"I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah."

Slate put together a pretty nifty widget for figuring out how the American flag would look if we added more states. A nice, little time killer.

A History of Government Bailouts

Slate has another great article on our frakked up economy. More importantly it links to ProPublica's History of Government Bailouts which as it's name implies, has neatly listed and organized all of our government's past and current attempts to save dying industries since 1970. It's a good resource for people who want to know where our money has gone in the past and where it will go in the future. 

Spoiler alert: from a quick perusal of the Bailout Aftermaths list suggests that the government tends to lose money when it bails out the financial industry and makes money when it bails out other industries. It kind of makes the double standard where we pour money into Wall Street banks with no strings attached and place heavy demands on GM and Chrysler seem unfair. On the other hand, perhaps this is why the government tends to do better when it bails out non-financial industries, because the government actually demands accountability of the Lockheeds and Chryslers of the world while letting the Morgan Stanleys do whatever they want with the taxpayer's money. I'd like to think that things will be different this time around but I'm not optimistic.

Screaming For Blood While Rome Burns

FARK's slogan is "It's not news, it's FARK" but as with other fake news outifts like the Daily Show, there are occasional turds wisdom excreted from its bowels. One recent shouting match turned up some interesting mind pellets. It was attached to a link to Matt Taibbi's rant telling off an AIG executive who wrote an open letter bemoaning his company's reaction to AIG's recent bonus scandal. The ensuing thread went as you might expect with people dividing neatly along idealogical lines with right wingers defending the AIG executive and left wingers defending Taibbi. But a half way down the thread, there were links to two interesting Slate articles examing AIG from another angle. By taking a look at one of AIG's deals with Goldman Sachs, the articles point out that while we are all screaming for people's heads over $160 million dollars worth of bonuses while AIG funnels billions of taxpayer funded bailout dollars to its trading partners which themselves have also received billions of taxpayer funded bailout dollars. 

In other words, we have one scandal which is essentially distracting us from something much bigger and much worse. Taibbi sees this as one big conspiracy designed to shift power and money to Wall Street. But it doesn't need to be a conspiracy in order to be an outrage. And that seems to be part of the problem. We are all so busy getting outraged over the latest Wall Street scandal that we are ignoring the real problems which have lead us into the economic hole in which we are stuck.