Saturday starts tonight - my college football picks:

PAC 12 CHAMPIONSHIP GAME - Autzen Stadium - Eugene, Oregon v. UCLA, Over 66 (2 units) (the win line is a zillion, too much)

MAC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME - Northern Illinois -3½ over Ohio (2 units)

Iowa State +10½ over Kansas State (2units), Houston -14 over Southern Mississippi (2 units), Cincinnati -9 over UConn (2 units), Baylor -3 over Texas (3 units)

SEC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME - LSU -14 over Georgia (4 units)

ACC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME - Virginia Tech -7 over Clemson (5 units)

BEST BET - Oklahoma State -3½ over Oklahoma (10 units)

Bonus Premier League pick - Arsenal (-1) over Wigan.

Open Thread.

Open Thread.

Geithner!

It’s housing, stupid. More precisely, it’s housing finance. As the Obama administration seeks ways to revive the economy, not to mention win an election, it is becoming clear that the biggest mistake officials made when they took office nearly three years ago was to underestimate the continuing damage to the economy from the mortgage crisis.

No sh*t.

BLS reports:

The Labor Department said Friday that the nation’s employers added 120,000 jobs last month, after adding 100,000 jobs in October. The unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent, after having been mired around 9 percent for most of 2011.

November’s jobless rate was the lowest recorded since March 2009. The rate fell partly because more workers got jobs, but also because about 315,000 workers dropped out of the labor force, and the jobless rate counts only people who are actively looking for work.

Open Thread.

Busy so light posting at best today.

Open Thread.

Open Thread.

Banksters in trouble? Have some cash:

The Federal Reserve moved Wednesday with other major central banks to buttress the financial system by increasing the availability of dollars outside the United States, reflecting growing concern about the fallout of the European debt crisis.

The banks announced that they would reduce by roughly half the cost of an existing program under which banks in foreign countries can borrow dollars from their own central banks, which in turn get those dollars from the Fed.

I support this policy, but think that spreading the free money around to the "little people" is just as important. Also too, fiscal stimulus.

Via Glenn Greenwald, Ruth Marcus reveals again something is not right with her:

Emma Sullivan, you’re lucky you’re not my daughter. . . . If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smart­alecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip. . . .

Marcus states that "I may sound alarmingly crotchety here, but something is upside down in the modern world, which has transformed Sullivan into an unlikely Internet celebrity and heroine of the liberal blogosphere[.]" You don't sound crotchety Marcus, you sound insane. Sullivan was too mean in her tweet about a politician? And you claim to cover these people?

Something is upside down in this world when a so called journalist can get this up in arms over a tweet that is disrespectful to a pol while being just fine with the past decade in Washington, DC.

Yes indeed, Emma Sullivan is VERY lucky Ruth Marcus is not her mother. She has a chance of having a moral compass and sense of what matters in this world because of that.

Speaking for me only

Of all the political events in Gandhi’s life, perhaps none is more famous than the Salt March of 1930. That theatrical act of defiance—in protest of the heavy tax on salt imposed by the British in India—catapulted Gandhi to new heights in his political career, as the image of this frail individual challenging a mighty empire captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of people around the world. [Emphasis supplied] - Ian Desai, Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2010

Gandhi would reject the division between the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Gandhi did not believe in enemies: he worked on the premise that solutions emerged only from cooperation. [. . .] Noncooperation is best understood as an invitation to cooperate. “We are the 100 percent” may not make for a dramatic slogan, but from Gandhi’s perspective, it is the only way to achieve true and lasting change in society. - Ian Desai, November 30, 2011 New York Times Op-Ed

I think Desai might better understand the situation if he thought of the 99%-1% argument as one of a 1% empire. The 1% of course are not the enemy, and I doubt anyone in the Occupy movement is thinking of them as enemies. The 1% is, though, an empire - a plutocratic empire that controls the workings of our institutions. The Occupy movement is engaged in a campaign of noncooperation with the 1% empire. Thus, Occupy shares Gandhi's view, as described by Desai:

[P]olitical freedom [. . .] to Gandhi implied the ability of a society’s system of self-governance to serve the interest of its citizens completely and without corruption.

That seems to me to express, in a nutshell, the ethos of the Occupy movement. It seems hard to imagine Gandhi would disagree with that tenet of the Occupy movement. More . . .

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It's time for Key West and the 29th annual NORML Legal Conference. For those who haven't been to Key West, also known as the Conch Republic, it is a tiny treasure only 4 miles long, 2 miles wide and 90 miles from Cuba. It is the southernmost point in the U.S. and about as laid back as you can get. There's lots of pirates. And you can't beat the weather.

Big Tent Democrat will be around, I may pop in now and then, and we'll have our usual open threads like this one, all topics welcome.

Via John Cole, funny Gawker:

Sullivan writes: "No one is arguing that "that black people are dumber than white," just that the distribution of IQ is slightly different among different racial populations, and these differences also hold true for all broad racial groups[.]"

Translation: "No one is arguing that black people are stupider than white people, just that black people are stupider than white people in a slightly more complicated way."

Standard deviation!!!!

Speaking for me only