The Iron Yuppie

Think what you will about her, but she's clearly a strong politician. But two moves recently, seem to be just weird:

#1) Insulting the (new?) media

Yes, that's very smart. The people who helped get you the nomination were bloggers. Insulting them is probably not a good move. Fine if you were just talking about a subset, but that's still no good boss. Bloggers are very defensive about not being characterized as unprofessional.

#2) Announcing you're running in 2012. What? WHAT?? First, you have some damage control to do with aides/Republicans. Look at the rumors being spread by your own people. Second, aren't you still governor? Wouldn't you like to finish that out? Third, the president-elect hasn't even had his first day in office - maybe you'd like to work WITH him before you get him out of office?

I dunno... I think Sarah Palin knew at some point through the phone call that she was being punked. (

)Nothing you can do to prevent idiots from calling you up I suppose.

Did you know as the next political election is upon us, that we have over 15,000 different political quotes and sound bites on our site? Barack Obama quotes, John McCain quotes, Sarah Palin quotes, Joe Biden quotes... everything you need to make your decision on Tuesday!

Here are some of my favorite...

Obama on clothes:

Biden on Obama's Spine:

Palin on becoming a VP nominee: McCain on being a responsible spender.

Whomever you feel like voting for, do it! It's shameful that we need to convince people to vote at all... it should be the law.

Feel free to ignore... testing what an ET URL looks like through Ping.fm: http://ping.fm/7QKLR

Sometimes the rest of the world occasionally feels in synch with the way you feel... my company happens to have been mentioned both in Silicon Alley Insider (via Brian Garrity of the NY Post), AND have been featured on the IE Addons Gallery. Cool!

Not Zombie Strippers cool, but still.

My favorite is Mr. Kafka's assessment of us: "Thanks to the NY Post's Brian Garrity

for this one, via something called Entertonement, which seems pretty cool. We hope it survives." We'll do our best!

I don't even think we have a separation between art and life any more. They're just merged together. Thanks to VideoGum and GigaOm for catching this... Michael (Steve Carrell) mentioned he watched Cookie Monster singing Chocolate Rain during Thursday's "The Office" episode, and now someone has gone and created it.

This video is just awesome:

First, you want to pause and let it buffer to 6 or so minutes in where you can start the video (or you can access the podcast here iTunes). The thing that is just amazing about it is this video is (only?) 20 years old, and they are explaining things that we just take for granted today. Things like:

• What a mouse is - "it's an upside-down track ball!"
• What a 3.5 inch disk is and how much it holds
• Pictures on the desktop = icons
• The concept of "Cut", "Copy", "Undo"

Pretty funny stuff.

Apparently tonight's line of the night is "Senator Government" Really? Isn't there more important stuff to talk about?

D

My very smart friend has written up some answers to my questions, which I will repost here.

1) It did go up proportionally.  It probably was 98% of the bonds worth. (I’m guessing.  I don’t have the data)

2) Not naked but no one ever had the $1B dollars to pay up when the bond defaulted.  It was unregulated so there are no ‘capital reserves’.  People were ‘netted’ on the belief that someone had that $1B.  But no one ever did.  So they are all bankrupt.

1b).  So it didn’t matter if the CDS premium was 98% of the bond.  $1B needs to get paid out on the chain. The guy receiving the 98% premium loses 2%.  But two points.  Someone else is losing the rest of the 98% through the chain of netting.  And 2% is on the total bond value not the capital that guy had.  He’s levered.  He may have lost 20% or 200% and been wiped out.

I'll tell you what I told him, which is it doesn't seem possible that this many smart people could get caught in such a web. His response:

I’m sure most of them were aware.  But when you can be a multi-millionaire in one year isn’t it worth the bet? If I said tomorrow you can be worth $100M or lose your job, how many would take that offer? That’s why derivatives need to be regulated.  Asymmetric returns.

When people in the industry start saying things should be regulated, that's usually a sign that it's reached absolutely critical stage.

Looks like Politico is getting a lot of attention on Memeorandum with their story about GOP voters having issues with the momentum of the campaign.

I heard the clip of someone yelling terrorist (

) and I guess it's pretty bad but who can really control people at a campaign event, anyway?

I guess they want McCain/Palin to go more in the direction of highlighting the Ayers connection (

), but I can't believe that's really getting any play. I guess we'll see.