Wanda Sykes at White House Correspondent’s Dinner

She just had me cracking up. l loved the Rush being the missing 20th hijacker because he was strung out on oxycontin comment.

The morning news shows – even Fox – referred to it as over the top. What’s so over the top, its just funny.

Let Them Fail

It seems one thing the left (not liberal) and right (Ron Paul variety) can agree on are these bank bailouts are misplaced priorities. The bailouts are full of incentives and rewards to those that got us into this mess. In addition, bailouts  propped up large banks who took way too many risks with taxpayer money , while the government simultaneously shut down median and small banks who were not “too big to fail”.

Tasini is the latest on the left to question Obama’s wisdom, or lack thereof, in continuing to bailout the banks.

I understand why the Administration had been working overtime to try to prop up major banks–but understanding does not mean agreement with the long-term strategy. In fact, the question worth asking today is not whether the stress tests are accurate or whether more taxpayer money will be needed to shore up the major banks. It is actually this: why are we not using this crisis to create a new banking system? via Let Insolvent Banks Fail To Make Way For A New System – Working Life.

As I mentioned yesterday the reason those hedge funds did not want to play ball with Chrysler was because of the belief they could be bailed out with Tarp funds. The Chrysler bankruptsy is the perfect example of moral hazzard. The hedge fund managers could avoid the economic consequences of the free market because of a goverment policy of bailing out the wrong doers.

What Tansini is hinting at is these bailouts are doing exactly the oppossite of what we should be doing policy wise. We should be propping up a system where banks are smaller, local, and accountable. These bailouts are doing the exact oppossite. Bank of America and these other banks today are much larger, global, and less accountable than before the bailouts.

Let’s Move Their Cheese

Thomas Frank hits the bulls eye again.

In truth, however, the verdict has been in for years. Pay for performance systems, at least as they exist in many places, are a recipe for disaster.

What they have “incentivized” executives to do, in countless cases, is not to perform, but to game the system, to smooth the numbers, to take insane risks with other people’s money, to do whatever had to be done to ring the bell and send the dollars coursing their way into the designated bank account.

via Frank: Let’s Move Their Cheese – WSJ.com.

Sadly Obama does not seem to be helping much in this regard. Just recently he went on a tirade (faux rage) about off shore tax loop holes while simutanously pushing for the Panama Free Trade Agreement. Another example is those hedge funds that pushed Chrysler into bankruptsy will most likely get a bailout by Obama.

Yes, its time to move the cheese.