Open Thread - Wed. February 17, 2016

Submitted by gulfgal98 on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 7:00am

Good Morning, 99%'ers!

Today I am on the road, traveling south for a couple of days and I will not be on line for the next couple of days. Since my last several Open Thread essays have been of a serious nature, I thought I would post a more light hearted Open Thread today. Since we are in the primary season and President's Day was on Monday, I thought I would post ten fun facts about our Presidents.

1. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were close friends and correspondents — but they also had a bit of a rivalry. Adams' dying words were, "Thomas Jefferson survives," unaware that he had died hours earlier. In another shocker, both died on July 4, 1826.
Source: PBS.org

2. During his presidency, John Quincy Adams enjoyed skinny-dipping in the Potomac River in the early mornings.
Source: Huffington Post

3. Martin Van Buren was the first president to be born an American citizen. All presidents before him were born British subjects.
Source: MSN News
Van Buren's nickname was "Old Kinderhook" because he was raised in Kinderhook, N.Y. A popular theory states that the term "O.K." is derived from the O.K. clubs that sprung up to support his campaign.
Source: NPR

4. James Buchanan regularly bought slaves in Washington, D.C. and quietly freed them in Pennsylvania.
Source: Randomhistory.com

5. Abraham Lincoln was a licensed bartender. He was the part owner of a saloon in Springfield, Illinois, called Berry and Lincoln.
Source: MSN News
Lincoln could throw down in the wrestling ring. As a young man, he was only defeated once out of approximately 300 matches. He made it to the Wrestling Hall of Fame with the honor of "Outstanding American."
Source: History.com

6. Not only was James Garfield ambidextrous — he could write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other at the same time.
Source: IPL.org

7. Teddy Roosevelt was shot in an assassination attempt while delivering a speech in Milwaukee. "I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot," he told the stunned audience. "I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap." He completed the 90-minute speech with the bullet still lodged in his chest.
Source: History.com

8. William Taft — also known as "Big Bill" — was the largest president in American history. He once got himself wedged into the White House bathtub and had to call his advisers for help getting out.
Source: Randomhistory.com.
After leaving office, Taft became the only ex-Pesident to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, effectively becoming the only person to serve as the head of two branches of government. In doing so, he swore in both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover to the presidency. (On an unrelated note, he also lost 150 pounds after leaving office.)
Source: Huffington Post

9. Herbert Hoover moved his family to China before becoming President, and he and his wife learned to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently. They would speak the language around the White House to prevent others from understanding them.
Source: Huffington Post

10. James Earl “Jimmy” Carter (1924-) was the first president to be born in a hospital. Carter is also the first known president to go on record as seeing a UFO, reported while he was Governor of Georgia.
Source: random history.com

So there you go. There's plenty more interesting and amusing facts about our Presidents, including some that are embarrassing.

As always, the Open Thread is for whatever you wish to post.

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Open Thread

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Comments

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 10:30am

Politics and money don't go together after all

Submitted by Shahryar on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 2:30pm

the lesson for Hillary: Stop spending!

If she puts in another $120 mil she'll definitely lose.

That's because she has no message, no defining goals and the more she's seen, the more people can see how empty she is.

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 2:33pm

This would be big

link

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, who correctly predicted 99 percent of election results in all 50 states in 2012, predicts Bernie Sanders will win the upcoming Nevada caucus by a narrow margin.
As of 4:30 Tuesday evening, FiveThirtyEight has Sanders winning in Nevada with 51 percent of the vote, while Hillary Clinton is projected to get 49 percent. Silver came to this result using his polls-plus model of forecasting, in which he collects the results of multiple polls, accounting for a range of results as the election draws closer.

If Sanders wins Nevada then the entire west is up for grabs.

Submitted by shaharazade on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 2:59pm

I read this morning

that it's a dead heat between Bernie and Hillary both nationally and in most states. Don't know whose poll it was as they all seem to me to have been struck clueless. Their usual methodology doesn't seem able to capture the rapidly changing/shifting demographics and the technologies at play. Likely voters or past election results are meeting a new dynamic of public outrage and disgust across the board. Maybe just my misinformed anti-scientific reading of this season of discontent as I have always thought political science is an oxymoron. Everybody knows the dice are loaded.....thanks to the internet and the reality were all living in.

Submitted by Pluto's Republic on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 4:19pm

I think you're right about the spending.

(Obviously the chart shows a negative correlation between spending and polling.) But also because in Hillary's case, the only thing left to spend money on is attack ads. Name recognition she already has. Overall, with the SuperDelegate system in place, she needn't worry about getting the nomination.

On the other hand, I think Hillary does have a message. The message is "No Message". It's an assurance of the continuation of the status quo, reaching all the way back into the Clinton years in the White House.

There is a large constituency that clings to the status quo, regardless of any abuses they suffer. Certainly, the Democratic Party itself is fully supports the status quo. Wouldn't you agree?

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 10:31am

Corporate credit

Submitted by Pluto's Republic on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 3:54pm

The corporate stock buybacks you were talking about

…the other day seem to be reflected here.

Some of the source material said that corporations were actually borrowing or issuing bonds to buy back beyond their working capital.

Of course, much of it was speculation, since buy-backs yank up the stock price. It's high-speed inside trading you don't go to jail for.

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 10:35am

Even the Fed admits that TBTF has got to go

link

Neel Kashkari, who ran the bailouts last time there was a U.S. banking crisis, I guess doesn't want to do it again, so he gave a speech yesterday about "Ending Too Big to Fail." Kashkari figures that regulators probably have the tools to respond if "an individual large bank runs into trouble, while the economy and financial system are otherwise healthy and stable," but worries that those tools won't help if "one or more large banks run into trouble while there is broader weakness and risks in the global economy":

Given the massive externalities on Main Street of large bank failures in terms of lost jobs, lost income and lost wealth, no rational policymaker would risk restructuring large firms and forcing losses on creditors and counterparties using the new tools in a risky environment, let alone in a crisis environment like we experienced in 2008. They will be forced to bail out failing institutions—as we were.

I think this is all basically right but it is kind of weird. For one thing, what is the likelihood that an individual large bank will run into trouble when everything else is fine? Like, no bad loans, no failing counterparties, no cratering securities markets, just a teller taking $1 trillion out of cash drawer and fleeing to Namibia? I feel like the odds of that scenario are low, and if that's all Dodd-Frank's single-point-of-entry resolution mechanism is supposed to address, then it was a lot of effort for not much benefit.

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 12:59pm

This is what I fear

More 'hope and change'?

The battle between the Sanders rebels and the Clinton restorationists seems to be all about credentialing: that is, both sides are signaling to their followers that they represent something vague-but-inspiring. The Sanders people are rallied by the cheap theatrics of denouncing Kissinger, just as Christian evangelists are thrilled when some two-bit con artist of a preacher rails against sin. The Clintonistas, on the other hand, are reassured by Hillary’s appeal to Experience, while they’re given a frisson of idealism by the prospect of the country’s First Woman President. Sanders, it seems to me, has no real interest in foreign policy issues, and his knowledge is limited, while his Russia-bashing is troubling. Like most “progressives,” he has a distaste for post-communist Russia that is no doubt entwined with the Russians’ rejection of Soviet socialism. Bernie, you’ll recall, spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
On the whole, Sanders is preferable to Clinton, but the virtues of the former have been greatly exaggerated. In the end, his “political revolution” will amount to a few early primary upsets, followed by the inevitable endorsement of Mrs. Clinton. His role, when it comes down to it, is to usher as many ostensible “leftists” into the Clinton camp as possible.

And that is going to be the sad conclusion of what could have been a real leftist insurgency in the Democratic party. It is a party that is ideologically sterile, brazenly ruled by party bosses, its national conventions lorded over by “super-delegates” and the donor class, more and more resembling a Soviet party congress as the years go by. Whatever conflict takes place internally is swiftly managed and contained: when the actors take off their masks, in the end they all look pretty much the same.

Submitted by Shahryar on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 2:27pm

the writer seems to like Kissinger

so I've discounted the rest of it. Here, check this out...

SANDERS: “Well, it ain’t Henry Kissinger. That’s for sure.”

This is a completely phony issue: Kissinger is 92 years old. It’s highly unlikely he’ll serve in any position in government ever again.

So wrong! Let's say Hillary said she liked Mussolini and Sanders brought it up as one weird thing. Would it be phony because Mussolini is dead? The reason we hate Kissinger and why we hate that Hillary likes Kissinger isn't because Kissinger is suddenly going to be her chief advisor. It's because we know what Kissinger has done, what he's stood for and why we can't have people who admire that to be in power.

He goes on...

Yet to hold up Kissinger as some Satanic figure is absurd because it drops the context of his actions, which occurred during the cold war. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union he has been a relative voice of sanity

No thanks.

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/17/2016 - 1:52pm

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