The web is host to many miracles, small and large.

In chapter 153,479,934 of the web’s weird, wired wonderfulness, my buddy Tony Pierce helps teach one Kareem Abdul-Jabbar how to blog.

“Gore and Pelosi See Role as Honest Brokers in Tight Contest.”

The Onion?

No, front page, right column of the New York Times.

Patrick Ruffini, one of the tiny handful of GOP strategists who get online and social media, is gleefully pushing for Ron Paul’s primary defeat.

Here’s what Ron Paul says about TX-14: ‘If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee.’ Give what you can. Ron Paul is running scared ‘ using his Presidential campaign’s donors’ money to subsidize a desperate last-minute attempt to save his Congressional seat.

Ron Paul is, of course, the GOP presidential candidate who did not write the anti-Semitic, racists, paranoid bile that appeared in his eponymous newsletters for several decades.

Christopher Hitchens in the March Atlantic:

In his essay on Malinowski, Ernest Gellner wrote of how the borderline and marginal peoples of Austria-Hungary needed three things from their benign, whiskered old monarch. The required insurance against mutual fratricide, protection of local and eccentric cultures and guarantees against the ambitions of Germany and Russia. By giving way first to micro and then to macro anti-Semitism, not only did this fair approximation of a civilization lose its best minds; it lost its collective min, and thus managed to invite the two worst possible fates by beckoning on first a German and then a Russian imperium.”

Oceana, one of the first causes to buy blogads way back in 2003, dreamed up this clever and, ultimately, sad spot…

Bill Gross, biggest bond fund manager in the world, is skeptical of bond insurer bailouts too:

That the monolines could shoulder this modern-day burden like a classical Greek Atlas was dubious from the start. How could Ambac, through the magic of its triple-A rating, with equity capital of less than $5bn (£2.5bn), insure the debt of the state of California, the world’s sixth-largest economy? How could an investor in California’s municipal bonds be comforted by a company that during a potential liquidity crisis might find the capital markets closed to it, versus the nation’s largest state with its obvious ongoing taxing authority? Apply the same logic to the gargantuan size of the asset-backed market it has insured in recent years – subprimes and CDOs in the trillions of dollars – and you must come to the same logical conclusion: this is absurd. It is as if Barney Fife, television’s Sheriff of Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show , promised to bring law and order to the entire country.

… the sense of stability imparted to an oligopolistic industry with visible flaws is not likely to last, nor may the hope for a return to economic growth of recent years. The modern US financed-based economy has a striking resemblance to Barney Fife, guaranteeing global prosperity without the productive industrial-based firepower to back it up. Neither ultra-low interest rates or tax rebates, nor investor-led and authority-based monoline bailouts are likely to change that significantly during the next few years.

Meanwhile, the chief of Germany’s biggest bank is sounding the alarm also, talking to Bloomberg TV.

Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann said rating downgrades for bond insurers pose risks that could match the U.S. subprime market collapse.

“It could be a tsunami-like event comparable to subprime,” Ackermann said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Frankfurt today. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest bank, is “well positioned” on its risk from bond insurers, he said.

Bond investors stand to lose $200 billion should MBIA Inc., Ambac Financial Group Inc. and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. forfeit their AAA grades because of declines in mortgage-backed securities they insure, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Ratings on $2.4 trillion of debt that the industry guarantees would be thrown into doubt.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton lent her campaign $5 million late last month as Barack Obama outraised and outspent her in the Democratic presidential race,” says the AP.

Where did HRC accumulate this money amid all her years of public service? I’m not suggesting the money is ill-gotten, but that some of it might come from a joint bank account with her husband. She did get an

$8 million book advance in 2000, but after taxes that number drops to roughly $4 million. Maybe that money was shrewdly invested in post-bubble Internet stocks that were in HRC’s name only.

If not, headlines might read “Hillary and Bill” loan campaign $5 million. I assume all this will be covered in disclosure documents. I realize that when Romney gives his campaign tens of millions from a bank accounts held jointly with his spouse, the headlines don’t read “Mitt and Ann invest in campaign,” but Bill Clinton makes the story more complex. And the headlines for Romney should be corrected too.

I liked Hillary a lot when I saw her speak at YearlyKos in Chicago last August, but I think she’d do better, now and in the Whitehouse, if she wasn’t shadowed (or overshadowed) by big Bill.

Walmart’s January same-store sales were just +1% year-over-year. That equals -3% in real terms. And that means down 10% relative to WM’s historic growth.

Imagine GDP down 10%.

?!$%

This is the kind of quite Thursday when more people throw in the towel and trickle of sellers becomes a gusher as the day passes.

Gee, what if these rate cuts don’t pull us out of the spin. Why did commercial paper rates for XYZ Corp just jump 75 bp?

Cognitive dissonance starts to slip, the pixels re-arrange themselves and the pretty lady becomes a hag.