All You Have to Do Is Throw Money, Throw Money.

The end times.

Bear Sterns finally decided to offer the hat to the highest bidder after homeowners called their bluff. As always, the CJR posted the best roundup of the fall of the suspenders-and-cigars firm's newspaper coverage:

As far as government bailouts go, this one could be worse. We’re glad to see the government did not bailout Bear Stearns shareholders, who are already issuing “howls of protests,” the WSJ reports. The paper quotes one employee (Bear Stearns’ employees own one-third of the firm’s shares) who doesn’t get it:

“I’ve got to think we can get more in a liquidation, I’m not selling my shares, this price is dramatically less than the book value Alan Schwartz told us the company is worth,” said a midlevel Bear Stearns executive. “The building is worth $8 a share.”

The building may be worth $8 a share but the rest of the company is worth negative dollars a share, dude.

Turns out they were to busy playing bridge while their firm went to the poor house. Which brings us to the levity of the situation, the red portion in the chart above shows the difference in Bear Stern's stock price from last friday to this morning, and really drives home how dire the situation is. Basically, Bear Sterns went looking for buyers, found one in the historically philanthropic J.P. Morgan and sold for mere pennies (or $2 a share). Its scarier than this everyday story, though, because the fed threw $30 Billion at the merger to leverage debt effectively in the process nationalizing the risk. J.P. Morgan will win big in this deal because the risk is placed on the taxpayers -- the Fed's loan will most likely never be paid -- and it gets at the least a very prime piece of commercial real estate. And as we dig deeper we see a Fed bailout broadcasting a message of laziness about inflation, a message arguing for a company asleep at the wheel, and one too big to fail. Worst of all, the already stretched taxpayer, facing increased threat of foreclosure, just saved the fuckers who financed their debt in the first place.

Straw Polls and Armchair Analysis.

I've been wondering exactly what the two party's turnout has been, and finding a drought of journalism on the story -- on a national scale; there are many like this -- so, I decided to boot up the good old Excel and spend a bit crunching some numbers. Call it an experiment in Computer Assisted Journalism, I hear it's all the rage. The New York Times out of all of the leading websites -- CNN, The Washington Post, etc. -- has the most efficient web interface for this. Their Primary schedule categorizes the format of each state's election format, whether a primary or a caucus, and because of the trouble with counting voter turnout in caucuses -- see the brouhaha over Nevada's -- I did not include them in my totals.

So far it looks like the Democrats are leading by a considerable margin in pure voter turnout. According to my numbers they have seen close to 14 million participate in the primaries, while the Republicans are lagging at only around 9 million. This is a heartening result, and of course is entirely unscientific; for example, in California, a heavily democratic state, the total Democratic turnout was close to 2 million more than the Republicans managed to poll which skews these partial results heavily. If we ignore california entirely so as to remove some bias, the split is closer 6 million for the republicans to 8 for the Democrats. The numbers for each state are below:

State	Democratic Turnout	Republican Turnout	Margin
New Hampshire	287,322	238,548	48,774
South Carolina	532,227	431,196	101,031
Alabama	542,511	567,291	24,780
Arizona	376,926	451,641	74,715
Arkansas	287,025	209,543	77,482
California	4,059,713	2,323,663	1,736,050
Connecticut	353,515	151,212	202,303
Deleware	96,341	50,237	46,104
Georgia	1,054,799	960,351	94,448
Massachussetts	1,254,537	497,531	757,006
Missouri	823,503	589,289	234,214
New Jersey	1,115,188	558,201	556,987
New York	1,747,978	606,479	1,141,499
Oklahoma	417,096	333,602	83,494
Tennessee	618,723	549,515	69,208
Utah	124,307	284,790	160,483
Totals	13,691,711	8,803,089	4,888,622

Of course, this is a big hay bale of analysis because these primaries were completely separate: neither party was in contest with the other, so the votes are skewed by statistical anomalies too complex to fathom (some Republicans could've voted in the far more media centric Democratic race for kicks). It's still an interesting bit to figure out.