Why Won’t The Media Address the Real Issue? ‘ACORN’ Is Wingnut Code for The ‘N’ Word.
Category: Good Writing
Jon Stewart is a F%$#ing Genius, I See No Racism Here Edition
It’s Just under 3 minutes. Just watch it.
Stephen Colbert is a F%$#ing Genius, Yet Again
This time, it’s his whole show, where he gets into bigotry, the faux decision by the Supreme Court to declare corporations “people”, etc.
This is the single most cogent show on current events that I have seen in decades.
It’s a shade over 22m long.
Atrios Nails It
On the slump in people using airlines:
Obviously the recession has much to do with it, but I do wish it would occur to our great captains of the airline industry that one reason people are flying less is that it the experience has become so incredibly sh$#@y.
Though it is not just the airlines who ascribe to the theory that they must make their product as miserable as is possible for the consumer in order to satisfy Wall Street.
Headline of the Day
The Devil’s Dictionary — Financial Edition
It’s very funny.
Unfortunately, it’s subscription only content for the WSJ, but if you go to this Google News link, you can read it there, because when you click through “the Google”, you bypass registration.
Here is a snippet:
BANK FAILURE, n. 1. A process by which towns across America are denuded of their feckless local bankers, paving a way into the market for feckless private-equity investors. 2. An increasingly common Twitter tag that spikes on Friday afternoons. See #bankfail, #wheresmymoney, #runitsthefdic.
Heh.
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day, Dealing with Republicans Edition
Obama’s Liberal Veal Pen
I think that Jane Hamsher puts her finger on what’s wrong with Barack Obama, most notably through the person of Rahm Emanuel, is doing to liberals, when she describes many liberal institutions that have been captured by the Obama presidency as being in a “veal pen”.
Much like industrial veal, we are being kept in a crate and, “in darkness except to be fed two to three times a day for 20 minutes,” so that the muscles atrophy, in order that our meat is tender.
Go read it.
On The Failure of Modern Economics
Krugman, on the failure of modern efficient market economics.
His basic thesis is that the belief in the infallible markets, which has been dashed repeatedly over the past 200 years, came back, and when juxtaposed with beautiful mathematics that were unfortunately completely disjoint from reality, we got our current situation.
Go read.
On the Greatness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
And guess what, it was not about bipartisanship or bringing in stake-holders:
….With the exception of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (which gave the president authority to close the nation’s banks and which passed the House of Representatives unanimously), the principal legislative innovations of the 1930s were enacted over the vigorous opposition of a deeply entrenched minority. Majority rule, as Roosevelt saw it, did not require his opponents’ permission.
When Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide cheap electric power for the impoverished South, he did not consult with utility giants like Commonwealth and Southern. When he asked for the creation of a Securities and Exchange Commission to curb the excesses of Wall Street, he did not request the cooperation of those about to be regulated. When Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act divesting investment houses of their commercial banking functions, the Democrats did not need the approval of J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.
Word.
No go read the rest.
How Matt Taibbi Changed Goldman Sachs
It’s clear that he’s got them rattled, because they are trying to claim that hostility toward them is motivated by antisemitism, and their marionette, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, has felt it necessary to deny that Treasury has a tilt toward Goldman.
The idea that either GS or the Treasury would actually feel defensive about this would have been ludicrous just a few months ago, but now everyone has heard of That great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.*
It appears that he has them scared.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
The Best Speech that Ted Kennedy Ever Gave
How many good men must we give before we finally face the fact that the weakness in our society is a weakness in ourselves?
It wasn’t his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1980.
It was in Sitka in 1968, though not too many people heard, or saw it, because it was given to the Alaska state Democratic Party Convention in Sitka in 1968, talking about the assassination of Martin Luther King and its aftermath.
Not a whole bunch of people have heard it, because he gave at the but my mom was in the audience, and she recalled looking around and watching political hacks on either side of her, with tears streaming down their faces.
You can find the speech, along with introductions by both Senator Ernest Gruening and Walter Eugene “Gene” Guess Speaker of the Alaska State House of Representatives, who my father worked with when we were in Alaska.
I downloaded the video to split and Youtube it from the Alaska state archives.
Part 1 of 2
Part 2 of 2
Well, Dr. Krugman, this Liberal Never Trusted Obama
I figured that he would throw progressives and liberals under the bus since the entire Donnie McClurkin affair, when Obama deliberately threw gays under a bus to win the South Carolina primary.
He’s done it with:
- Rapid withdrawal from Iraq.
- Releasing torture photos.
- His support of “fair trade”.
- Stupid tax cuts in the stimulus package.
- Pursuing war crimes by Bush and His Evil Minions™
- Bailing out the banks.
- Gays, particularly with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
- The use of civilian courts to try terrorists.
- Closing Guantanamo (with an assist from craven Congressmen).
- Ra
So now, Paul Krugman notices that progressives have finally drawn a line in the sand on the public option:
It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.
Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.
So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.
Gee, you think?
I’ve been saying this for over a year.
Just Read This
Obama: knowing when to be an asshole
It’s a good article, even though the title gives it away.
Talk About Damning With Faint Praise
As some of might know, professor Niall Ferguson wrote an article in the Financial Times where he said that, “President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US.“
I saw it, I read it, and thought that it was sophomoric bullsh@$ of the sort you frequently see college students who want to play at radicalism, both left and right.
One of the people who called him out on this was Paul Krugman, who said that he could not, “fathom is how any editor could think this was a good thing to appear in the FT’s pages,” and James Fallows, who suggested that would like to see him, “discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates.“
I did not blog about it, because I didn’t have anything to add, but Niall Furguson decided not to let sleeping dogs lie, and he did discuss it with Dr. Gates.
So Krugman offers an apology of sorts:
What can I say? While the Ferguson line was deeply offensive — everyone I know asked, “Did he really write that? Did the FT actually publish it?” — it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with the question of whether Felix the Cat was supposed to be African-American. The mind reels.
For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist.
I think he’s a poseur.
I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance.
And this time he ended up choking on his own snark.
(emphasis mine)
Remind me to never demand an apology of Nobel Prize winning economists.
Krugman Says, “I Told You So!”
In early 2008, Krugman says that Obama’s post partisan unity shtick would fail, because the Republicans would crank up every dishonest, and quite honestly clinically insane, argument.
Well, today, Krugman says, “I told you so,” and he is right:
Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.
Fundamentally, we have a president who wants people, including his opponents, to really like him, in a pathological kind of way, and he believes that he has the ability to make it so.
He is disastrously wrong.
If he wants any meaningful change, he needs to want his opponents to fear him, like LBJ….And, of course, avoid a military counter-insurgency in Asia, which is what did Johnson in politically.
….Uh oh…..
Best Snark Evah!!!!
Don’t Make Me Get Out of this Chair!Columnist and deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jay Bookman notes a contradiction in the arguments of the “Obama will engage in Nazi-style euthanasia™“.
It appears that one of the widely circulated canards is that if Obama gets his way, he will kill the sick and infirm, and Mr. Bookman, being on the mailing list for retarded libertarian magazine Human Events,* received this missive titled Grandmas and Unborn Babies Face Extermination by Obama’s “Health” Care Plan, which cited an editorial in Investors Business Daily, which claimed that:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.†
The problem here, as Mr. Bookman so ably notes, is that Stephen Hawking lives in the UK, and has lived there his entire life, and furthermore, he has, since the age of 6½, had his medical care covered by that very same National Health Service that is allegedly chomping at the bit to kill him.
The folks writing about this are stupid and evil beyond belief.
That being said, while Jay Bookman is an engaging writer, this is not the “Best Snark Evah!!!!“, that distinction is left to the comments on his blog post, specifically the first comment, from one Brad Steel:
Hawking can talk the talk, but he can’t walk the walk.
I think that I broke something laughing.
*Thankfully, I have avoided this fate.
†You won’t find it there any more, though there is a note there noting the “correction“.
You Do Not Have Health Insurance
So says James Kwak, and he is completely correct:
…That’s not insurance; that’s employer-subsidized health care for the duration of your employment.
…
In addition, there is the problem that even if you are nominally covered when you do get sick, your insurer could rescind your policy, or you may find out, as Karen Tumulty’s brother did, that your insurance doesn’t cover the treatment you need.
Just read the whole thing.