Morning No: No Reserve

by: Natasha Chart

Mon Sep 28, 2009 at 06:00

- Grayson continued looking into the behavior of the Fed last week, questioning their general counsel on conducting GAO audits of the Fed and those empowered to act on their behalf to spend the money US taxpayers coughed up to let them throw around without oversight.

- Crazy conservatives make wild, wild claims about how "regulations" are the root of all evil, costing businesses all kinds of money. Funny how they never seem to worry about unregulated businesses stealing wages, wrecking people's health and selling defective products to an even greater degree than the regulated ones, and thus extracting huge amounts of wealth from individuals. Yeah, funny, ha ha.

- Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, says that we shouldn't expect the dollar to continue as the world's reserve currency indefinitely.

- Dear The Government, we'd like unemployment to drop and for you to make sure that we will all, always, have healthcare, before you go proclaiming willy-nilly that 'the country' is out of the woods re this whole Great Recession thing. You mostly don't seem to care about household level losses of opportunity and profit, or general misery and fear, but look, the people who live in our households really, really do. Kissy the face, n.

- The interesting thing about making abortion illegal is that it doesn't make it more rare, just more expensive and difficult, as Australians have found. This has been highlighted recently by the case of Tegan Leach, a young Australian woman on trial for inducing a chemical abortion.

- Scientists look to establish safe operating limits for humanity that would allow the preservation of our habitat, and the analysis tool is generating a lot of discussion. In any case, it is a problem that focusing on upper limits seems to give policymakers the green light to believe that damaging the environment below that threshhold is less dangerous than it is.

- The GOP does favor a public option. For homeowners' flood insurance. Too bad people aren't as important as houses.

- It's mostly optional to check luggage on planes, except that it's a pain in the rear (not to mention expensive and environmentally irresponsible) to have an entire duplicate set of toiletries in 2 oz. or under sizes packed in a specific size ziploc bag that isn't sturdy enough to really protect your clothing in the event of minor spills. Hence, the airlines have a captive audience for these ridiculous baggage handling fees. I almost never checked bags before the federal government decided that it was possible to hide the smell of *ing acetone. If the Obama administration would repeal the stupid security theater provisions of our air travel standards, I bet they'd see a 10 percent approval bump pretty much immediately. (Via)

- And now, for something completely mindblowing, I give you a slide show that has to be seen to be believed, via @Mlsif:

Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.