H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Category: Politics
Karl Marx is Laughing
Because Congress is less popular than Communism:
There is a deeper message, which is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell has managed to take an institution which already held in low esteem, and absolutely trash it.
While the “very serious people” in the Democratic Party think that this is a political advantage, they are wrong.
You see, the foundation of conservative electioneering is the idea that government does not work, and as much as they might damage themselves in the short term, they are, in the long term, undermining the very idea that government can regulate the banksters, keep the poor from starving, protect us in the work place, and provide healthcare for the rest of us.
While someone like John Boehner may be too gin soaked and stupid to consciously understand this, he, and His Evil Minions™, do understand that constant gridlock and dysfunction plays to their strengths, and that it’s a lot easier than doing something constructive.
Deep Thought
H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
So,the Sweep Against the Occupy Movement is in Process
Or maybe done.
Culminating with a police assault on Zuccotti Park, mirrorring the actions in Portland, Oakland, Albany, and Salt Lake City.
It was a classically classy affair, with Police dressed for the apocalypse, and journalists being detained as they attempted to record the whole sordid affair.
We also have the Mayor of Oakland admitting that the mayors coordinated the crackdown on a conference call, which appears to have been coordinated by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security:
Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict “Occupy” protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night’s move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.
The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.
According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.
If you don’t think that the control freaks that are Barack Obama and his administration were setting this up, and took steps to ensure that it happened when Obama was out of country.
This is all about comforting his Wall Street buddies, while attempting to co-opt the Occupy movement.
Olbermann goes to town on Bloomberg, but avoids the elephant in the room (Obama):
Buh By Buddy!
It’s official, Silvio Berlusconi resigns as Prime Minister, excising a cancer to Italy’s body politic.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that this was to make way for a “technocrat” PM who will proceed to wreck Italy’s economy by implementing Hoovernomics.
Well What Do You Know? The Penn State Football is a Bunch of ‘Phants!
Or, more accurately Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno are both registered Republicans, which is not as odd as it sounds, as coaching staffs tend to lean that way (with the notable exception of Bill Belichick).
Let is cede the fact that Republican does not equal pedophile, nor does it imply that Republicans support Pedophilia, though the abuse of power and self-entitlement bit, where Paterno and the Penn State sports program let it slide because Sandusky was one of them, does seem to be symptomatic of Republican party registration.
The point that the author makes in the article, and the one that I agree with, is that if either Sandusky or Paterno were Democrats, you would hear Rush Limbaugh making animal noises and Deliverance references while implying that Democrats support pedophilia.
FWIW, I agree with Olbermann, Paterno should be filed.
Who Knew that Mike F%$#ing Tyson Was So F%$#ing Funny?
Here he is doing a spot on impression of Herman Cain:
H/t MP at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Italy’s Cancer of the Body Politic Offers to Step Down
Silvio Berlusconi has offered to resign:
The European debt crisis appeared to claim its most prominent victim on Tuesday when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, cornered by world markets and humiliated by a parliamentary setback, pledged to resign after Italy’s Parliament passes austerity measures demanded by the European Union.
Although Mr. Berlusconi’s exit was not immediate — weeks of political wrangling over the austerity measures probably lie ahead — political commentators said they could see no escape this time for the prime minister, whose Houdini-like ability to wriggle free from scandals is legendary.
“A season is over,” said Mario Calabresi, the editor in chief of the Turin daily newspaper La Stampa, who said Mr. Berlusconi told him that he was not only stepping down, but also would not run for office again.
In the end, it was not the sex scandals, the corruption trials against him or even a loss of popular consensus that appeared to end Mr. Berlusconi’s 17 years as a dominant figure in Italian political life. It was, instead, the pressure of the markets — which drove Italy’s borrowing costs to record highs this week — and the European Union, which could not risk his dragging down the euro and with it the world economy.
It’s good that he’s going, but the bigger picture is that Berlusconi’s continued political success has been almost entirely due to his near complete dominance of Italian television.
Self-serving clowns like Silvio are the inevitable result of media consolidation, whether it’s the Italian monopoly on commercial TV (and effective control of state TV), or the media oligopoly in the United States.
The problem is that while one can have free and fair elections, but without an independent and heterogeneous media, you stand a real risk of not having a free and fair campaign.
It Would Be Ironic If…………
Pass the Popcorn
The first big name bankster to get put in the dock is Barack Obama’s biggest backer, Jon Corzine for his role in the collapse of MF Global.
You see it appears that first he successfully lobbied regulators to allow the trades that did his firm in, and then the firm commingled customer funds with their own private risk capital,* so now he is hiring a lawyer:
Jon S. Corzine has hired Andrew J. Levander, a leading white-collar criminal defense lawyer, according to three people briefed on the matter, as the former New Jersey governor deals with fallout from the collapse of MF Global, the brokerage firm he has run since last year.
Mr. Corzine resigned from MF Global on Friday morning and will not seek $12 million severance payments.
Federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission, are investigating the $630 million in missing customer money at MF Global.
Mr. Levander could not be reached as he is out of the country, according to his assistant. He did not return an e-mail seeking comment. Daniel O’Donnell, the chief executive of Mr. Levander’s law firm, Dechert, declined to comment.
In Mr. Levander, the chairman of Dechert, Mr. Corzine has retained a New York lawyer who is no stranger to defending prominent Wall Street executives. He represented John Thain, the former chief executive at Merrill Lynch, in a government inquiry related his role in Merrill’s sale to Bank of America. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager who invested with Bernard L. Madoff, hired Mr. Levander to defend him against a New York attorney general’s lawsuit connected to the Madoff case.
The only question now is who is first, Barack Obama, claiming never to have known the guy, or the Republicans, who will try to super glue Corzine to him.
Pass the popcorn.
*The technical term for this is “stealing”.
Matt Taibbi’s Take-Downs are a Thing of Beauty
Case in point is his latest on Michael Bloomberg.
Go Read.
Seen on Facebook
You Know, Occupy Wall Street Is Beginning to Look More and More Like Tunisia or Egypt…
And not just because Tunisians are drawing satirical comparisons with the Arab spring, making comments about “recognizing the American Transitional National Council,” on Barack Obama’s Facebook page.
It appears that law enforcement has been directed to crack down on the Occupy Wall Street movement, with the recent crack downs in Oakland, Portland, and Tulsa, with what was clearly brutality in the cases of Oakland and Tulsa.
Additionally, it appears that the NYPD, realizing that their previous thuggery has served to help the movement to go viral, has become more sophisticated in its tactics by herding drug addicts and the homeless to Zuccotti Park in an attempt to disrupt the New York protests.
When this is juxtaposed with the general strike in Oakland today, it really is beginning to seem a lot more like the Arab Spring, though whether it is Tunisia or Bahrain remains to be seen.
I will say that one protest, the occupation of Obama’s chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt’s front lawn brings back memories of the protests on chancellor’s Joe Duffy’s front lawn at UMass over the maze.*
I also came across an interesting take on the whole movement, that it is a proxy for a primary challenge to Obama:
Like a major national primary against a sitting-though-unpopular president, this movement is sending a signal to the existing elites. Change and deliver on a new social contract, or else. It isn’t clear what “or else” means. Perhaps this is signifying a collapse of older institutional arrangements, or a breakdown in belief in existing authority structures. Perhaps this is the first of many large-scale civil disturbances, and a spark that will lead the establishment to solidify its authoritarian impulses. Maybe the training of tens of thousands of people around the world in nonviolent non-electoral means of challenging power, the legitimization of protest, the introduction of new areas of contention like the role of the Federal Reserve, and the re-mainstreaming of figures like Noam Chomsky and the promotion of people like Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges are signifying a larger shift in our political culture. It’s too early to know.
One of the bitter ironies about the Obama administration is that they have successfully seized control of the Democratic Party apparatus to a degree that I’ve never seen, which makes primarying him, even as a symbolic gesture, is off the table, and, much like water finding a path of least resistance, Occupy Wall Street seems to an alternate path.
If this is the case, then what appears to be the strangely incoherent decision making process of Occupy Wall Street makes sense, because the Obama administration’s apparatus is best defined as very bright control freaks, and this sort of decentralized decision making is something that is calculated to make their little hardwired politico brains explode.
The alternative to this unwieldy process would be the almost certain co-opting of the movement.
*There was a chain link fence erected as a sculpture at UMass in the 1970s, and a frequent activity of students until the late 1980s was to get drunk and wander through the maze. After a decade of drunks bumping into the walls, it was falling apart, and the administration wanted to demolish it. This resulted in a storm of protests, culminating in protests on the Chancellor’s lawn, and the administration agreed to replace the sculpture, rather than demolishing it.
Deep Thought
H/t ILIWIUITMABOIP.
Well Duh!!7
Reviewing recent events, French President Nicolas Sarkosy has concluded that Greece should never have been admitted to the Euro zone:
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said allowing Greece into the eurozone in 2001 was a “mistake”.He said Greece was “not ready” at the time. But, he added, it could be rescued thanks to Wednesday’s EU deal on the euro debt crisis.
This should surprise no one.
Greece, except by virtue of its geography, is closer to a 3rd world nation than it is a 1st world nation.
Any sensible individual would have noted that Greece was iffy for entry into the EU’s free trade zone, so it was always clear that a common currency would be a stretch.
What happened was that the Eurocrats in Brussels, Paris, and Bonn/Berlin thought that the post Berlin Wall Unity Schtick European Union trumped reality.
FWIW, I stil think that the solution here, at least in the short term, is to kick Germany out of the Euro, and allow. A rising Deutsche Mark to fix imbalances.
Dems Try for Seppuku Once Again
So the Democrats on the “Super Committee” are trying to gut Medicare once again, while showing how serious they are by exceeding their mandate for deficit reductions:
Democrats are proposing to slash huge budget deficits by up to $3 trillion, aiming high to repair the country’s fiscal mess even as Republicans show early signs of resisting the proposals.
The broad package of measures calls for long-term spending cuts, including to the government-run Medicare health program for the elderly that threatens to explode the national debt. The other half of the package would come from tax increases, four congressional aides told Reuters on Wednesday.
Republicans rejected the Democratic initiative.
“Asking for a $1.5 trillion tax hike in the middle of a jobs crisis is not a serious proposal,” said a House of Representatives Republican leadership aide.
There is a deep ideological divide between the two parties over taxes — likely a key issue in the congressional and presidential elections in November 2012.
The Democratic plan was presented on Tuesday behind closed doors to a special congressional panel tasked with finding ways of cutting the budget deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years, the sources said.
It was a rare leak from the so-called “super committee,” whose secretive deliberations have sparked intense speculation about how much progress the 12 Republican and Democratic members have made since they first began meeting on September 8. They face a November 23 deadline to report to Congress.
The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
The Democratic plan proposes cutting the deficit by $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion and calls for between $200 billion and $300 billion in new stimulus spending to boost an ailing U.S. economy. It would be paid for with lower interest payments from reducing deficits.
It also seeks around $400 billion in Medicare savings, with half coming in benefit cuts and the other half in cuts to healthcare providers. Details of that proposal were scant but tackling the popular Medicare program is always politically risky for politicians in Washington, especially Democrats.
The Democratic proposal also identifies $100 billion in cuts to the Medicaid healthcare program for the poor, according to a lobbyist in contact with the committee.
Seriously, it’s both bad policy and bad politics, and it echos Obama’s strategy of attempting to show that they are even more crazy serious about the deficit, which the rest of the country really does not give a crap about.
Quote of the day
On the virtues of conceding points to your opponent at the start of negotiations:
It’s a case study in the perils of offering concessions to your opponents before negotiations have begun. And it will force Democrats in both chambers, but particularly in the Senate, to decide whether to pass a proposal comprised of measures Obama’s backed in the past, even though they’ve been cherry picked to essentially constitute a Republican piece of legislation. If Senate Dems block the measure, Republicans will accuse them of wanting to pick political fights instead of passing Obama jobs legislation. If Dems pass the measure, and Obama signs it, the GOP can cite it as evidence that they’re not simply standing in the way of action on the economy.
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
The Marijuana Policy Project has just declared that Barack Obama is the worst President ever on medical Marijuana.
I think that this is not a deeply felt philosophy, but yet another case where a lack of ideology, or perhaps a contempt for ideology, that leads him to placate the most extreme of the dead enders, whether it be the drug war, or the Iraq war. (Where we were thrown out, we didn’t leave voluntarily)
What this means is that he doubles down more aggressively on bad policy than he would if he actually believed in it.
It’s kind a metaphor for his whole a political career.
H/t Disinformation.
Why Rick Santorum is Not a Douche
Because in a just world, no part of him would never see the inside of a vagina:
The candidate later went on to explain that sex between a man and a woman is “special,” and even birth control is “not OK.”
“We’ll repeal Obamacare and get rid any idea that you have to have abortion coverage or contraceptive coverage,” he said. “One of the things that I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the sexual liberty idea and many in the Christian faith have said, you know contraception is OK. It’s not OK because it’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
(Emphasis mine)
Seriously, the fact that any woman ever let this meat sack pass his genes on with her makes me despair for the future of our species.
Rats Leaving a Sinking Ship
In this case, it’s Michelle Bachmann’s entire campaign in New Hampshire just quit on her:
Staff members in New Hampshire for Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann have resigned en masse, a Republican familiar with the situation said on Friday, in a fresh blow to her 2012 hopes.
The Republican had few details, but news reports in New Hampshire said the resignations included her New Hampshire campaign manager, Jeff Chidester.
Bachmann, campaigning in Iowa, sowed some confusion by saying she was unaware of the resignations.
Manchester’s Union Leader newspaper said Chidester, a conservative activist and radio talk show host, left due to frustration with Bachmann’s national campaign, not with the candidate herself.
Bachmann has a long history of churning through staff the way that Rush Limbaugh churns through Oxycontin.
This is a not unexpected development.
Sometimes, There is Truth in Justice
A federal court judge just said that two key prosecution witnesses are not credible because they were motivated by racism and politics”
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson in an order today lambasted two key prosecution witnesses in the State House vote-buying case as being motivated by political ambition and racial prejudice.
Thomson said Republicans Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale and former Rep. Benjamin Lewis of Dothan had ulterior motives when they assisted investigators in the case. Beason and Lewis were key prosecution witnesses in the case, in which VictoryLand owner Milton McGregor and others were charged with offering and taking bribes to try to get a gambling bill approved in the Alabama Legislature. The two Republicans said they approached FBI agents after they felt gambling interests made improper offers to try to secure their votes on the bill.
“The evidence introduced at trial contradicts the self-serving portrait of Beason and Lewis as untouchable opponents of corruption. In reality, Beason and Lewis had ulterior motives rooted in naked political ambition and pure racial bias,” Thompson wrote.
“The court finds that Beason and Lewis lack credibility for two reasons. First, their motive for cooperating with F.B.I. investigators was not to clean up corruption but to increase Republican political fortunes by reducing African-American voter turnout. Second, they lack credibility because the record establishes their purposeful, racist intent,” Thompson wrote.
He’s allowing the testimony, but he is allowing the defense to present the evidence of racism and political dirty tricks at trial.
Still, if I were a prosecutor, and the judge just told me that their star witnesses are racist scum, and he’s also sent a message to the prosecutors that the traditional “all white jury” is not an option, and I’d be mainlining antacid right now.
H/t TPM.
gee, you think?