Year: 2011

OK, Maybe She Has a Chance

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Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign raised $3.15 million in the 3rd quarter, more than double Wall Street darling Scott Brown’s haul of $1.55 million:

 Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren is off to a quick start when it comes to raising money for her Senate campaign in Massachusetts, with a debut total — $3.15 million — that may even out-perform some of the Republican candidates for president.

Warren, who helped set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is a favorite candidate among progressives, announced the impressive third-quarter haul in an email to her supporters Monday. She said that 96% of the contributions came in donations of $100 or less.

Note that, “Most of the money was raised since she formally joined the race for the Democratic nomination in mid-September.”

You gotta figure that she’s going to get a lot of sweat equity out of her supporters as well.

I think that the primary campaign is basically over, but I still think that Scott Brown, particularly with the enthusiastic backing of the banksters, and what will surely be tepid support from the Wall Street living Democratic establishment *cough* Obama *cough* will be a though nut to crack.

But I am no longer making a prediction about the outcome.

Go Read the Shrill One

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Krugman is brilliant today:

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Go read the rest.

As an aside, the reaction of the 1% does not reflect the positions of people who feel that they truly deserve their prestige and power.

Deep down, they know that they are parasitic frauds, and they are terrified at being exposed.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot … Little Green Footballs?!?!?!

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Here is a moment of WTF for you, Charles Johnson of the right wing cesspool Little Green Footballs is calling out the so-called Values Voters summit as a bunch of bigoted haters:

If there’s one right wing event that sums up the reasons why I ran screaming away from these lunatics more than any other, it’s the Values Voter Summit, put on every year by a devil’s brew of extreme religious fanatics preaching virulent hatred against everyone who isn’t them.

At the Values Voter Summit, you’ll find every sick and twisted right wing meme in existence; open racism, white supremacists, theocrats (real ones, who want to literally replace the Constitution with the Bible), creationists, historical revisionists, End Times believers, hard core misogynists, deranged homophobia and bigotry of all kinds. And those are just the speakers.

This year, as in every year, it’s attended by all the major Republican politicians, sucking up to these freaks for the almighty vote — because the haters have a dedicated base of deluded drones. Their votes can make a difference for Republicans, and the hate groups are always trying to force their primitive beliefs on the rest of America. It’s a match made in hell.

If the Republican party base, at least as understood by the Republican Presidential candidates, is too crazy for LGF, we are in a world of hurt.

Bank Failures over the Past Two Weeks

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Yeah, I missed them last week.

Here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. First International Bank, Plano, TX ⇐ This one is from last week, Oct 30, sorry.
  2. The RiverBank,Wyoming, MN
  3. Sun Security Bank, Ellington, MN

    Full FDIC list

    It looks like the total for this year will be somewhere around 100, which is awful, but better than 2010.

    So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

    Not Enough Bullets…

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    What happened in Chicago at the Occupy Wall Street protests there?

    Some traders hung out a sign reading, “We are the 1%“:

    The Occupy Wall Street movement spread to Chicago this week, where protesters have gathered outside the Chicago Board of Trade, the world’s oldest options and futures trading center. Like the protesters in New York and other cities around the country, the group gathered to protest our nation’s growing income inequality, as the top 1 percent of Americans continue to see their incomes rise rapidly and their tax rates fall. The Chicago traders, confronted by the protesters’ “We are the 99 percent” message, crafted their own not-so-subtle reply, hanging signs in eighth-floor windows that said, “We are the 1%“:

    I’m sure that these folks will carry their smirks on their faces until they see Madam Gillotine.

    H/t Cthulhu.

    Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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    The power of wishful thinking

    Representative Louise Slaughter has suggested during an interview on Olbermann and she suggested that, because of Clarence Thomas’s repeated violation of conflict of interest statutes that his votes might be subject to retroactive recusal.

    Rep. Slughter’s suggestion as a remedy is just wishful thinking.

    There is a remedy, and it’s called impeachment, and the idea that Chief Justice Roberts as head of the judicial ethics commission would refer this to the Department of Justice is ludicrous.

    More Like George W. Bush Every Day

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    Barack Obama is now claiming that the legal opinion granting him the authority to assassinate American citizens is a state secret, and so it is not subject to any sort of public scrutiny.

    You know, as scary as George Bush was, he was basically a dunce, Barack Obama is a lot of things, but he is not stupid.

    This not a fact that I find particularly reassuring:

    Why? What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they’re asserting is a matter of sound law? This isn’t a military secret. It isn’t an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding a domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is an analysis of the power that the Constitution and Congress’ post September 11 authorization of military force gives the executive branch. This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose his specific reasoning to scrutiny. As the Post put it, “The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

    Obama hasn’t just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set. It’s time for the president who promised to create “a White House that’s more transparent and accountable than anything we’ve seen before” to release the DOJ memo. As David Shipler writes, “The legal questions are far from clearcut, and the country needs to have this difficult discussion.” And then there’s the fact that “a good many Obama supporters thought that secret legal opinions by the Justice Department — rationalizing torture and domestic military arrests, for example — had gone out the door along with the Bush administration,” he adds. “But now comes a momentous change in policy with serious implications for the Constitution’s restraint on executive power, and Obama refuses to allow his lawyers’ arguments to be laid out on the table for the American public to examine.” What doesn’t he want to get out?

    Think about it for a second: This ruling just an evaluations of public court rulings and public statutes, but they have buried this from any sort of public scrutiny.

    There can’t be any sensitive secrets involved, but they are covering it up.

    Something is hinky here.

    All Praise Be to God for That Which he Has Granted…

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    In this case, it’s the fact that Sarah Palin has declared that she will not run for President in 2012, which means that I can add her to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named:

    Sarah Palin said she won’t seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, ending a lengthy and attention-grabbing political flirtation that kept voters and potential rivals guessing while buttressing her public profile.

    The former Alaska governor and her party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee — more recently a reality TV star and cable-news commentator — said she opted against a White House run because she believed “that at this time I can be more effective in a decisive role to help elect other true public servants to office — from the nation’s governors, to congressional seats and the presidency.”

    Her announcement, in a statement sent to supporters today, removed a major uncertainty surrounding the Republican presidential race while raising questions about how she might use her celebrity and political following to shape the primary.

    “I will continue driving the discussion for freedom and free markets, including in the race for president,” Palin’s statement said.

    “I will help coordinate strategies to assist in replacing” President Barack Obama, keeping Republican control of the U.S. House and helping her party win a Senate majority, she said.

    This means that I never have to write about her, or read about her, again.

    While we are at it, let me add the following people to my list:

    • John and Kate Gosslin.
    • The cast of The Jersey Shore.
    • The “Real Housewives” of anywhere.
    • Nancy Grace.  (If she flips out on national TV, or is tried for a crime, this is suspended for reasons of schadenfreude)

    Actually, let’s say that it includes pretty much any reality TV star.

    In any case, Sarah is now done.  She’s made her bucks off of her 15 minutes of fame, and she was a springboard for Michelle Bachmann to become a viable (?) presidential candidate.  (The Republican Crazy Bitch Babe is the genre that she created.)

      Don’t Tell Me I Never Gave You Anything

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      Here are my pictures from New York. (Click for big honking images)

      Most notable was a Broadway disaster so bad that Dick Cheney should be the producer:

      And here are the offices of the Gray Lady:

      I remember Times Square before it became a Disneyfied version of Blade Runner:

      Maybe it’s the Eastern European Jewish heritage, Cossacks and all, but I really hate mounted police: