LIMBAUGH: Are you sure that Paterson appoints or is there a special election?

CALLER: I am reasonably sure that Paterson will be appointing the replacement, assuming that he, you know, doesn’t resign in the next 60 or 90 days.

LIMBAUGH: Let’s assume you’re right. So, David Paterson will become the massa…

CALLER: Yes.

LIMBAUGH: …who gets to appoint whoever gets to take Massa’s place. So, for the first time in his life, Paterson’s gonna be a massa. Interesting, interesting.

via Rush Limbaugh races to inject racial joke about Paterson into Massa mess.

I go for long stretches of time without listening to Rush/Hannity-esque hate radio, so I forget from time to time what utter douche bags these people are. The shock factor of not listening to these guys for months and then switching them on out of the blue is really awesome; it’s like visiting another planet.

Today I listened to Michael Medved and some moron from a “Religious Liberty” think-tank flipping out about the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Their thesis was that forcing God-fearing, 1000% straight men like themselves to share locker rooms and barracks with gay men will mean the end of civilization. Presumably this is because all that uncorrupted religious straight-dude flesh will be too much of a temptation for gay soldiers — who naturally will have enlisted for deadly dangerous combat in stinking Middle Eastern hell-holes just to get a glimpse of toothless Christian boys from Arkansas naked. These megachurch-bred anti-gay advocates with their visceral terror about the end of the closet, sure that liberated gay men by the hundreds will be lying in wait to rape them the instant the shower-nozzles turn on … I mean, the amount of projection going on is so obvious, it’s almost laughable.

Then I get home and I read that Rush Limbaugh is making a funny about New York Governor Paterson and the scandal surrounding Representative Eric Massa. Massa is naturally is the hot news on every right-wing talk radio station in the country today because he is a poster child for exactly this same conservative sex-paranoia — a Democratic politician who apparently felt liberated enough in our permissive cultural environment to grope and tickle straight male staffers. Limbaugh, discussing the scandal with a caller who mistakenly believed that Massa’s resignation would allow Paterson to appoint a replacement, then made the above pun.

It’s not so much that Rush made a racist joke. Nor does it even bother me that the whole premise of the discussion was incorrect (Paterson doesn’t get to appoint a replacement). We’re used to Rush being both racist and factually indifferent.

It’s more that Rush is such an intellectually lazy piece of shit who’s been on dumbly racist autopilot for so long that he literally can’t avoid making a dumb, unfunny black-baiting joke when the opportunity is shoved in front of his face. You could see this joke coming from thirty miles away, and Rush is so intellectually obese, he still couldn’t get out of the way in time. I mean, the minute the conversation switched to a discussion of the black governor Paterson and a guy named “Massa,” who among us didn’t think that Rush was going to go there?

If the guy had even an ounce of self-awareness left, he would have tried to surprise us by not making the joke. It actually might have been funny, if he had left it alone, just this once, just to fuck with us, as it were. But the guy has been self-plagiarizing for like eighteen consecutive years now — hasn’t added a single thing to his act since the first Clinton term at least — and this shit is just muscle memory with him by now. He’s just mailing it in over and over again, using as little mental energy as possible broadcast after broadcast, so that he can make it to the end of every day and stuff his face with pills or French fries or whatever his drug of choice is these days. Ugh…

Lower credit risk means a lower price for protection. Zero implies zero risk. The higher the basis points, the higher the implied risk. When U.S. credit default swaps were first introduced, the price of protection was around two basis points. According to Bloomberg, the price for five-year protection was around 38 basis points (per annum) on Friday. But the price in the over-the-counter market — where this stuff actually trades — was almost double or around 75 basis points.

Since most traders in U.S. credit default swaps don’t think the U.S. will default any time soon, why are they trading U.S. credit default swaps? They are speculating on price movements the way a day trader buys and sells stocks to speculate on stock price movements.

via Janet Tavakoli: Washington Must Ban U.S. Credit Derivatives as Traders Demand Gold.

Another Janet Tavakoli piece, this one about the market for CDS on the United States.

I’d like someone to explain to me how trading a credit default swap on a U.S. Treasury note isn’t gambling. This is purely betting on crowd behavior — after all, nobody really thinks the U.S. will default.

It’s weird enough living in a country where a man can legally own an arsenal of machine guns, but his neighbor growing a pot plant will send a team of DEA agents kicking his door in with a no-knock warrant. But this goes even beyond that. If I go online today to HaveNoLifeAndBetOnSports.com and bet fifty dollars on the Bucks against the Celtics tonight, I’m a criminal. But some gazillionaire firm in New York can legally bet against the United States of America in unlimited amounts in a trade that has nothing to do with anything, but a guess about how many other people will make the same bet.

Jesus, are we a weird country.

When you have agents and hangers-on handing you money and naked women and Escalades from the age of 14 on, it’s bound to swell your head. Some athletes just get a worse case of it than others.

via A Field Guide to Sports Egos | Men’s Journal.

My new Men’s Journal piece is out, and I’m interested to know if anyone thinks I left anyone out of this list of reigning sports narcissists. Obviously there’s no Kobe and I’ve gotten some letters complaining that Steph was left off, but I’m saving Marbury for an athletes-who’ve-gone-insane column.

Anyway, if there are obvious omissions, please let me know. We struggled over this one.

Look at about the 5-minute mark of this video — Janet Tavakoli debating Rick Santelli about predatory lending. You basically have a whole panel of CNBC goons pooh-poohing the idea that predatory lending took place, setting up the inevitable revisionist history that the 2008 crash was caused by individual homeowners borrowing beyond their means.

My favorite part of this comes roughly at the six-minute mark. Tavakoli has just deftly explained how a lot of the predatory practices worked — people with limited financial literacy were presented with long and complicated mortgage deals, and told they would have a fixed payment in perpetuity or a guaranteed re-finance, or were nailed by fraudulent appraisals. Then she mentioned the big one, the fact that investment banks then took all these mortgages and with eyes wide open securitized them and sold them off as worthy investments to suckers on the other end of the chain.

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MY health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected by Anthem’s planned rate increase of as much as 39 percent for its customers with individual policies — but the trend worries me, as it should everyone. Rates are soaring all over the country. Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers?

Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection could soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Bust the Health Care Trusts – NYTimes.com.

This is how politics is supposed to work. Well, not really — in reality, you’d like to see your leaders actually lead, i.e. do the right thing first, before being forced into it by circumstance. But we’ll take the latter.

The sequence: Obama and the Dems got whipped in Massachusetts and it suddenly occurred to them that they might want to start doing things that would be popular outside their Rolodex of campaign contributors. A bailout tax was one early idea. They started searching the landscape for outrages they could get on the other side of and found a good one: Anthem Blue Cross in California raising rates by 39 percent.

Suddenly the Obama administration decided to come out against the antitrust exemption for the insurance industry. Like they only just noticed the problem.

The insurance antitrust exemption has been an outrage for over fifty years. The original bill formalizing the industry’s exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, was dreamed up by two Hollywood villains. Nevada Senator Pat McCarran was the inspiration for the “Senator Pat Geary” character in Godfather Part II (”Senator… my final offer is this: nothing” — that guy), while Homer Ferguson was the inspiration for the Lloyd Bridges character in Tucker who whored himself out for the auto makers to get Tucker’s new car struck from the market. These two gigantic assholes teamed up to help the insurance industry avoid the albatross of competitive pricing.

McCarran-Ferguson was supposed to be temporary. Franklin Roosevelt clearly thought so when he signed it into law in 1944, saying that after “a moratorium period,” the antitrust laws “will be applicable in full force and effect to the business of insurance.” The law was supposed to expire in 1947. It didn’t.

As a result, all the evil shit that made for such high drama in Kurt Eichenwald’s book The Informant – about a bunch of agricultural firms who get together to fix prices for an additive called Lysine — that’s actually legal in the insurance business.

This is why insurers (especially insurers with large market shares in small states) are easily able to gouge customers and deny coverage. There’s really no legal mechanism for preventing the firms from getting together and arranging price-fixing and other outrages. In a normal market customers would be able to get better coverage and cheaper rates from a competitor, but insurance is really more like a series of competition-free fiefdoms where the customers can’t go elsewhere for a better deal. State Farm even denied coverage to Trent freaking Lott after Katrina and got away with it because State Farm has Misssissippi by the nads. It’s crazy.

This is, again, another reason Obamacare was such a joke from the start. The White House vision clearly called for “health care reform” without a repeal of McCarran-Ferguson. Which is technically almost impossible, but they tried it.

That didn’t work, naturally, so now they’re finally getting around to doing the obvious. They’ll fail — every attempt to repeal McCarran-Ferguson inevitably does, mysteriously — but at least they’re talking about it. But Jesus, why does this stuff take so long?