Pensito Review is proud to announce the addition of a new feature. Kevin Pettway, professional illustrator and publisher of his own web comic, Heroes of Lesser Earth (HOLE), will be adding a political cartoon called, “1000 Words” to the site on a regular basis. One picture is worth…well, you know.
We welcome Kevin to the PR team and hope you will enjoy his contributions.
Former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan says the U.S. economy is in the worst shape in 60 years:
It is now official: George Bush has Katrina-ized the U.S. economy.
“The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War,” Greenspan said in a Financial Times commentary.
“It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities,” he said, referring to the meltdown in the US sub-prime home loan market and subsequent massive losses for the banks holding the debt instruments.
“The crisis will leave many casualties,” he said, his remarks coming after Bear Stearns, the fifth largest US investment house collapsed Friday and was taken over by JP Morgan Chase for a fraction of its value of only a week ago.
But Pres. George W. Herbert Hoover Bush says his government has stabilized the crisis — and it wasn’t even all that difficult. It just required putting in a little O.T.:
“I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend,” Bush said as he met with his economic advisors at the White House. “You’ve shown the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation.”
Actually, many analysts and critics said, by focusing on Paulson’s working hours instead of on the fear gripping Main Street and Wall Street, the president seemed to show just the opposite — that he has failed to grasp the gravity of the country’s economic crisis.
“He has no idea what’s going on. Even by his standards, he’s wrong,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who said he had been trying to get the president to pay more attention to the economy for more than a year.
Bush’s “working over the weekend” line also suggested a comparison to another disaster in which he was accused of acting too slowly: Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, the president was ridiculed for praising FEMA Director Michael D. Brown for doing “a heck of a job” — even as thousands remained stranded in floodwaters in New Orleans.
Our worst fears are confirmed. This makes it official: George Bush has Katrina-ized the U.S. economy.
The Worst Vice President Ever goes to Baghdad and says:
“I was last in Baghdad 10 months ago, and I can sense, as a result of the progress that’s been made since then, that there have been some phenomenal changes, in terms of the overall situation, both with respect to the security situation, where Iraqi and American forces have done some very good work, as well as with respect to political developments here in Iraq.”
Meanwhile:
At sunset Monday, however, a female suicide bomber killed at least 40 people* and injured more than 50 when she blew herself up in a crowded pedestrian area near a Shiite Muslim shrine in the southern holy city of Karbala, according to government and hospital officials. Among the victims were several Iranian pilgrims who’d come to worship at the Imam Hussein shrine, one of Islam’s most sacred sites…
The majority of casualties in the Karbala suicide bombing were female pilgrims who’d gathered at refreshment stands about a half-mile from the shrine.The majority of casualties in the Karbala suicide bombing were female pilgrims who’d gathered at refreshment stands about a half-mile from the shrine, said Saleem Kadhim, a spokesman for the Husseini Hospital, which received 40 dead and 56 injured from the blast.
Medics from nearby towns were called in to help the overflowing hospital, and the government imposed an open-ended citywide curfew on Karbala.
“I was near the bus station when I saw a woman who was pushing others and then, a few seconds later, I saw a flame in the sky,” said Jassim Hussein, 32, who helped carry victims from the scene. “I blame the Baathists and members of the old regime. As you know, Karbala is a target for so many enemies, especially those against the Shiites. And I also blame the security forces because we don’t have checkpoints in this area.”
…In other violence Monday, a car bomb exploded at a busy intersection in the Baghdad neighborhood of Karrada, wounding eight people. Three separate roadside bombs in the capital also left casualties: One policeman was killed and one wounded when their patrol was targeted near a teachers’ training institute in Mansour; three Iraqi civilians died at a busy intersection near the Shaab Stadium in Zayuna; and one civilian was injured near the landmark Mr. Milk grocery store in Mansour.
And:
Sen. Barack Obama will deliver a major speech about race in Philadelphia tomorrow that he said would explore his relationship with Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright and the wave of controversy it has stirred in his presidential bid.
“I am going to be talking about not just Reverend Wright, but just the larger issue of race in this campaign, which has ramped up over the last couple of weeks,” Obama told reporters after a town hall meeting here. According to aides, he was up until 3 a.m. Monday working on his remarks.
Wright, who recently retired as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side, was Obama’s spiritual guide when he became a practicing Christian during his 20s. He presided over Obama’s marriage to Michelle and baptized both Obama daughters. But Wright, a fiery preacher, has come under heavy media scrutiny for a series of racially charged remarks he has made from the pulpit, and Obama has played defense on the issue since Friday.
The controversy over Wright’s comments, which includes video of Wright saying that blacks should say “God damn, America” and that the 9/11 attacks were America’s chickens coming home to roost, will be ideal fodder for Republican attack ads in the general election, so Obama needs to tamp this down right now.
Giving an address on race and religion at this particular moment is a smart move. It plays into Obama’s strengths — he is indisputably a great speaker. (His performance will undoubtedly make a mockery of Mitt Romney’s silly, robotic presentation on Mormonism in Texas last year.) And if the speech is effective it could accomplish two things: It might cauterize the issue of Wright’s comments in the general election, and it could ramp up his support in Pennsylvania, thus staving off going negative against Hillary Clinton for another week, at least.
So “now what?
The Florida Democratic Party said this afternoon it won’t pursue a do-over of its contested primary, putting the dispute squarely in the lap of the Democratic National Committee’s rules committee next month.
Florida officials had floated the idea last week of a mail-in vote, but questions quickly arose about its logistics and fairness. The consensus from thousands of Democrats is against a revote, Representative Karen L. Thurman, the state party’s chairwoman, says in a letter to Democrats.
“A party-run primary or caucus has been ruled out, and it’s simply not possible for the state to hold another election, even if the Party were to pay for it,” Thurman writes.
Crooks and Liars has a round up, via IamTRex, of recent job losses and dismal sales in the one sector of the U.S. economy that is both over-staffed and net negative for the health and well-being on the nation: the conservative punditosphere:
1. Michelle Malkin fired from “The O’Reilly Factor”.
2. Ann Coulter’s book sales tanking and her credit cards getting declined by Publix.
3. Melamine Misstatement fired from her job.
4. Tucker Carlson tossed out on his amply padded backside. [Our coverage is here.]
5. And now Jumpin’ John Gibson being taken away to be rendered into fat for cheap tallow candles for The Poor or whatever.
Don’t let the screendoor hit yas on the way out!
Last week, Laura Schlessinger showed us again what a PhD in physiology has taught her about what makes people tick. Here is her take on what drove former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to cheat on his wife, Silda, with high-priced hookers:
“When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings, sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like her hero, he’s very susceptible to the charm of some other woman making him feel what he needs” the popular psychologist and radio personality said.
Schlessinger admitted she was speaking from ignorance: “I do not know anything about their personal lives,” she said, but she insisted that when men cheat it is because their needs are not being met:
“The cheating was his decision to repair what’s damaged and to feed himself where he’s starving,” Schlessinger replied. “But, yes, I hold women responsible for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.”
If she can make shoddy analyses based on nothing more than a hunch, so can I: Sounds like Laura Schlessinger may be projecting. We can only wonder what needs she was trying to meet in 1975, for example, when she agreed to pose topless for her boyfriend, Bill Balance.
A more realistic view is that while some men stray because they and their partners have grown incompatible, perhaps about a third of the species just can’t keep their jimmies in their pants. The “needs” of these guys, the Hugh Hefners of the world, are insatiable. They are hard-wired to seek greener pastures, no matter how lovely the yard they’re in may be. The fact that so many of these men are rich and powerful is incidental. The fact that the divorce rate hovers around 50 percent (and is even a bit higher among evangelical Christians) is strong circumstantial that hound-dogging is a common practice up and down the social strata — from auto mechanics, plumbers and dry-wallers to doctors, lawyers and accountants, and governors, senators, presidents and kings — and even the occasional preacher.
To blame the women these “womanizers” marry for not being able to quench their unquenchable needs is just the sort of crackpot shame-centered analysis that has made Dr. Schlessinger a national laughing stock.
People who know about this stuff don’t expect much from Dick Cheney’s trip to the Middle East.
Cheney will reinforce the message from visits by President George W. Bush in January and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month, in a stepped-up diplomatic push for Israelis and Palestinians to move forward on peace efforts dealt a blow by violence in Gaza and Israel.
Analyst: “He’s got nothing to offer. He represents a lame duck president, a floundering economy, a situation in which the U.S. for all its efforts in Iraq has no leverage on the government in Baghdad.”“The mood has deteriorated incredibly in the last six weeks since the president was there,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.
“From the outside it’s very hard to see that Secretary Rice was able to even arrest the slide let alone get things moving forward. My guess is the vice president will be able to arrest the slide if not necessarily put things on track,” he said.
Let’s be honest. Our interest in the Middle East isn’t about justice in Israel, for either the Israelis or the Palestinians. It is, and always has been, about one thing.
“I’m not sure he’ll seek anything more than a good and thorough discussion about the current situation in the global energy markets,” a senior administration official said.
That’s right, the big O: oil. After all, what else besides the subject of his past, current, and future business interests does Cheney have to talk about?
“I don’t think that he’s going to be able to bring back anything meaningful because he’s got nothing to offer,” Steven Simon, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said.
“He represents a lame duck president, a floundering economy, a situation in which the U.S. for all its efforts in Iraq has no leverage on the government in Baghdad,” Simon said.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
