Kim and his deceased father Kim Il-Sung are at the heart of a personality cult that borders on religion, with near-magical powers ascribed to the younger Kim.
Rainbows supposedly appeared over sacred Mount Paekdu where Kim Jong-Il was allegedly born, and he is said once to have scored 11 holes-in-one in a single round of golf.

via France24 – N.Korea leader sets world fashion trend: Pyongyang.

Why only 11?

Obama is sooo happy health care passed because now he can go talk voters to death. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Anne Korblut does not like the fact that President Obama answers a constituent’s concerns about taxation with regard to his primary policy achievement of his first term with a very long answer.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).

Always fond of lists, Obama ticked off his approach to health care — twice. “Number one is that we are the only — we have been, up until last week, the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance,” he said.

A few minutes later he got to the next point, which seemed awfully similar to the first. “Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation,” he said, then carried on explaining further still.

via 44 – Obama’s 17-minute, 2,500-word response to woman’s claim of being ‘over-taxed’.

No, no the first two points are not the same. The first point, ( “Number one is that we are the only — we have been, up until last week, the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance,”), speaks to a variety of points. Two of the top of my head

• The social contract of our country now implicitly includes health care as a basic need, not a luxury for the young, old, and employed. Like the rest of the western world.
• We can compete with labor costs in other countries by finally controlling the health care costs per worker.

The second point, (“Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation,”) may simply refer to the fact that Doris may develop a pre-existing condition, get laid off and then have no access to insurance without reform. She may have a daughter who wants to backpack through Europe for a year who is under 26. She can stay on Doris’ insurance. Basically, the increased taxes have immense direct benefits for every citizen that we all find worth it when its employer/employee funded or comes due in the form of an emergency room bill.

It’s not that Kornblut noticed that Obama went on too long, lost the attention of the attendees and is wont to provide wonky responses to a constituent’s question.

What irks me is that she seems so bored to tears she couldn’t be bothered to write a post that actually analyzes the his answer. The President went on for 17 minutes and she analyzes twenty five seconds of his pitch. Then she dives into gossip. Next time, she can save real estate and just write: They were so bored with this cat. People straight up rolled on him, dawg. Yada Yada Obama! Our President cured insomnia! Yawn Mr. President, you can’t sell worth a damn. POTUS! Wrap it up dude…I’ve got to do a spot on Hardball and there is no catchy sound bite I can regurgitate for him on command. Here he goes again: one time…at Camp David.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin photo credit: edalisse

John McWhorter explains Palinspeak is and why it isn’t a disqualifying trait to Palin’s loyal supporters.

Yet Palinspeak still differs from statements like Brownback’s in degree. It’s a rather extreme case — an almost instructive distillation of the difference in public conceptions of language in Charles Eaton and Robert Byrd’s time versus our own. “Folksy” is only the beginning of it — “You betcha,” -in for -ing, and “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” during her debate with Joseph Biden indeed make her sound accessible, ordinary, unpretentious. This, however, is America as a whole, and no one should be shocked that a public figure would strike this note. “You betcha” hits the same chord in Palin’s fans as the equally folksy — and close to meaningless — “Yes, We Can” intoned in a preacherly “black” way did when a certain someone else was saying it. Folksy is America; it always has been, but is especially so now.

What truly distinguishes Palin’s speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. The there fetish, for instance — Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended “there,” as in “We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there…” But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to “forge that peace.” That peace? You mean that peace way over there — as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She’s far, far away from that peace.

All of us use there and that in this way in casual speech — it’s a way of placing topics as separate from us on a kind of abstract “desktop” that the conversation encompasses. “The people in accounting down there think they can just ….” But Palin, doing this even when speaking to the whole nation, is no further outside of her head than we are when talking about what’s going on at work over a beer. The issues, American people, you name it, are “there” — in other words, not in her head 24/7. She hasn’t given them much thought before; they are not her. They’re that, over there.

[…]

Palinspeak is a flashlight panning over thoughts, rather than thoughts given light via considered expression. It bears mentioning that short sentences and a casual tone can still convey information and planned thought.

via What Does Palinspeak Mean? | The New Republic.

Former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan

First the “no fault of mine” fantasy provided by Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan.

TAPPER: You’ll be testifying about the financial crisis on Wednesday before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. When you testified before Congress in October, you said that you finally saw a flaw in — in the way that you looked at markets, that markets cannot necessarily be trusted to completely police themselves. But isn’t it — isn’t it more than a flaw? Isn’t it an indictment of Ayn Rand and the view that laissez-faire capitalism can be expected to function properly, that markets can be trusted to police themselves?

GREENSPAN: Not at all. I think that there is no alternative, if you want to have economic growth and higher standards of living, in a democratic society, to have competitive markets. And, indeed, if you merely look at the history since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, when all of those ideas surfaced and became applicable in public policy, we’ve had an explosion of economic growth, and especially in the developing countries, where hundreds of millions of people have been pulled out of poverty, of extreme poverty and starvation, basically because we have competitive markets.

via Greenspan: Financial Crisis Doesn’t Indict Ayn Rand Theories – Political Punch.

Now the reality courtesy of Michael Burry manager of the hedge fund Scion Capital from 2000 to 2008.

During 2007, under constant pressure from my investors, I liquidated most of our credit default swaps at a substantial profit. By early 2008, I feared the effects of government intervention and exited all our remaining credit default positions — by auctioning them to the many Wall Street banks that were themselves by then desperate to buy protection against default. This was well in advance of the government bailouts. Because I had been operating in the face of strong opposition from both my investors and the Wall Street community, it took everything I had to see these trades through to completion. Disheartened on many fronts, I shut down Scion Capital in 2008.

Since then, I have often wondered why nobody in Washington showed any interest in hearing exactly how I arrived at my conclusions that the housing bubble would burst when it did and that it could cripple the big financial institutions. A week ago I learned the answer when Al Hunt of Bloomberg Television, who had read Michael Lewis’s book, “The Big Short,” which includes the story of my predictions, asked Mr. Greenspan directly. The former Fed chairman responded that my insights had been a “statistical illusion.” Perhaps, he suggested, I was just a supremely lucky flipper of coins.

Mr. Greenspan said that he sat through innumerable meetings at the Fed with crack economists, and not one of them warned of the problems that were to come. By Mr. Greenspan’s logic, anyone who might have foreseen the housing bubble would have been invited into the ivory tower, so if all those who were there did not hear it, then no one could have said it.

As a nation, we cannot afford to live with Mr. Greenspan’s way of thinking. The truth is, he should have seen what was coming and offered a sober, apolitical warning. Everyone would have listened; when he talked about the economy, the world hung on every single word.

Unfortunately, he did not give good advice. In February 2004, a few months before the Fed formally ended a remarkable streak of interest-rate cuts, Mr. Greenspan told Americans that they would be missing out if they failed to take advantage of cost-saving adjustable-rate mortgages. And he suggested to the banks that “American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.”

Within a year lenders made interest-only adjustable-rate mortgages readily available to subprime borrowers. And within 18 months lenders offered subprime borrowers so-called pay-option adjustable-rate mortgages, which allowed borrowers to make partial monthly payments and have the remainder added to the loan balance (much like payments on a credit card).

Observing these trends in April 2005, Mr. Greenspan trumpeted the expansion of the subprime mortgage market. “Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit,” he said, “lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately.”

via Op-Ed Contributor – I Saw the Crisis Coming. Why Didn’t the Fed? – NYTimes.com.

Greenspan has reset himself inside his own mind after the economy was almost destroyed by a fire he either unwittingly or recklessly fueled. Now, Greenspan wants to reset the lessons of the last 10 years and go back to a time when he was ever the Oracle and Michael Burry “was just a supremely lucky flipper of coins”. Only fools would let him do that.

photo credit: Max Klingensmith

It turns out Daimler was bribing foreign governments to get special treatment.

Daimler, which makes Mercedes-Benz cars and trucks, is said to have made payments from 1998 to 2008.

The US Justice Department has accused the company of paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to officials of at least 22 governments.

They are alleged to include China, Russia, Egypt and Greece.

Iraq claim

The money was allegedly aimed at persuading governments to buy Daimler vehicles in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

One accusation is that Daimler paid kickbacks to Iraqi government officials to secure deals to sell vehicles, violating the United Nations’ Oil for Food Program.

Another allegations is that Daimler gave an official in Turkmenistan an armoured car as a birthday present to encourage him to grant a contract to supply government vehicles.

American law prohibits companies which operate in the US from making improper payments to officials of other countries.

Reuters news agency says it has learned from a source close to Daimler, which has been led by chief executive Dieter Zetsche since 2006, that it is preparing to pay a fine of $185m (£121m) to the US Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

via BBC News – US charges car firm Daimler with violating bribery laws.

Otherwise known as the free market. Apparently, this is how tax breaks create jobs.

…that is, that it will tip over. or capsize.