So now here he is, reminding everyone that he was a tough cop before being a tough cop was cool, and he’s so plugged into the media that he’s taking swings at the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs (GS) and all that. He knows that the key is to become a hero of the internet, blog denizens that eat this stuff up and that from this base of support he’ll push through and be a full-on, respected politician again. The mainstream media will be forced to take him seriously. Who knows if he’ll run for office again. It doesn’t really matter. The man is a master comeback specialist and everyone should take a lesson.  So what next? Spitzer should refashion himself as a shadow prosecutor, or shadow inspector general—he should be to Goldman Sachs what Ralph Nader was to General Motors. (Goldman isn’t the only bank that profited wrongly from the AIG bailout, but it stands as a clear and handy surrogate for a vast and difficult-to-comprehend industry; Nader’s auto-safety campaign focused on GM’s Corvair, but all cars now have seatbelts.) . . .  We hope he’s learned something from his trials and stays in the private sector—he should launch a nonprofit focused on monitoring the bailout along the lines of CREW or any of Nader’s organizations and apply his prosecutorial gifts to civil litigation in the public interest, aimed at getting documentary evidence through the discovery process of how banks like Goldman gamed the system and harvested our money into profits. It’d be the best way he can do penance for his misdeeds and satisfy his own desire for glory and attention.  Every time we hear the phrase “the United States of Goldman Sachs” we shake our heads in wonder. Every ninth-grader knows that the U.S. government consists of three branches. Goldman owns just one of these outright; the second we simply rent, and the third we have no interest in at all. (Note there isn’t a single former Goldman employee on the Supreme Court.)  The first will be for new home sales, housing starts and residential investment. The second bottom will be for prices. Sometimes these bottoms can happen years apart. I think it is likely that we’ve seen the bottom for new home sales and single family starts, but not for prices.  It is way too early to try to call the bottom in prices. House prices will probably fall for another year or more. My original prediction (a few years ago) was that real house prices would fall for 5 to 7 years (after 2005), and we could start looking for a bottom in the 2010 to 2012 time frame for the bubble areas. That still seems reasonable to me.  Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama’s place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it. The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear. . . .  Barack Obama may prefer European-style socialized health care. He may consider himself a citizen of the Earth and sometimes address his audiences as “people of the world,” as though he were born not in another country but on another planet. Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the U.S.A.  Calderon has been so caught up in the day-to-day fight that he’s never answered the questions “What does victory look like?” or “What is the 5-10 year plan?” or “What is Mexico trying to accomplish?” Calderon began his fight against cartels without a plan for victory. He just started fighting because he saw a threat and violence. Throughout the past two years, instead of pro-actively implementing a plan, Calderon has tended to react to violence, sending thousands more troops to Juarez, Michoacan and elsewhere following surges in violence from the cartels.  That silence is understandable. Because even if Khamenei does not say it, giving up Ahmadinejad means, “I was wrong.” Wrong to push so hard on the Presidential election result, wrong not to extend an hand to the Green Movement, wrong to let arrests and beatings and killings spiral.  That silence cannot be maintained, however. The President’s inauguration is in eight days. And by that point, Khamenei either has to disown his boy or embrace him, albeit while reminding Ahmadinejad not to stray again.  So far, the Supreme Leader has blundered, both in perception and strategy, by being too firm in his support of the President. Does he dare risk hugging Mahmoud to the point where he goes down with him?
The former New York governor is back, sort of; Goldman Sachs, Iran, birthers, Mexican drug war and more.