I Tell You, I Tell You, I Tell You...

[womzilla]

we must blog.

Billmon, proprietor of Whiskey Bar, has been on fire for the last few days:

• Taking A Baath:

  I don't know who's calling these shots--Bremer, the Pentagon or the White House--but whoever it is, their behavior is starting to remind me of a behavioral pattern common among less sophisticated investors. Rattled by a sudden, unexpected drop in the market, they sell. When the market rebounds (as it has a tendency to do), they buy--usually at about the point the recovery falters and the market heads back down. Then they sell again, taking another loss.
  
  This is called getting "whipsawed." And right now, it looks to me like the Coalition may be whipsawing its way into an even deeper hole in the ground.




• Earth Day:

  Phillips: "Are you saying this administration just doesn't care about air pollution?"
  
  Buckheit: "Yes. I'm saying this administration has decided to put the economic interests of the coal fired power plants ahead of the public interests in reducing air pollution."
  
  Phillips: "That's a pretty serious allegation."
  
  Buckheit: "Well, I was the head of the air enforcement division up until a couple weeks ago and I watched it happen."




• Desert Barbarossa:
  

  Iraq, like Poland, was born encircled--with six different nations, including two large, non-Arab regional powers, on its borders. Even if you didn't know anything about Iraq's tortured history and its many ethnic and religious divisions, you'd be hard pressed not to conclude that defending the country against external threats would be extremely difficult, and probably impossible, and that a breakdown of political and military control within its borders would create enormous security risks both for its occupiers and for its neighbors. . . .
  
  This chain of thought left me with a joke, dating from World War II, which I picked up somewhere. It seems a German general and his mistress are indulging in a little pillow talk one night, when he lets slip the fact that the Fuehrer has decided to invade the Soviet Union--Operation Barbarossa.
  
  The mistress, who's no smarter than she needs to be, is a little vague on the details of European geography. So the general takes her into his study and shows her his wall map. He points out the enormous red expanse of the USSR, and the smallish brown patch that is Germany.
  
  The mistress examines the map with dismay, then worriedly asks her paramour: "But liebling, has the Fuehrer seen this map?"

And more. If you can stomach to read politics, you should read him.