WONKESS

Food Matters...

h/t Cage Free Family

The Faux-gument of Borrower Responsibility...

I'm getting pretty sick of the twin argument I hear from conservatives about "caveat emptor" on the one hand and "personal responsibility" on the other.  I believe the premise is: (1) anyone who even has a whiff of having entered into a sub-prime or alt-A mortgage who is now in near or potential default is personally reckless regardless of the marketing techniques used by the realtor/mortgage originator because they should have done the appropriate due diligence before entering into the contract, (2) that they shouldn't be rescued by anyone, and especially not by taxpayer dollars, because by entering into the mortgage contract, they now have an obligation to perform and besides, (3) anyone who is near default must have bought above their means, and they should never have bought beyond their means in the first place.

This is a non-sequitor as far as I'm concerned, because it mixes the legalistic, on the one hand, with the moralistic on the other. 

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding out there of the concept of CONTRACTS.  The whole point of the contract was to take the moral out of the equation, understanding that different individuals have different moral standards, which can be attributable to different upbringings, different cultural backgrounds or simply because someone is evil.  A contract is an agreement that two parties enter into, and the inducement (for both sides) to enter into the contract are the specific terms of the contract.  Get that?  It's the fact that a party likes the TERMS of a contract that makes him enter the it, not because of some nebulous sense of duty, or obligation.

The most important thing to keep in mind, then, is that the TERMS of a contract should always include specific provisions regarding what happens if one side of the contract decides, in fact, to not fulfill his contract.  Now a contract that contains no such terms will not fail for such absence, but it is then understood that the parties to the contract are willing to accept that they will get nothing as compensation for the failure of the other party to perform.  Now there is a large and complicated body of law that has to do with how to deal equitably for the situation where there is a failure to compensate for service already rendered, but that is not the situation we face in a mortgage contract.

Mortgage contracts have all sorts of built in terms that are precisely meant to deal with the possibility of the mortgage-holder not meeting their payment obligations.  Traditionally, this has included requiring a down-payment and holding a security interest in the underlying house, backed by checks to determine the credit-worthiness (and likelihood of continued credit-worthiness) of the borrowing party.  These "safe-guards" are meant to give the mortgage-holder an economic incentive (and not just a moral one) to perform. 

It was beyond dumb for originators to give mortages with no-down payment, relying purely on the value of the underlying real estate as a buffer against mortgage default.  But, as wew have been told, this was entirely due to the fact that with the pooling and bundling of mortgages into securities and their derivatives, the risk was passed ever higher, with no one attending to the number one rule of lending money - do your due diligence. 

I don't know why Americans so enjoy righteous indignation against their fellow Americans, relative to the corporations.  Or maybe we are so frustrated at the impotence we feel when we learn that the largest benefactors of the government's largess to AIG is... Goldman Sachs, that we can't help but want to stick it to the little irresponsible guy (as a proxy for the big huge irresponsible asshats that brought this pox upon our house). 

It bears remembering that the banks stand to gain as much from a government supported mortgage bailout as the individual irresponsible homeowner.  Foreclosures are notoriously costly, and recovery percentages poor.  A renegotiated rate for near-foreclosure homeowners is also far more beneficial to the banks than to the mortgage holder, who, in the majority of cases, is still paying for a house that is worth somewhat to much less than the attached mortgage, even if it is at a better interest rate.  In other words, if you want to voice some anger regarding this mortgage bailout, direct it at the right party(s).

And it is certainly the preferred bank plan, when the alternate is a court-determined cram-down (which is a bankruptcy procedure whereby a court will effectively force the bank to accept a lower principal based on a "more appropriate" valuation of home prices).   I'm not a fan of the cramdown for administrative reasons: it irks my sensibilities to use the legal regime to change the terms of the contract in a way that is clearly beneficial to one party over the other, and it is just one of those slippery slope roads you might not want to go down.  On the other hand, given that the very recent 2005 bankruptcy rules effectively screwed over all consumers holding debt, yet the consumer had no say in it, you might argue what's good for the goose...

Kick Ass...

Yeah, I'm getting really bad at this updating my blog thing.  Don't blame me.  I'm taking a class online for a master's degree (don't ask, long story, and no, it's not econ (I wish)) and the class is kicking my ass.  I'm so tired, I'm even finding it hard to be hatin' Bernanke, Geithner et al...

Foreclosure Alley...

This is so incredibly sad:

Inland Empire is pretty much the poster child for the foreclosure crisis. SoCal Connected tracked down some surreal sights associated with the crisis...

Stiglitz on the Financial System...

Holy Cow... This is such a friggin' good article (h/t Jesse's Cafe) and it goes to my Credit discussion.

Financial markets have been likened to the brain of the economy. They are supposed to allocate capital and manage risk. When they do their job well, economies prosper. When they do their job badly, as we are once again learning, everyone suffers. Financial markets are amply rewarded for their work--in recent years, they have received over 30 percent of corporate profits--and the standard mantra in economics was that these rewards were commensurate with their social return...

The task of unraveling all that went wrong in our financial system is a difficult one, but in essence the financial system's latest innovation was to devise fee structures that were often far from transparent and that allowed it to generate enormous profits--private rewards that were not commensurate with social benefits. The imperfections of information (resulting from the non-transparency) led to imperfections in competition, helping to explain why the usual maxim that competition drives profits to zero seemed not to hold....  One should have suspected that something was wrong with the economic system when millions of Americans owed billions to credit card companies and banks in "late fees," "penalties," and a variety of other charges, transforming a high annual interest rate of 20 percent into a truly usurious effective interest rate of 100 percent or more for those who fell behind in their payments.

To put it another way, had those in the financial sector allocated capital and risk in a way that fueled the economy, they would have had handsome profits. But they wanted more, and so established incentive structures that encouraged gambling. If they gambled and won, they could walk away with a share of the profits. If they gambled and lost, the investors would bear the consequences.... The financial-system-as-casino... is a negative-sum game. Those on Wall Street may have walked off with billions, but those billions are dwarfed by the costs to be paid by the rest of us. Some have lost their homes and life savings. Others are innocent bystanders who resisted the false promises of the mortgage brokers and the credit card companies, but now find themselves out of jobs as the economy weakens.

In short, the problem with the U.S. economy is not that we have allocated too many resources to the "soft" areas and too few to the "hard." It is not necessarily that we have allocated too many resources to the financial sector and rewarded it too generously--though a strong argument could be put forward to that effect. It is that too little effort was devoted to managing real risks that are important--enabling ordinary Americans to stay in their homes in the face of economic vicissitudes--and that too much effort went into creating financial products that enhanced risk. Too much energy has been spent trying to make an easy buck; too much effort has been devoted to increasing profits and not enough to increasing real wealth, whether that wealth comes from manufacturing or new ideas. (emphasis mine)

It's nice to hear a Nobel Prize winner thinking along the same lines as myself.  But it also reinforces my fear that this is too little notice, too late.

A long time ago, when I worked for a HUGE CORPORATION, we did one of those corporate exercises where we learned about the feedback mechanisms, including negative feedback, which reduces output but may be necessary to stabilize the system.  IOW, on some level, rather than casting pejoratives on the current slew of doom-n-gloom economists (like Roubini and Stiglitz w/ this article), we should simply come to the realization that their prophetic economic downturns (the real ones, not like the blips of  92 and 01) are simply necessary negative feedbacks.  There needs to be a purging of the system in order to re-stabilize the system.  A global recession, or even a localized one, will wean Americans off the teat of credit (man, I'm crass today) and get our minds off the cultural issues that are so divisive but have SO FRIGGIN LITTLE REAL MEANING IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES. 

Yeah, I hate Sarah Palin.  I hate her w/ a passion (and yes, this is a total non-sequiturious digression).  Because she stands there at the podium, rallying her troops to fight these cultural battles (that I have vowed to stop engaging in.  It's like trolls... you gotta learn to STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS) and ignores the much more real issues that need to be addressed to keep this country strong (economy, economy, economy, education, senior entitlements and health care - and only b/c these are damn vital to how the economy is going to turn out).

But at least I now understand what the big "C" conservatives are feeling.  Sarah Palin is the Republican's Barack Obama.  So they probably view Obama with the same visceral dread and loathing that I have for Governon Palin.  But I'm a logical being, I can get over this, I can argue myself down from my fur up, claws out, gut reaction... right?

Pbbfftttt...

How Credit Crunched the Middle Class...

If I were a tad better versed in economics, I'm sure I would be able to say this as well as Steve Waldman (pfft, as if!). But I'm doing tadpole economics in a sea of sharks (in power only, not in aggression), so I can't. But he so lyrically says exactly what I'm thinking, every single time:

Credit was the means by which we reconciled the social ideals of America with an economic reality that increasingly resembles a "banana republic". We are making a choice, in how we respond to this crisis, and so far I'd say we are making the wrong choice. We are bailing out creditors and going all personal-responsibility on debtors. We are coddling large institutions of prestige and power, despite their having made allocative errors that would put a Soviet 5-year plan to shame. We applaud the fact that "wage pressures are contained", protecting the macroeconomy of the wealthy from the microeconomy of the middle class. 

I hate the whole Republican attitude of "nation of whiners" and I'm not sure why there are so many who buy into the line. Given the real lack of income progress made by the majority of Americans over the last seven/eight years, it is shocking that there are so many out there who still swear by the whole "pull yourself up by your bootstrap" motto.

Chart lovingly borrowed from the NYTimes.

Here is the deal: look at the first graph.  What you see is that the highest fifth of American households consumes just 47% of their income compared to the middle fifth (who consume 77% of their income) and the lowest fifth (who consume an astounding 182% of their income). 

A couple of interesting asides.  First, this chart ends at 2005, before the most recent run-up of gas and food prices.  Given that the official inflation rate in the US is running in the 5-6% area (and some suggest that inflation is as high as 8%, once you toss out certain metric bending adjustments, such as hedonic pricing), you would have to bump up consumption slightly for each bracket.  These numbers also do not take into account (1) any increases in housing prices due to ARMs adjusting over the past year, which has substantially increased housing costs for many Americans and (2) it also does not take into account the escalating unemployment numbers, which will drive the average income down.  Second, I find that there is an interesting disparity between the supposed average American consumption, which would suggest a savings rate of at between 20-50% among 3/5 of Americans compared to the actual savings rate in the US, which is and has been hovering in negative territory (which is, apparently, also a contentious issue, since the savings rate may or may not include pensions and other retirement savings plans and doesn't include home equity -- except we know how that's going).

Anyways, Waldman believes (as do I) that these numbers are vitally important because they hint at what has prevented furor over the growing income disparity in America.  That even as wages have stagnated for everyone except those in the top 5-20%, absolute consumption has actually kept apace among the different income groups.  And the truth is, most Americans (this one included) often use consumption instead of wages as the gauge of their own economic well-being.  (If I can own that latest Coach bag then I must be doing ok financially.)

Of course, the kind of consumption that these numbers suggest has been supported by easy credit.  Apparently, credit was soooo easy, that creditors were under the false illusion that they never had to be repaid.  And it is this "irresponsibility" that the conservatives seem irasibly focused upon. 

Now don't get me wrong: I don't understand how Americans have sank so far so fast, how we have an entire generation of people who think nothing of being tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.  And I'm not counting the folks who simply found themselves in hard times because of illness or other bad luck, who had to rely on easy credit to get them out of a jam.  I'm mostly thinking about those who thought it was worth a debt burden to own the latest model Suburban, iPhone or whatever monster machine most in vogue.  On the other hand, we are too quick to forget that on the other side of the debt equation were financial companies that made fistfuls of cash (on paper) from one-off fees and usurious interest rates.  As any credit card company will tell you, they don't make money off the rich, who tend to make their payments on time, qualify for low interest rates and, worst of all, never incur the penalties and extra interest charges associated with carrying a balance on their credit cards.  You just know that the incentive system is all wrong when a company can make MORE money off poor people than off the rich.

Now that credit is no longer "easy" and lenders are being told tighten their standards (by their shareholders and by regulators), we are going to face an enormous challenge as a society: what to do with the millions who will shortly have to arrive at the conclusion that they are not in fact the middle class that they had perceived themselves to be?

As Waldman points out: "in a way, the credit crisis comes out of a tension between the broad-middle-class America of our collective imagination and the economically polarized nation we have in fact come to be. We borrowed to finance an illusory Mayberry. The crisis won't be over until this tension is resolved. Either we modify the facts of our economic relations, or we come to terms with a new America more comfortable with distinct and enduring social classes." (emphasis mine)

So what do you think?  How comfortable are you with an America where social classes are far more distinct and less fluid than that which we have all become accustomed to?

Minority SH and the Cross They Bear...

For those who think that the financial markets and a free capitalist system is just great shakes for the average person, consider the following story from the NYTimes about Carl Icahn's behavior as director and majority shareholder at XO Communications.  The system pretends that it protects the minority shareholder, but truth be told, if a sophisticated and ultimately relatively powerful (compared to me, if not to Carl Icahn) shareholder like R2 Investments can't get its fair shakes, what makes you think you can.

I'm back from the Democratic Nation Convention.  It was a mind-blowing experience, and I'm exhausted.  More to come.

To Blame or Not To Blame...

I am not buying anything new to wear to the DNCC.

Not a stitch.  Not a new dress, not a pair of new shoes, nada. 

Ok, so maybe I'm fibbing a bit.  I did buy two scarves about two weeks ago, in an "I can't stand how friggin' cold my office is" moment at H&M for 20 bucks, and I'll be carting those scarves to Denver.  And I also bought a digital voice recorder like a month ago, for my interview with Congresswoman Maloney, which I will also take to Denver.  And finally, if shipping goes my way, I will have a refurbished back-up battery pack for my laptop come tomorrow (why oh why does Murphy's law insist that my computer starts crapping out in every possible way on the eve of one of the most exciting things I've ever done in my life??)

Instead, I hit my storage boxes yesterday, and managed to find: a few tops that I think will work, an old D&G suit that still (barely) fits but might be a touch too warm for the apparent hawtness that is Denver, and a shawl that I can switch in/out and use for the guaranteed to be frigid flight to and from Denver.  Everthing is a bit too tight, a bit worse for the wear, and a bit dated, but I don't think I'll look like a baglady either.

What does this have to do with anything?

Because I have to admit, that while it's easy to sit and talk about the craptastic economy and what a mess Bernanke et al have done in managing things over the past year, it's far more difficult to admit what role I've personally played in the "Peak Credit" tragedy occurring in our own backyard (more on Peak Credit and my new muse, Cassandra, later in this post).  And I've done everything those faceless financial pundits say I've done.

I made a rash decision, with decades-long consequences, to invest in a degree that will become increasingly irrelevant as the state of the country diminishes (law is, after all, national).  I've prided myself on saving above the national average, but then ignored the fact that for the years that I was in law school, I both ate up whatever gains my savings brought me, as well as fell deep into negative net worth territory.  I have coveted the lifestyles of my faster friends, and fell easily into their spendthrift ways, accumulating boxes full of crap that I will never have anything to do with again.  I pretended to be environmental by recycling and buying organic, which were completely and utterly neutralized by my blatant consumerism.

I bought in, hook, line and sinker, and I never even realized it.

So now, I'm trying to step out, but it may be too little too late. 

The United States has $9 trillion dollars in debt.  And if the GSEs need rescuing, our debt will climb.  It may not climb to the full $14 trillion, but it will exceed the 14 figures mark.  I'm reading this wonderful handbook right now: Where Does the Money Go: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis (library copy, of course), and the authors emphasize the difficulty of visualizing something like $9 or $14 trillion dollars.  And the problems that come with this disconnect between reality that is and the reality that we perceive.

Right now, I get a large check from my employer twice a month.  If I just look at that check, I could justify buying almost anything, including all of my favorite things (Nanette Lepore, Christian Laboutin, Philip Lim Chloe...).  That is the reality I could perceive.  But the reality that is... well, that would be the six figure debt, the two children and the extraordinary expense that is their care, and the fact that J and I, now in our early 40s/late 30s, cannot yet afford to buy the roof that is over our heads.  And worse, the reality that is includes the distinct possibility that if the economy is craptastic for much longer, then the six-figure investment we made in my education will not equal much of an investment at all.

We (and by we, I mean WE) are in for a world of pain.

Obama's proposal to increase taxes won't be enough.  It will hardly make a dent.  Because Bush's tax cuts were so large and so deep, we've lived though 8 years of financial complacency.  Behavioral economist will explain how absolutely disastrous the Bush tax cuts were - because people always react far worse to a tax increase than any joy they get from any tax cuts.  And just when we need a government safety net the most, we find ourselves, in the best case scenario, completely beholden to authoritarian governments for credit or, in the worst case scenario, completely insolvent.

Cassandra, of Cassandra does Tokyo, talks about the period of Peak Credit that we have either already or are about to shortly experience.  I've pasted her entire post here, for your consuming pleasure, the emphases are mine, the tears... well, I guess they'll have to be yours (mine have already been shed).

Does Peak Credit inevitably follow piqued credit? Well if you're my age, and you thought so and positioned accordingly, you'd have been bankrupted a very long time ago - possibly as early as the late 1980s. And if you were a glutton for punishment, you'd have been toasted again in 1994, another time in 1998, yet again in 2002, and rubbing one's nose in it, perhaps every year after that until midsummer two-thousand-and-seven. Dog days indeed for those bearish on the ability of the financial system to manufacture, distribute, and service debt, whether in real or nominal terms, or in relation to any measure of the economy or change in the growth thereof.

Yet as pessimistic on its sustainability (and wrong!!) as one would have been in the past, one should now be as optimistic one's assessment that this is The Big One, that we've smacked head-first into the boundary of the maximum amount of debt that can be assumed by households, corporates and governments in our economy and be reasonably sustained with the fruits of our labour, and investment. Actually, I would posit that we long-ago pierced any reasonably sustainable threshold, and only through sheer inertia and the fortuitiousness of pulling of rabbits-out-of-hats have we lasted this long. But it is the anchoring of popular belief in faith and absent solvency from days long passed combined with the extrapolation a series of non-extrapolatable macro income streams which could cause any sensible human being believe or have believed that the boundary lay somewhere in front of us and not far behind us.

Culpability is not singular. Stern-Stewart, investor short-termism and systemic mono-focus, along with greedy managers replete with agent/principal dilemmas must assume blame on the corporate side. Selfish American Voters repeatedly demanding representatives requite incongruous financial goals with cynically lame and unsustainable fiscal policies, along with a near complete detachment from reality in regards to present consumptive desires in relation to both incomes and longer-term savings requirements are just as at fault as the monetary wrecktitude resulting from an unwillingness to accept mild deflation and cyclical recessions where required for reasons that - to this day remain inexplicable given that Continental Europeans seemingly had little difficulty distinguishing a bubble or accepting that both taxes and economic brush-fires are not inherently bad in The Big Picture.

So IF what we are currently witnessing, commonly termed as The Credit Crunch, is in fact, an expression of what I will term Hubbert's financial equivalent - "Peak Credit" phenomena , and IF as I posit, we long ago untethered the financial wagon from the real economic train, what does this mean?

Many things, but first and foremost, that we are at a major and painful inflection that will impose a real Kunstleresque austerity upon Americans converging their desires with their means. In a word, this means "revulsion", a somewhat arcane and long-forgotten term for large-scale write-downs and/or economy-wide elimination of outstanding debt(s). For this reflects the implausibility of servicing, let alone paying off obligations, and the consequences to those whose capital and assets were/are/will be vaporized. It will, undoubtedly, be fought by authorities, with certain costs borne by the state and socialized upon unwitting voters.

Japan wallowed in their own debt-shite for more than decade, and in the US it is (in present political climate of denial) even more natural that attempts to band-aid and stave off the inevitable reality will likewise be tried. In another time and another place, natural growth and demographics might have met inflation somewhere in the middle and the cycle would resume again without massive dislocation.

But this time it is different. This time, the encumbrances are too large. This time, there is competition for markets, and their value propositions are surpassing Americas. This time the patient is too soft, obese, relatively uneducated, faux-faithful, weak, politically compromised, and cronily corrupt. This time, the business cycle is turning dramatically for the worse, wealth effects are only beginning to bite, oil has peaked with a generation of adjustment between any remotely plausibly cost-effective replacement. And competition is even heating up in the emerging world for the remaining high-margin business. This does not sound like an environment that will assist households or government to rebuild balance sheets and make good on obligations without great sacrifice from ordinary people and even greater sacrifices from the monied class. This sounds like an environment where creditors and debtors will be required to sit down and negotiate what can and might plausibly be paid, or converted into equity, or stretch maturity with lower rates - anything to keep it as an "asset" and a performing one.

"Peak Credit", like Peak Oil, thus forlornly reflects the necessity of increasing demand for credit from borrowers to sustain the unsustainable, at precisely the time when supply is constrained and shrinking, for suppliers are squarely confronting the reality that new sources are limited, and in any event, the demanders (even if supplied) have diminishing hope in the current environment of returning what was lent.

Some will think that these ruminations border on the insane. And I will admit that when I walk out of my office door to the local trendy coffee bar, there is scant evidence where I live that Peak Credit is anything but a financial phenomena - limited to the flippers in Vegas or the spec developers in Fla. or CA. But perhaps that's because the most insidious aspect of Peak Credit is its disruption to the chain of dependencies that bore its hallmark over the past two-and-one-half decades.

So inexorable and complete has the rise of credit been in its permeation of every crevice of life that no one blinks when multi-trillion dollar GSE balance sheets are supported by but the thinnest veneer of equity - even AFTER large potentially (no, probably) impermanent increases in underlying asset values; when dogs receive pre-approved credit cards by mail; that its sheer ubiquity produces persistently negative rates of saving; when corporates use leverage in lieu of a margin of balance-sheet safety on the enterprises they are meant to steward in order to conform and placate the markets' twisted short-sighted ideal of optimal capital structure leaving them woefully exposed to cyclical fluctuations; where data-mined models themselves based on limited data replace good common sense; where leaders defer to unsustainable plebeian notions of what constitutes prudent fiscal policy producing errors in judgment that make the trench warfare of the first world war appear sane. If this is what God's country resembles, imagine the financial horror in hell...

"Peak Credit" will wreak as monumental changes upon American consumptive life as Peak Oil, and these cannot help but exert a massive deflationary pull - at least until such time as the parties agree to squarely face reality that confronts them, and in an interconnected world, everyone else.

Econo-Reflux (Redux)...

Here is a scary little blurb on the state of the US economy from the FT.

...further aggressive fiscal easing at the federal level would be risky. If the budget outlook starts to scare the markets and interrupt the flow of foreign capital to the US, the dollar might fall abruptly – worsening the inflation risk and forcing the Fed’s hand on interest rates. The point at which fiscal easing becomes self-cancelling may not be far away.

It is worth remembering where the blame for this neutering of fiscal policy lies: squarely with the Bush administration. At the start of this decade, the budget stood in surplus to the tune of 2.4 per cent of GDP. On unchanged policy, this was expected to grow to a surplus of 4.5 per cent of GDP by 2008. This year’s actual deficit of 3 per cent of GDP therefore represents a worsening of more than 7 per cent of GDP, or roughly $1,000bn. Almost all of this deterioration is due to policy: to tax cuts, spending increases, and their associated debt-service costs.

That projected surplus was a priceless gift to the White House. It offered the Bush administration ample scope for outlays on homeland security and other unforeseen priorities, and moderate tax cuts as well, all within a budget balanced over the course of the business cycle. Instead, the administration knowingly opted for outrageous fiscal excess – adding insult to injury with its phoney tax-cut sunset provisions, designed for no other purpose than to disguise the long-term fiscal implications. Eight years on, this startling record of fiscal irresponsibility has all but taken fiscal policy off the table as an available response to the slowdown.

Gods... is it possible to hate someone more than I hate W?  Because this summarizes why, in some respects, all politics is shat right now.  And why Obama might as well = McSame when it comes to the economy.  We have never been so stuck in a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario as we are today.

So the Fed fund rate stays stuck at 2%, because on the one hand, if we raise it, that will only worsen the credit crunch, there will be less liquidity, companies can't raise capital, investment stalls, MAYHEM!  CATASTROPHE!  And on the other hand, if we lower it, then there will be no incentive to save (and if anything, my previous post , the value of the dollar drops, inflation wreaks havoc on the American consumer, MAYHEM!  CATASTROPHE!

It's like this:

 

THAT'S HAWT.  (H/T Big Picture)

And... oh... I soooo want to hate Greenspan (if he weren't just so cerebrally yummy) except he did make a half-hearted attempt to jack up the interest rates (to 5 3/4?) after it turned out that the tech bust was not some unstoppable contagion.  Which Ben Benedict-nanke, the traitor, wasted in a matter of minutes.  He has definitely earned my eternal ire.

Dooce = Gollum...

A part of me is really glad that I didn't go to blogher.  Specifically, the part of me that finds this revolting (nb: be forewarned, serious drama involved).

So, yeah, dooce is all, I can support my family on my blog and I'm an entry in urbandictionary, but boy-oh-boy, check out the hipper-than-thou attitude.  The girl needs to relocate to Brooklyn, pronto.  Then she can jet and hang with Victoria, and Katie, and that dame-of-hipper-than-thou-ness, Gwenyth.

Because if you put it out there, and you're notorious for dishing it, donja think you should be able to take it, just a little bit?  Especially when the reference was all flattering as hell, and from the nicest southern gal that side of the Mason-Dixon. 

Yeah, way to reveal your Mormon upbringing a little more, Dooce.  If you are a hobbit, you're of the gollum variety: mystical and not at all awesome. *Yethssssss.... my preciouthsssss*