Category: Evil

9 August 2010, 9:36 PM

Another Place Where Obama is Doubling Down on Bush Policies…

Education, where the Bush era assault on public schools and teachers unions continues apace, so despite the demonstrated fact that charter schools do not produce better results, and despite the fact that the focus on testing has produced widespread fraud, Obama is doubling down with privatizing education in the same way the Dick Cheney privatized core military functions.

What’s more, a former George H.W. Bush Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, is now denouncing these policies:

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, I think that what happened in New York City is—shows that the direction he’s taking is wrong, because everything he is proposing in Race to the Top and also in his blueprint will rely on exactly the kinds of methods that led to a massive fraud in New York state—that is, that Race to the Top is requiring states to judge teachers by the student test scores, and we now know, based on this immense fraud in the city and in the state of New York, that the test scores are not reliable. So teachers will be judged by unreliable data, and we’re going to dismantle the teaching profession in pursuit of this mechanical fix that won’t work.

If there is lower class of scum than the war profiteers like Halliburton, who profit off our wars, it’s the Education profiteers like the Edison schools, who profit off our children.

There might be an excuse if this crap worked, but it doesn’t, and since No Child Left Behind was implemented, the racial and economic gaps between children have widened, because the educational reform establishment believes that the only thing that needs to be done to fix schools is to f%$# teachers.

9 August 2010, 7:28 PM

I Am Not a Finance Guy, But I Have Some Warning Signs………

And they are:

Opaque markets where ask and bid prices are not known by the participants.
Opaque financial instruments that seem to generate return and safety at the same time.
Minimal disclosures.
Promises from the sellers that they will take care of clients without regulation.

So we see all of this in so-called structured notes:

Wall Street banks are creating the “next investment bubble” by selling opaque and unregulated structured notes to investors hunting for yield, according to Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics.

Using the same “loophole” that allowed over-the-counter sales of collateralized debt obligations and auction-rate securities, firms are pitching illiquid structured notes whose value is partly derived from bets on interest rates, Whalen wrote today in a report.

What’s even worse:

Individual investors, who “love the higher yields” on structured notes, will lose money when benchmark interest rates climb, according to Whalen.

“We already know of two hedge funds that are being established specifically to buy this crap from distressed retail investors as and when rates start to rise,” said Whalen, a former Federal Reserve Bank of New York official and co-founder of the Torrance, California-based research firm.

What this means is that when the economy starts to recover, and interest rates rise, we will see another bubble pop and push us down.

Lovely.

5 August 2010, 10:05 PM

Beck’s Fools Gold

Click for full size

Anatomy of a scam

Barry Ritholtz has a masterful takedown of how Glenn Beck and Goldline are scamming his audience by selling them grossly overpriced gold coins.

It explains very clearly why Goldline is under criminal investigation in its home state of California.

Go read.

4 August 2010, 8:05 PM

Michelle Maglalang Malkin, Anchor Baby

Yes, immigration hardliner, and frequent railer against immigrants having “Anchor Babies” to secure residency status, was anchor baby herself.

Go figure

3 August 2010, 8:27 PM

Obama Administration Goes Full Eric Blair*

Or maybe Franz Kafka.

You see, last month, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights were retained by Nasser al-Awlaki, “the father of Obama assassination target (and U.S. citizen) Anwar al-Awlaki,” to get a court injunction to keep him from being killed by the U.S. government..

The government’s response was declare Anwar al-Awlaki a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” which meant that lawyers could not represent him without a special license from the government.

George W. Bush never asserted a right to assassinate American citizens, and they never used Treasury Department anti money laundering legislation to prevent lawyers from representing someone pro bono in a case to prevent their assassination:

Left with no choice, the ACLU and CCR this morning filed a lawsuit on their own behalf against Timothy Geithner and the Treasury Department. The suit argues that Treasury has no statutory authority under the law it invokes — The International Emergency Economic Powers Act — to bar American lawyers from representing American citizens on an uncompensated basis. It further argues what ought to be a completely uncontroversial point: that even if Congress had vested Treasury with this authority, it is blatantly unconstitutional to deny American citizens the right to have a lawyer, and to deny American lawyers the right to represent clients, without first obtaining a permission slip from Executive Branch officials (the Complaint is here). As the ACLU/CCR Brief puts it: “The notion that the government can compel a citizen to seek its permission before challenging the constitutionality of its actions in court is wholly foreign to our constitutional system” and “[a]s non-profit organizations dedicated to protecting civil liberties and human rights, Plaintiffs have a First Amendment right to represent clients in litigation consistent with their organizational missions.” The Brief also argues that it is a violation of Separation of Powers to allow the Executive Branch to determine in its sole discretion who can and cannot appear in and have access to a federal court.

Obama’s positions on national defense and surveillance indisputably worse than those of George W. Bush’s.

Bootnote:
After stonewalling for weeks, the Treasury Department granted a license once the ACLU and CCR filed a separate lawsuit against the denial of such a license, probably because they want to assert the right again, even if it is just for a few weeks to f%$# with the ability of some guy to get proper legal counsel.

I am so writing in “Howard Dean,” in the 2012 general.

^*George Orwell’s real name.

2 August 2010, 10:35 PM

Worst Website Ever…

Yvette’s Wedding Dresses , in Panama City, Fl.

May cause your eyes to bleed, and turn down the volume, the accompanying music sucks too.

2 August 2010, 10:24 PM

They Should Save Their Energies for the Pedophile Priests

The Chilean President has denied a request by the Catholic Church to pardon members of the Pinochet junta currently jailed for murder, rape, kidnapping, etc.:

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera on Sunday denied a pardon to people jailed for dictatorship-era crimes, a move likely to ease tensions with the opposition and rights groups over a controversial call for clemency.

Chile’s Catholic Church had asked Pinera to free or lower jail sentences of military officers convicted for human rights violations as well as other criminals in a call for clemency to mark the country’s upcoming bicentennial celebrations.

The pardon request infuriated human right groups and the center-left opposition, rekindling memories of General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973-1990 rule that still divides many Chileans.

I’m thinking that the Church of Rome issues of forgiveness that are a bit “closer to home”.

Perhaps they should address these matters before engaging in a full throated defense of the perpetrators of horrors of the Chilean dictatorship.

31 July 2010, 9:44 PM

Goldman S@#54

We live in Bizarro World

Jon Stewart asks a question, “What is the appropriate response for a company that is selling its customers a sh%$ty deals, being caught on email calling them sh%$ty deals, and then being forced to pay a $550 million fine?”

Well if you are Goldman Sachs, the response is to ban profanity in employee email.

<Facepalm>

31 July 2010, 8:37 PM

What a Repulsive Capitulation to the Forces of Bigotry and Evil

The Anti-Defamation League has, over the past few years, attempted to forge ties with the Christian Right, because they are perceived as “Pro-Israel.”

It should be noted that the fundamentalist Christian definition of supporting Israel means that they want Jews to be around to die horribly and painfully during the Armageddon that follows the rapture, which is a different definition of being “Pro-Israel” than I was previously aware of.

Well the latest big of demagoguery coming from our Christo-Fascist friends is their Jihad against an Islamic center being built in lower Manhattan, largely because they think that this is an act of bigotry that can play well for them politically.

In response, to these contemptible proclamations from Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and the rest of the merry band of bigots, the ADL has come out against the complex with a bizarre statement saying that the people screaming are bigots, but that the screaming has upset 911 victims, and that any construction should therefore be stopped.

The ADL has affirmatively allied itself with the philosophical descendants of the bigoted thugs who lynched Leo Frank, which, ironically enough, was the event that led to the creation of the ADL in the first place.

28 July 2010, 9:19 PM

Another Way That the FIRE* Sector Cheats Ordinary Americans

If you get a large insurance payout, they won’t send you the money, they just send you a “check book,” and keep your money in an account that they hold.

Only the “check book” is not a check book, because it’s not a bank, and it’s not FDIC insured, and they pay you 1% for an account that earns them 5%:

Lohman, a public health nurse who helps special-needs children, says she had always believed that her son’s life insurance funds were in a bank insured by the FDIC. That money — like $28 billion in 1 million death-benefit accounts managed by insurers — wasn’t actually sitting in a bank.

It was being held in Prudential’s general corporate account, earning investment income for the insurer. Prudential paid survivors like Lohman 1 percent interest in 2008 on their Alliance Accounts, while it earned a 4.8 percent return on its corporate funds, according to regulatory filings.

Note that her son was a soldier killed in Afghanistan, so they are stealing from the bereaved families of fallen soldiers.

At this point, I normally say, “Not Enough Bullets,” but I’ve used that a bit too much lately, so I will go with the apocryphal end of Marcus Licinius Crassus, who was made to drink molten gold by his captors as punishment for his greed.

^*The Finance Insurance and Real Estate sector.

28 July 2010, 5:52 PM

A Public Service Announcement

Courtesy of the Group News Blog:

27 July 2010, 7:18 PM

Not Enough Bullets

BP has given their CEO, Tony Hayward, his waking papers.

Only, he gets to stay on until October, at full pay, and he still has his millions in stock options, and in 2 years, he is eligible for a pension of £600,000 a year.

On the brighter side, he is literally being sent to Siberia, as, BP is, “Planning to nominate him as a non-executive director of its Russian joint venture, TNK-BP.”

If you are one of the hyper-rich, you are safe from the consequences of your actions, which is why these f%$#s act the way they do.

If they win, they make a sh%$ load of money, and if they lose, they are still set for life.

One note here, he will be replaced by Bob Dudley, who is an American, which just goes to show that the BP board does not get the USA.

I think that they think that an American CEO will defuse American anger at them.

They are wrong. Americans are suckers for a British accent, we love being conned by people with British accents, just look at the success that lying charlatans like Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Andrew Sullivan have done selling their crap as gold.

The problem here is that something bad happened, and the more people looked at BP, they saw that it is a corrupt criminal psychopathic organization, even by the standards of the oil industry.

26 July 2010, 7:53 PM

News of the Unsurprising

It turns out that one of the reasons that executive compensation has been skyrocketing lately is that compensation boards game the system to maximize pay for the executives, who, after all, hired them in the first place.

Imagine that.

I would remind everyone that the pot for wages are not infinite: When they get 7 or 8 figure paychecks, it means that everyone else there gets less.

I once figured that Michael Eisner’s compensation at one point in the mid 1990s, $550,000,000.00,^* or about $73.45 a second, would have added about $6.00/hour to the pay of every Disney employee, which in turn would likely have saved money through reduced turnover.

It doesn’t matter to them though, they just want to make more than the next CEO.

^*For that, he did some rather wooden dialogue with Mickey Mouse on the Wonderful World of Disney. For that kind of money, the mouse should have been able to do him like Marlon Brando did Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris.

26 July 2010, 7:28 PM

People Who Should Have Been Drowned at Birth

Jeffrey Lord, writing, rather unsurprisingly, for The American Spectator, who claims that the lynching of her relative, Bobby Hall, because they beat him to death instead of hanging him.

So, according to the “white cracker inbred former Reagan White House political director” morons out there, it’s only a lynching if it involves rope.

At least ⅓ of lynchings did not involve hangings. They involved burning, shooting, and (Yes, Virginia) beating, among other methods.

Needless to say, as a result of his contemptible and brain dead rants, he is sure to be invited onto the Sunday political talk shows.

20 July 2010, 6:16 PM

Cowards.

When people talk about DFH^* bloggers hating on the Obama they seem to think that its all about Obama being a pragmatist. It isn’t about his being a pragmatist.

It’s about his, and his people being abject cowards, who soil themselves when someone on the right wing shouts out a lie.

Case in point, Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, who was just fired for a yet another deceptively edited video from professional bigot Andrew Breitbart.

You see, she gave a talk about how when she was working helping farmers, when the first white farmer came to her for help, the thought crossed her mind was not to help, because they were white, but she realized almost as soon as the thought hit her that it was wrong.

Well after excerpting 30 seconds out of a 45+ minute speech (see below), so that Fox News could go “Oh noes! N*****s are trying to take over America.”

The response of the Secretary of Agriculture was to fire her before any real facts came out.

I am with what Digby said:

“Her decision ‘rightly or wrongly” will be called into question” because some right wing hitman put out an edited tape that makes her sound as if her point is the opposite of what it is, so she had to be fired.

They are telling wingnuts everywhere that all they have to do is gin up a phony controversy (especially about a black person, apparently) and the administration will fire them so as not to shake confidence that they are “fair service providers.”

This is sheer cowardice.

This is what pisses people off.

Video after break

^*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.

15 July 2010, 9:38 PM

Barack Obama Hires Enemy of Healthcare Reform to Manage Implementation

Liz Fowler, who was a former staffer of Max Baucus, who went to work as a lobbyist for Wellpoint (vice president of public policy), and then came back to Baucus to kill the public option, has has been hired by the White House to implement the regulations for healthcare reform.

Yet more of the criminally naive concept of bringing enemies in to run programs that they did their best to destroy.

Additionally, it makes a joke of yet another of Obama’s promises, to shut down the revolving door between government and industry, because if Ms. Fowler were going through the revolving door any faster, it would look like a Cuisinart set to liquefy.

14 July 2010, 7:36 PM

Why You Should not Give to the DSCC

Because, will throw money at people like Blanche Lincoln, who, now that the primary challenge is done, is once again throwing her lot in with the rich bankers who are in the process of destroying our country.

This time, she and John Kyle, he of the “never need to pay for tax cuts for rich folk,” fame, have introduced an inheritance tax bill that is a big wet kiss for the richest families in the United States:

Their proposal would require Democratic leaders to amend the small-business jobs bill with a provision that sets the estate tax at 35 percent with a $5 million exemption. These amounts will be phased in over a 10-year period and also be indexed for inflation. In addition, inherited assets would be taxed at their worth upon transfer, not when the deceased purchased them.

Of course, because of the way the Bush and His Evil Minions^™ wrote his tax cuts, there is no inheritance tax at all this year, but next year, it goes back to 55% and a $1 million exemption, and, quite honestly, the “liberal” proposal is a $3.5 million exemption and a 45% rate.

Of course, when given a choice between giving something to rich heirs, and giving everything to those same heirs, Blanche Lincoln goes with giving money to the useless heir class.

The first broad based tax adopted by the founding fathers was an inheritance tax. They did it because they realized that dynastic wealth was corrosive to the republic.

But Blanche Lincoln needs those campaign dollars, so f%$# the budget and American people.

It goes without saying that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is backing her to the hilt, which is why you shouldn’t give to the DSCC when they come calling.

13 July 2010, 8:11 PM

There is No Room for Compromise on Abortion

The same folks who bought you the draconian restrictions on abortion in Barack Obama’s healthcare bill are now lobbying to ban federal coverage for all forms of birth control.

Let’s be clear here, this is not about meaningful policy. They just want to punish women for having sex:

Polls suggest the majority of Americans would support such a policy. But the Daily Beast has learned that many conservative activists, who spent most of their energies during the health-care reform fight battling to win abortion restrictions and abstinence-education funding, are just waking up to the possibility that the new health care law could require employers and insurance companies to offer contraceptives, along with other commonly prescribed medications, without charging any co-pay. Now the Heritage Foundation and the National Abstinence Education Association say that, like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, they oppose implementation of the new provisions.

This why there is no meaningful space for discussion for these people.

They use terrorism against doctors, they are working to make birth control unavailable at pharmacies, and now they are trying to exclude birth control from prescription coverage.

Enough is enough. These people are not the opposition, they are the enemy.