Kool-Aid, a Christmas Carols choir, and valet parking.
Now, this special day started out with a fairly conventional name: "Grandparents Day." Which is precisely what it is. But over time it transmogrified into "Grand Friend's Day" and, finally, the current and peculiar "Great Friends" that it is today.
The well-intentioned, loving thought behind the nomenclature was that to have a Grand Parents Day when some children don't have grandparents -- much less grandparents who are alive -- would do too much to emphasize this heartbreaking disparity among our little ones.
Fact is, some kids have grandparents, and some don't. But God forbid we do anything that acknowledges that fact -- no matter how benign -- and pour salt on the wounds of the grandparent-less. Life's not fair, but don't tell anyone. Just pretend it is.
In high school I suppose they'll hold a "No Cars" Day, in hat-tipping tribute to the pitiable teenagers without four wheels. Except that would rather emphasize the point, and "Great Friends Day" seems to be highlighting the great divide already, quite nicely. Ah, best that we not talk about such things.
Another hard lesson in life's inequality? Some of us don't have fathers. The most fortunate of the fatherless are left with dreams, but dreams we can only posthumously celebrate. So it is with great delight I am able to report that yesterday, Leon G. Cooperman, a wizened old fellow, stepped up to serve as Obama's dad.
Here's the letter he wrote dear Barack -- I hope you'll read the whole thing. This spade-calling man doesn't mince words, and I can only imagine what he'd say about our school's Great Great Something Day.
Warning: although the letter is suitable for workplace viewing, your monitor might start smoking.
A conservative friend of mine loves Morning Joe on MSNBC. Hardly a day goes by that he doesn't call or text me with something like, "Did you see that? Did you see it? Boy, Joe really got 'em good this morning!"
But last week, it was my turn to text him. While watching good old Joe, I saw Mika Brzezinski announce that it was Valerie Jarrett's birthday and she was taking her gal-pal Val some homemade tomato soup. "That's it," I texted my friend. "Mika is so modest, so fair and tenderhearted I can't watch her without crying. She makes me feel so inferior. Not watching it -- ever again."
Though I haven't seen mention of Mika's tomato-soup love offering on any conservative blogs, there are several posts about the increasingly non non-partisanship on display at Morning Joe.
For instance, after Joe's pious pontificators had a marvelous time spewing their cutting witticisms about the GOP candidates, Mika brought up what I call the "Solyndra Scandal: Part II."
You may have seen -- likely, on a conservative site -- that the Obama Administration begged Solyndra executives to hold off announcing their massive lay-offs until 11/3/10, the day after mid-term elections. And oh, by the way, said Administration officials, we're giving you that next draw on Solyndra's DOE loan. But your December draw? Umm, that's still up in the air. Now, about those lay-offs . . .
After Mika brought up this "pressure" from the White House, a silence fell over these normally decisive, bitingly incisive fast-talking heads.
More curious still, Jon Stewart's take-down of OWS -- the movement Obama virtually adopted as his third child -- was no where to be seen.
Could it be Morning Joe let this Daily Show clip slip on by because the protester's distinction between "property rights" and his own "personal property" would have bewildered these high-brow pundits? I'm just a low-brow blogger mom and it sure baffles me.
No doubt we've all read the headlines: "The End of the Euro?" "Berlusconi Resigns," "Monti takes the helm" and so on. But sovereign bonds, bilateral netting, and yield curves make for thick reading.
So before I jumped into a pile of primers (and I've linked to an excellent one), I had to ask: does the Euro crisis matter to you and me? After all, we've got soccer games, dinners and lunches to make, dry cleaning, carpool, and field trips to take.
Sadly, the answer is yes. A lot. Because -- and apologies in advance for bringing up that pesky credit default swap thing again -- U.S. banks are heavily exposed to European sovereign debt.
In plain English, that means that not only have U.S. banks bought government bonds from European countries ("direct exposure"), our banks also sold so-called "insurance policies" (remember AIG's "policies" on subprime mortgages?) on the bonds of Greece, Portugal, Italy and so on. CDSs, or credit default swaps -- you remember the term "derivatives"? -- represent the banks' "indirect exposure."If one of these countries defaults on its debt (or the Euro crashes, triggering a "credit event") our banks will have to pony up. And all of a sudden -- and likely quite sudden -- no one will know who owes what to whom, and whether they're good for it. It will be the 2008 fetal position all over again, but worse. We're talking the mother of all credit contractions. The fancy schmancy financial reporters call this "contagion" and speak of "fire walls."
Could one of the PIIGS default? Or the Euro crash? You bet. This just in: the ECB (European Central Bank) started buying Italian sovereign bonds this morning just so Italy could borrow enough money to keep running. Last week Greece was forced to turn to Iran for oil because no one else would give it any credit.
The EFSF (which stands for the euphemistically named European Financial Stability Fund) did a bond issue and . . . oops! There weren't enough buyers for its debt so it bought some of its own issues -- a most ominous sign that borrowing has hit a brick wall, and hard.
In fairness to cooler heads that mine, you should know that JP Morgan and others say there's no need to worry; they claim they are well "hedged." In other words, if there is a "credit event" their net exposure is meh, no biggie. They can take the losses and pay "policy limits" on the CDSs they sold because, well, they bought these handy "insurance policies" as well.
And how well that worked in 2008, when there were runs on money market funds and Paulson begged Pelosi on bended knee for $700 billion to capitalize our banks before we ran on them too!
Ah, and Goldman-Sachs proudly claimed it was fully hedged back then, too. But only thanks to your bailout of AIG, and mine, was that true. Somehow, I don't think Germany's Angela Merkel is in a bailing-out mood. And heck, Sarkozy's got kid to support now.
So how much exposure -- meaning, "how much loss are we talking?" -- do our U.S. banks have to this Euro-mess? Relax. Only about $4 trillion -- if the banks are to be believed -- and that's if everything went to hell and we went into full meltdown. You know, if the old trusty bilateral netting move failed.
And that won't happen because someone will bail out these guys, just like they did AIG, right?
Move along, little dogies, nothing here to see . . . No, there's nothing here to see because the banks have cloaked their balance sheets.
Remember, hedges are lovely if your counter-party is good for the money. But in Europe, that's one hell of an IF. Equally problematic, when the yields hit the fan, is the lack of transparency. That alone -- a terrifying dearth of information on who owes what to whom -- will be enough to cause a rip tide.
Then again, we do have Obama at the wheel. The same capable Obama who got his advice on the economy from former NJ governor Jon Corzine (who brilliantly ran the now-decomposing MF Global). Alrighty then. More "stress" tests ahead! Sleep tight.
So keep some cash on hand and watch the yield curves on sovereign bonds, fair maidens. If they start rising -- like Italy's did last week -- it's time to fasten your seat belts and brace for the Eurocalypse. Something tells me -- oh, call it motherly intuition -- we're in for way more than a roller coaster ride.
We've all heard our kids make these losing arguments once or twice: "it's not my fault!" or "yeah, but he did it, too!" Heck, you can't blame a kid for trying. But Obama is no kid. Still, he either blames Bush for his problems or claims Bush did it, too. Consider "Fast and Furious," and who can forget Solyndra?
Ah, but never mind Solyndra. Now our Boy Wonder is pushing another kind of green: Christmas trees. Yes, Saturday Night Live was killed in one fell swoop when the Obama Administration proudly unveiled the Christmas Tree Promotion Board yesterday.
This long-overdue board will do things "to strengthen the position of fresh cut Christmas trees in the marketplace and maintain and expand markets for Christmas trees within the United States."
Well it's about time. For more fascinating details, see 7 C.F.R. 1214.10 and 7 C.F.R.1214.46(n). "CFR" stands for the Code of Federal Regulations. Having personal experience with them, let me assure you they are a pleasure to read and comply with. Clear and concise, with handy egg nog recipes in the footnotes, they say things like:
Voting in the referendum is optional. If current domestic [Christmas tree] producers and importers chose to vote, the burden of voting would be offset by the benefits of having the opportunity to vote on whether or not they want the program to become effective.
Of course, as with any Federal board, this one needs money to operate. To that end, which can't come soon enough, sellers will pay a 15 cent tax on the sale of every fresh Christmas tree, assuming the seller sells 500 trees or more per annum. Savvy sellers will pass this Grinchy tax along to the consumer.
So if you were feeling all warm and eco-fuzzy with your artificial tree, stop the righteousness now. It's true green or no green. Oh, and Nina Totenberg? Don't even think about raising separation-of-church-and-state objections. It's our government's job to promote Christmas trees, even if CHRIST does appear in a federal board. Besides, George Bush didconsidered it, too. So what there.
Up next is a SexPromotion Board. But a fee for sex would work quite well, if we require only men to report each act of copulation and pay the tax. Like the Christmas tree producers who came before them, profiteers like Viagra and Cialis would surely be game.
Law nerds everywhere -- or maybe it's just me? -- wondered for a brief instant why Justin Bieber's accuser waited so long to claim he's, well, her baby daddy. Reports the LA Times,
Yeater said she and Bieber met backstage at a concert in L.A. on Oct. 25, 2010, where he propositioned her and then lost his virginity, knocking her up in the process.
"When I later realized I was pregnant with Justin Bieber's baby, I tried to contact him through his representatives but no one ever called me back," she told the court, according to Star. She gave birth to a son this past July 6, and stated in the suit that there was nobody else she'd had sex with in between.
Ordinary people elsewhere are probably more interested in the unfolding Cain saga (which is utterly exhausting), and why our luggage is safer than we are -- thanks, TSA! Why, we're safer folding ourselves into a suitcase than we are going through TSA's monkey-monitored x-ray machine. Imagine that.
But back to Bieber. Mariah Yeater's child is now a full three months old. Curious.
Sorry to disappoint, conspiracy fans, but I don't think the woman's lawsuit filing is tied to his just-released Christmas album. No, it probably has more to do with statutory rape and the statute of limitations.
According to his perpetrator accuser, he was 16 and she was 19. But twelve months after their alleged tryst, it looks like she's bulletproof -- at least under California law.
Every year, just before Thanksgiving, my kid's school has a special day called "Great Friends Day." It's a big deal, complete with cookies and Kool-Aid, a Christmas Carols choir, and valet parking. 
Another hard lesson in life's inequality? Some of us don't have fathers. The most fortunate of the fatherless are left with dreams, but dreams we can only posthumously celebrate. So it is with great delight I am able to report that yesterday, Leon G. Cooperman, a wizened old fellow, stepped up to serve as Obama's dad.
Here's the letter he wrote dear Barack -- I hope you'll read the whole thing. This spade-calling man doesn't mince words, and I can only imagine what he'd say about our school's Great Great Something Day.
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