Hank Kalet

The lights have flickered a few times and my radio went dead twice. It is almost 3 p.m. on Monday, and Hurricane Sandy is bearing down.

Looking out the window, I can see the sheets of rain coming at 45-degree angles. The leaves are being ripped from the trees. And, as my friend Megan said to me on Facebook, the trees are doing their happy dances (or should it be “unhappy dances”?).

This is just the beginning.

I’ve avoided watching TV for the past few hours, preferring to hear from friends on Facebook and Twitter how things are going. TV news has been in sensationalist mode since it became apparent that this storm was going to hit New Jersey and New York. Not to underplay what we are dealing with and will be for the next couple of days, but the tone of coverage was over the top and alarmist.

More straightforward reporting would have been useful, and we could have done without the various experts recruited to do analysis.

The reality is this: Hurricane Sandy is a big, nasty storm. There are dangerous winds expected and lots of rain and the potential for flooding in some areas, a softening of ground in most areas that likely will lead to downed trees and lost power. We all needed to take precautions, including having bottled water on hand, flashlights, etc. Those in low-lying areas needed to get to high ground, with their pets, and then we just ride it out. There’s not much else we can do.

This is a brilliant bit of satire that gets at the core of the GOP’s regressive politics.

Junk bonds are back, which is bad news for the economy.

As The New York Times reports,

Companies with junk credit ratings have been increasingly issuing bonds for riskier purposes that could hinder their ability to pay back bondholders.

Demand for junk bonds has touched record levels this year as investors reach for their rich yields, a stark contrast to the meager returns available on Treasury securities and money market accounts. But the voracious demand has allowed companies to easily raise money for things that may actually end up weakening them.

Junk bonds, also called high-yield bonds, tend to offer higher yields when they pay off but carry significantly higher risk of default. The problem is not the bonds themselves, but the way they tend to be used — to financed forced takeovers that strip value from the company taken over, to fund the collateralized-debt obligations at the center of the 2008 crash and, as they are being used now, to pay off investors without thought to what they will do to the long-term health of the company.

And companies have been using more of the proceeds for the sorts of risky projects that were common before the financial crisis and in the go-go days of the 1980s — paying dividends to private equity owners and financing mergers and leveraged buyouts.

Jo-Ann Stores and Petco, for instance, both with junk ratings of CCC, sold a combined $875 million of bonds this month, with some of the money set to quickly leave the companies through dividend payments to their private equity owners. Many analysts say that the practice can hurt the financial health of the companies by increasing their regular interest payments to bondholders without strengthening the underlying business.

Basically, the companies are adding debt without adding value, which at some point is going to come back to haunt them — and us.

Gail Collins neatly sums up something I’ve been saying for a while: You are either pro-life with no exceptions or you are pro-choice. There can be no middle ground:

The idea of banning abortion except for rape and incest cases makes anti-choice politicians sound more evenhanded, but it doesn’t actually make much sense. If you believe life begins at conception, then that’s a life, and you should try to convince women not to terminate any pregnancy, no matter what the cause. Our difference of opinion is over whether you can impose your beliefs with the threat of cops and penitentiaries.

And if rape victims deserve exemptions because their situation is dire, what about other women with unwanted pregnancies and terrible stories? The real crime of people like Mourdock and Akin is that their inartful language throws a sudden stark light on a stance that sounds so unthreatening when a candidate simply says: “I’m pro-life.”

Pretty simple, don’t you think?

“even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen.”

This goes beyond the pro-life position to one in which he’s justifying the rape as god’s will. It is a truly disturbing comment that is completely indefensible.

Add Sarah Palin to the list, thanks to her racially charged attack on Obama. Then again, she’s been on this list all along, with notable race-baiters like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump.

As for Trump, he made another in a long line of crazy proposals and claims, today offering a donation to charity in exchange for President Obama’s college transcripts and passport records.

What ever you think of the president, this obsession with his legitimacy is scary and has everything to do with his race. There remains an disturbingly large minority of Americans — most of whom affiliate with the GOP — who refuse to accept that a black man can or should be president. This unwillingness has been translated into a paranoia about birth certificates and official records that can not be dispelled no matter what kind of documentation is provided.

That these kinds of delusional ravings now come from the GOP mainstream is terrifying — and should be an indictment of a party that probably should go the way of the Whigs.