smasher

I’m a religious reader of Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo site. For months, he’s been writing about John McCain’s fitness for office, calling him dangerous and unpredictable. I haven’t always agreed with this, but the more I see of McCain and his campaign, the more I think that Marshall might be right.

The McCain campaign has lurched from crisis to crisis, from the badly staged “that’s not change we can believe in” speech, to sticking his foot in it during the Georgia crisis, to delaying the start of the GOP convention (supposedly due to Hurricane Gustav), to the hows and whys of the Palin selection (which seriously calls into question exactly who’s running the show in the McCain campaign), from saying that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” one week, to deciding the next week to “suspend” his campaign to “rush” back to Washington, call for the resignation of the SEC chairman, attempt to delay the first presidential debate (and invite speculation that he did so in order to keep his running mate away from Joseph Biden next Thursday), and help scuttle the Wall Street bailout talks at the White House.

His bad poker face and short temper have gotten him in trouble before, and his arrogance is legendary. Check out this exchange between McCain and member of the public at a campaign town hall event for  college-aged folks. Maybe the kid is a little shirty about how he phrases the question, but it’s still a totally legitimate question, given McCain’s age and health history. McCain gives his answer, but can’t resist sneaking in a little dig at the end. (”…you little jerk!”) It was kind of a cute remark, and it fit well into his maverick image, but it also betrayed a meanness and arrogance churning just below the surface. He was basically saying, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” And if he could let a 20-something college student get under his skin, how would he behave during tense international negotiations with a foreign adversary?

If this is the leadership and management style he plans to bring to the White House, we should all be very, very afraid. Here is a man who creates crisis, who is prone to histrionics, who repeatedly makes dangerously inaccurate statements in public, games major scheduled events, and disrupts delicate bipartisan negotiations for political gain. (”Country first” indeed!) He has a great sense of melodrama, but he also has little capacity for nuanced thought, almost no economic policy chops, and a terrible poker face.

Some would say that this is classic McCain. But that’s the problem. These are very bad traits to take to the White House, where diplomacy, negotiation, and measured debate are key. Right now the last thing we need is an administration making snap, seat-of-the-pants decisions, and veering unpredictably between melodrama and arrogance.

And McCain’s recent “hail Mary” moves have all landed with a thud. Postponing the GOP convention due to Gustav? Gustav turned out to be a wash. Picking Sarah Palin as his running mate without vetting her first? A disaster. Trying to look presidential by “suspending” his campaign and attempting to push back the debate? Another disaster. Rushing to Washington to participate in the Wall Street bailout bill talks? Another disaster. So McCain’s leadership style isn’t just dangerous and unpredictable; it’s counterproductive, too.

Frankly I have doubts about his health–both physical and mental. He often appears a little unsteady and awkward in public, with somebody almost always nearby to whisper in his ear to keep him in line. Again, who’s running the show?

There has been a lot of buzz around how and why McCain didn’t–or perhaps couldn’t–look Obama in the eye at any point during the first debate. (Arrogance? Contempt? Fear? Beta monkey/dog behavior?) But given what we now know about last week’s encounter in at the White House–in which Obama basically called McCain’s bluff–it sheds new light McCain’s body language during Friday’s debate. Maybe they both knew what millions of viewers didn’t: Obama had already handed him his hat, the day before.

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My impressions of last night’s debate:

I thought Obama held his own quite well, on what was supposedly McCain’s home turf.

A lot of commentators and observers have remarked on McCain’s apparent rudeness and aggressiveness. I wasn’t really looking at that, and my initial reaction was a bit different. This was a good, substantive debate between two very smart, strong candidates. Obama appeared at some points to be a little too polite, not as aggressive as McCain. McCain’s performance didn’t strike me as rude or mean; it struck me as aggressive and strident–which, at first blush, it should have been. These guys were two strong candidates engaging in a presidential debate, and both scored their points.

Frankly, I thought McCain’s performace was stronger than I expected, especially coming at the end of a very bad, chaotic week for him.

The early part of the debate focused on the immediate economic situation. Both McCain and Obama dodged the question about the bailout plan, and rightfully, too. It’d be dumb for either of them to state specifics before the plan has been finalized.

Obama was clearly more comfortable talking about economic issues, and McCain’s responses here were very canned and incoherent. (McCain just made no sense at all here.) This section of the debate was a clear win for Obama, even though both candidates did a lot of dodging and weaving around the specifics of the bailout, and how their budget proposals would be effected.

I was expecting more real zingers, especially from John McCain. Instead, he appeared a little nervous, and was obviously stringing together some of the catch phrases from his stump speeches, and not entirely coherently or effectively. (”Veto pen.” “I’ll make them famous. You will know their names.”) His canned zingers came off either a little tired and flat, or got a little lost in the delivery. (For example: his line about the $3 million study of bear DNA. “I don’t know if it was criminal or paternal.” It was a good line, but the delivery was a bit flat and forced, and his point got lost because of it.)

(I don’t have cable TV, so I haven’t actually seen too many clips of his stump appearances. But to somebody just tuning in to the presidential race, McCain’s schtick last night probably appeared a little tired and rote despite its unfamiliarity, like watching an all-star cast sleepwalking its way through a Saturday matinee.)

Obama made a very good point around the impact on the federal budget of earmarks ($18 billion) vs. tax breaks for the wealthy ($300 billion). He did a great job here of putting one of McCain’s most famous “maveric” traits–his ongoing campaign against budget earmarks–into broader perspective. It gave the impression that McCain gets fixated on the wrong stuff, and as a result fails to grasp the bigger picture.

I thought McCain cleaned Obama’s clock–or at least appeared to–around the question of the former Soviet bloc states. He seemed to have a clear grasp of the issues here, and left Obama stumbling and flailing around a bit. But at other points, McCain came off more as a name-dropper than a coherent strategic thinker. (”I’ve been there,” or, “I’ve met with —.”) This made him appear nervous and insecure. He came off as a guy who talks big–like an obnoxious sales guy at a party–but it doesn’t exhibit much nuance in his thinking. (Obama’s “hatchet vs. scalpel” metaphor was a good one here, and was a great way to distill their different approaches into a single sound bite.)

I cringed a bit around the bracelet exchange. McCain has made a lot of hay around his black Iraq vet bracelet, and the meme for a long time in the blogosphere has been that Obama wears a similar bracelet, too, but is too above the fray to talk about it. Not anymore. This might have been a deliberate tactic on the part of the McCain campaign to bait Obama into talking about his own black bracelet, and kill that meme.  Obama appeared a bit flustered and defensive during this exchange; I thought it was his weakest moment of the evening.

The most chilling exchange to me concerned Iraq. McCain’s rationale included bizarre–albeit unspoken–parallels to Vietnam, around the idea of “total victory” and “letting the generals do their thing with the troops on the ground.” So apparently he’s learned nothing about fighting a counterinsurgency or an asymmetric war, despite his years of experience as a foreign-policy wonk. He seems to want to fight Vietnam all over again, and try to get it “right” this time. It’s exactly the wrong lesson to draw from Vietnam, and quite a lot of emotional baggage to bring to the Oval office.

It was particularly striking when they got into the difference between “strategy” and “tactics.” McCain didn’t hammer home his point very well here at all. He was still fixated on the surge, rather than on the larger question of why we went there, what our objectives are now that we are there, and how we define “victory.”  If he was trying to pin Obama for not knowing the difference between “strategy” and “tactics,” I think it had the opposite effect. (Joe Biden made this point later in the evening. By the way, Biden appeared very sharp here, and he exhibited a much deeper, more nuanced grasp of foreign policy than McCain did at any point during the debate. I’ve always thought Biden would make a fantastic Secretary of Defence, and am a little disappointed that he’s been given bucket-of-warm-piss job instead.)

The question about North Korea seemed to get lost in wonkish minutia on both sides. Most people–certainly most people tuning in to the race for the first time–won’t know or care about the ongoing debate around the “six point talks” with North Korea. McCain’s comment about the North Koreans being “three inches shorter than the South Koreans” was a bit of a non sequitur here. He could have done a better job setting up that point; instead, it got lost in his rhetorical shorthand. (I had to think for a second about what he was saying there–that the North Koreans are more malnourished than the South Koreans. He didn’t explicitly say that, and some viewers might have gotten a little lost for a couple of moments as a result, as they tried to figure out what the hell McCain was talking about.)

In fact, that might have been McCain’s biggest overall rhetorical blunder of the evening: his attempts at distilling his foreign policy experience into sound bites and catchphrases probably did him more harm than good, because he wasn’t providing enough context for them. (”I have a pen.” “I will make them famous; you will know their names.” “Dear Leader.” “North Koreans are three inches shorter.” “Six point talks.” “SDI.” “I have been to —-.”) It reminded me of Bush 41’s own muddled catchphrase shorthand in 1992. (”Message: I care.”)

Obama did a great job parrying this stuff, at one point correcting and then tossing aside a misleading statement that McCain had made about Obama not holding hearings on Afghanistan in his Senate subcommittee: “My subcommittee doesn’t even deal with Afghanistan. Anyway, that’s inside baseball….” Obama still has a grasp of what the public knows and what it doesn’t know–i.e., he hasn’t been in Washington long enough to become one of them–and isn’t letting himself get lost in the minutia of the debate. He was keeping his eye on the big picture, and had a better sense of his audience and what he wanted to convey to them. In contrast, McCain seemed so focused on scoring points that he might have lost some viewers in the process. This is completely separate from the question the pundits have been clucking about today, about whether McCain came off as excessively mean or rude to his opponent.

And that might be what ultimately carried the day for Obama: contrary to McCain’s charge, Obama does know the difference between tactics and strategy. He practiced it throughout the debate.

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As I write this, John McCain has “suspended his campaign” (or maybe I should say he has “suspended” his “campaign”) to deal full-time with the current economic crisis.

Bush addressed the nation last night. He basically said, “Fear. Everybody fear! Fear itself! Give us $700 billion before it’s too late!” He didn’t say anything about the deregulation which got us into this in the first place. In fact, he said that increased regulation could come later, after the $700 billion bailout plan was passed as-is. (He waited until the end of the speech to remind us that our savings accounts are guaranteed by the FDIC.) It wasn’t a convincing case, at least not to me.

I’m not a great economic thinker. (The only formal economics education I’ve ever had was reading Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and bits of JM Keynes.) But here’s how I see it:

• Taking out a balloon mortgage is the present-day equivalent of buying stocks on margin. The basic idea: you’re OK if the value of your holdings goes up, but you’re totally fucked if it goes down. (Briefly: buying on margin goes like this: you borrow money to buy stock. If the stock goes up, you make money on the profit, and your creditor makes a percentage on the loan. But if the stock goes down, you owe your creditor for the loss.) Millions of small-time and first-time investors who had bought stocks on margin were ruined by the the crash of 1929. Millions of first-time and marginal home-owners are being ruined now by the real-estate crash, especially those holding adjustable-rate balloon mortgages.
• Bush and the conservatives were always talking about the “ownership society.” (They wanted to extend it to social security, too.) Why was it ever legal to push marginal real estate deals and sub-prime mortgages to marginal buyers? The “ownership society” doctrine is little more than institutionalized exploitation.
• The one good thing which has come out of this has been the indefinite moratorium on short sales. (I.e., making money on a stock’s decline.) Why short selling was ever legal is beyond me.
• Bush’s bailout plan is basically a socialized version of trickle-down economics: bail out the big lending and insurance corporations–using taxpayers’ money–and hopefully their newfound corporate fiscal responsibility will trickle down to free up credit to small investors and regular homeowners. (In my mind at least, this latest financial panic is the coup de grace for trickle-down economics.)
• Why was preserving golden parachutes for failed executives ever on the table in this deal?
• The huge housing boom was basically a huge waste of resources and capitol. The only thing I’m surprised about is that it went sour so quickly.
• Why are taxpayers footing the bill for real estate speculation gone sour? I don’t really want to own a subdivision of half-finished McMansions in the Sacramento exurbs. If it turned out to be such a shit investment for a mortgage bank, in what way is it a better investment for me?
• Hopefully the idea of trickle-down economics is dead and buried now. In a lot of ways, we’ve proved the reverse: allowing bad mortgages to proliferate and then bundling and spreading the risk to larger entities has brought down major players in the investment and insurance sectors. So legalizing and encouraging bad monetary policy and hard-selling bad investment deals has allowed the risk to bubble up to the big players.
• Maybe deregulating the financial sector wasn’t such a good idea after all. It turns out that screwing small investors and first-time home-owners (especially those who probably had no business owning a home) brought down the big investment banks, too. I still want to see Phil Gramm being interviewed on Meet the Press or Face the Nation or something. He’s got a lot of explaining to do. (Yeah–it wasn’t just Phil Gramm. It was everybody–including at least one major party’s candidate for President–who had a hand in enabling and legalizing mass fiscal stupidity, who let investment bank executives and lobbyists write monetary policy, and who allowed lobbyists to define the boundaries of governmental oversight of the banking industry.) And it turns out that one of the things which made the US economy so attractive to overseas investors was our supposed fiscal stability and oversight/regulation of the financial sector. (Without it, we’re no better than a corrupt banana republic or island tax shelter.) So much for that.
• Maybe taking the dollar off the gold standard was a bad idea, too. Six months ago, I thought the gold standard argument was very bizarre and abstract. Now I’m not so sure. If our currency is only as good as our regulation and oversight, it may be fucked after all.
• Why $700 billion? Is that enough? Is it too much? Where is it going? To whom? And who manages it? (It seems like a number pulled out of Henry Paulson’s ass.) According to some reports, this “emergency” bailout plan has been in the works for months–totally under the radar, totally beyond scrutiny. So what is this? Either the folks dictating monetary policy have known for months or years that we were fucked, or declaring an economic emergency was a good way to guarantee a massive public handout to the investment banking industry during an election year, with no strings attached.

The idea of John McCain racing back to Washington to help broker a bailout of the financial sector is pretty hilarious. This is the guy who doesn’t know much about the economy, other than Government Regulation Is Bad (because his buddy Phil Gramm told him so), and that Our Economy Is Sound (after all, he’s a maverick who would fire any lobbyists on his campaign).

(Bill Clinton was on The Daily Show the other night, and he put it pretty clearly: the tech boom fueled a lot of innovation and generated a lot of wealth. When the tech bubble crashed–partially from virtual real estate speculation on the internet–a lot of the wealth was poured into an unsustainable housing market, when should have gone into spending on infrastructure and alternative energy research and development. Oops.)

I’m basically a Keynesian. There’s nothing wrong with a little regulation and oversight. If anything, it makes for long-term solvency and prosperity at all levels of the economy. And if there’s nothing wrong with handing a blank check to a rotten industry without the promise of increased oversight and regulation, there certainly isn’t anything wrong with defecit spending for the public good during an economic downturn.  (Grover Norquist probably doesn’t agree. But then again, he’s personally benefiting more from government spending than I am.)

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I completed the 65-mile route on the D2R2 this year, slowly

I rode the Banjo, which was absolutely delightful on this ride: light, stable, comfortable. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Though next year it needs a lower gear.

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Yes.

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The plumbers are basically done. (At least I think they’re done. They haven’t come back since last Thursday, though they haven’t presented us with a bill, either.) And they did a good job of wrecking the place, and charging a lot of money for it. Now I’m the delighted owner of a brand-new wastewater stack, and a new shower mixing valve, and a new bathroom faucet set.

I called in a plasterer for an estimate, but he said he couldn’t do anything until I’d re-framed my bathroom ceiling. This is what it currently looks like:

The white pipes are the neighbor’s new toilet, sink and bathtub drains. And those are all new copper supply pipes, too. Most of the bit which is already missing–where the new pipes are–were damaged in previous floods. This is what started all this madness in the first place.

So the sequence of events:

1. Demolish the rest of the mess.
2. Call in a carpenter to frame a new ceiling. (The neighbors’ new pipes are set lower than the original ones, so the ceiling will be a bit lower than the original one, but much higher than the awful drop ceiling which had been there since before I moved in here.)
3. Call in an electrician to install a new light fixture, fan, etc.
4. Call in a plasterer to finish the walls and ceiling.
5. Paint.

So I joined the land of DIY: demolition.

I get stage fright every time I have to deal with anything like this. In fact, I’ve spent the last couple of days doing errands, making lists, looking for tools, etc.–basically procrastinating. But today I dove in, crowbar and dust mask and safety goggles, to strip off the rest of my bedroom wall.

Here it is before:

…and after:

I have a new Ryobi cordless tool set (circular saw, saber saw, drill/screwdriver, sander). Today I tried out the saber saw.

It was amazing–it made cutting through the old lathe like cutting through butter. In fact, I didn’t really use it very much. It was almost too easy and efficient, and took some the sport out of it. I almost preferred to grab at the stuff madly with my hands.

At one point I attempted to find the circuit to the bathroom sconce lights, so I could disconnect them and take them out. But they turn out to be on the octopus circuit–a bizarre 15-amp circuit which winds its way all through the house, powering lights and outlets the my bathroom, the light in my hallway, the lights in the common front hallway, an outlet in my bedroom, at least one outlet in my office, and the entire basement. It’s now marked clearly on my fuse panel.

I attempted to disconnect the sconce lights, but when I opened up the junction box in my basement, it scared the hell out of me–a mess of old fabric-insulated wires twisted together, wrapped in electrical tape, and stuffed tightly into the box. No thanks. Not today.

The actual demolition was kind of fun, though slower going than I expected. The real PITA is the cleanup.

Nothing like taking ownership of a place by tearing it apart piece by piece.

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I’ve figured out a way to remove a stem wedge which had gotten very stuck in one of my bikes.

There are a few approaches to this–such as removing the rest of the handlebars/stem, wheel, and fender, and trying to knock the thing out from the bottom–but they don’t always work.

The trick is to extract the thing without damaging the steerer tube or any other parts of the bike. Here’s what you need:

• Some penetrating oil (I like Kroil)
• An 8mm bolt long enough to reach the wedge without the rest of the stem installed (i.e., shorter than the one which comes with the stem) but long enough to poke out of the top of the head tube.
• A block of hardwood big enough to completely cover the headset locknut, with a hole driven through it for the bolt
• A washer
• A fender washer

Here’s what you do:

1. Take off the handlebars/stem and the front wheel.
2. Drizzle some Kroil into the steerer tube. Let it sit at least overnight. The longer the better.
3. Insert the bolt through the washer, fender washer, and hardwood block, and then into the steerer tube. (Apply a little grease to the threads first.)
4. Carefully tighten the bolt until the stem wedge is free.

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My neighbors and I have decided to do some major work, including a new main stack (the old one was original to the house–more than 100 years old), replacement pieces to the main vent, and new copper risers (supply pipes) to all three units. This is all a good thing, because it means that I (probably) won’t have a cascade of water coming through my ceiling two weeks after I finish remodeling my own bathroom.

Yay!

But in the meantime the place has been infested with plumbers. They’re everywhere: in the basement, in the ceilings, in the walls, all over the floor.

It’s been more than two weeks, and the novelty has worn off. Hopefully today is the last day.

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Sorry about the interrupted service. I’ve started my bathroom remodel.

Plumbers have come today to start tearing things apart. The’ve found some cool stuff:

• There is a main vent after all. I was worried about this–that we’d have to install one all the way up to the roof. The bad news: a good portion of it is corroded and cracked, and needs to be replaced. Most of it is galvanized steel–which is what it should be–but the corroded portion is cast iron. (”If they didn’t have the right stuff available,” said the plumber, “they used whatever they could get.”) Luckily it doesn’t all have to be redone.
• The main stack is cast iron, and dates back to the original construction of the house–c. 1900.
• We found some bits of newspaper shoved into the wall during the tiling job. No explicit date, but I found a short item about Anton Cermak meeting with high-level Democrats. Cermak was assassinated in March 1933 during a public appearance in Miami with president-elect Franklin Roosevelt. (So Cermak took one for the team.) The assassin, an anarchist named Giuseppe Zangara, was aiming for Roosevelt.

  Zangara gleefully went to the electric chair. His final words: “Get to hell out of here, you son of a bitch [spoken to the attending minister]. I go sit down all by myself. Viva Italia! Goodbye to all poor peoples everywhere! Lousy capitalists! No picture! Capitalists! No one here to take my picture. All capitalists lousy bunch of crooks. Go ahead. Pusha da button!”

  This places the current bathroom to sometime around late 1932.

• I asked the plumber when they stopped using brass for pipes; I was surprised that brass would be used as late as the 1930s. He said that they didn’t use copper for supply pipes until shortly after the Second World War. (He also said that “victory pipe”–thin-walled cast iron–was used for plumbing during the war. Luckily there isn’t any of that in the house.)
• The closet traps–the wastewater fitting directly below the toilet–was built of thicker gauge cast iron than the stuff used in the main stack. So those date to the 1932 remodel
• The tub is enameled cast iron.

Shots are here.

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I’m in the process of getting my new server online, including an updated blog engine (wordpress instead of the old Movable Type), updated gallery, and so on.

The new server is eons faster and better than the old one: it’s a 1.6 GHz AMD 64-bit box, instead of the old P200 on the old machine. So some stuff should be faster on the new machine.

I’ve imported the legacy blog content to the new server, and will be consolidating and updating other stuff (images, links, etc.) over the next few days.

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