Dean Baker on the fact that the people who lauded Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan upon his retirement in 2006 still have lucrative jobs working in senior management at the Federal Reserve:
BTW, as noted in the article, many of the people at these Fed meetings are still in top policy making positions. This shows that the U.S. economy still produces good-paying jobs for people without skills.
H/t Atrios.
You can make fun of Rick Santorum without having to resort to making ass juice/frothy mixture/Google jokes.
There’s simply way too much insanity even without Dan Savages bit of literary genius.
Case in point, he just said that the “American left” “hates Christendom”, because, among other things, they think that the Crusades were an aggression against the Arab world.
Because, the mass slaughter in Jerusalem, and the pogroms and murders that swept through Europe was all hunky dory.
On behalf of my ancestors, who were doubtless murdered and raped by your ancestors, go Cheney yourself.
H/t The Reality-Based Community, who asks the obvious question, “Is he going to endorse the Inquisition next, and expose Voltaire as an undercover jihadist and proto-Marxist?”
Seriously, I’m not sure if Santorum is simply bat-sh%$ insane, if he’s just used to saying this crap because it’s what College Republicans do to tweak people in order to get their juvenile jollies.
Truth be told, it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same.
Senator Ben Nelson (DINO-Nebraska) is retiring.
This man has been a cancer on the Democratic caucus in the Senate for two terms, all while being adored by the morally bankrupt Washington punditocracy.
That being said, all is not well, as there is even more intense wankeritude in the wings, “Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, had also been mentioned on political blogs as a possible candidate if Nelson retired.”
Blah.
Fortunately, Matt Taibbi does have words to express my contempt.
Read it.
Yes, I know, orange, likely drinking problem, looks like a poster child for sex without partners, so it always sucks to be him.
It’s just that today, it sucks even more, because he had to back down on his attempt to short circuit the 2 month extension of payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits.
The problem here is that he backed out on a deal that he cut with, among other folks, the Senate Republicans, because he has no control of his caucus, and once the members of his caucus realized that they looked like complete prats, though not as complete as John Boy, they got in his face too.
When one looks at the basic mechanics of the office of Speaker of the House, and excludes the prism of ideology, Boehner is still the worst speaker in recent memory: He can’t count votes, and he can’t hold onto them, and he cannot protect his caucus from their own worst impulses.
The word is that it’s Eric Cantor who is setting himself up for this sh%$, because he wants the gavel, but Boehner, having attempted an unsuccessful coup against Gingrich in the 1990s, should know what is going on, and how to deal with it.
Actually, the week, and likely the month, and possibly the whole year, is the so-called “fact checkers” at Politifact.
Basically, they declared that statements that the Paul Ryan “destroy Medicare” plan did in fact destroy Medicare was the “lie of the year.”
I get it: Reality has a well-known liberal bias, but when you are replacing a single payer health insurance system with vouchers that won’t cover private insurance, you are destroying Medicare:
This is simply indefensible. Claims that are factually true shouldn’t be eligible for a Lie of the Year designation.It’s unnerving that we have to explain this again, but since PolitiFact appears to be struggling with the relevant details, let’s set the record straight.
Medicare is a single-payer health care system offering guaranteed benefits to seniors. The House Republican budget plan intended to privatize the existing system and replace it with something very different — a voucher scheme. It would still be called “Medicare,” but it wouldn’t be Medicare.
It seems foolish to have to parse the meaning of the word “end,” but if there’s a program, and it’s replaced with a different program, proponents brought an end to the original program. That’s what the verb means.
(emphasis original)
It’s very simple: If you eliminate a program, even if you come up with something completely different that you give the same name, you’ve eliminated that program.
Furthermore, if you want to take 10+ years to phase it, you’ve eliminated that program.
I’m in complete agreement with Krugthulhu:
The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.
And not only do they go with complete bullsh$%, but they overruled their own polling (even after a ‘Phant congressman attempted to encourage astroturfing, it still came in 3rd) to declare the truth to be a lie, so they doubled down.
Needless to day, Politifact won’t get links from me.
There are too many bastions of truthiness out there.
Newt Gingrich is a, “Stupid Man’s Idea of What a Smart Man Sounds Like.”
Case in point, Newt Gingrich seems to think that making the Federal Reserve like the European Central Bank is a good thing:
If Newt Gingrich were president–something that has recently at least entered the realm of plausibility–the Federal Reserve would no longer worry about trying to create jobs, and would focus instead only on controlling inflation. And wealthy financial industry tycoons like Warren Buffett would likely get a big tax cut.
………The Federal Reserve has two tasks under the law: to keep inflation low, and to achieve maximum employment. Gingrich wants to end that “dual mandate,” so that the central bank would focus solely on inflation.
So it’s back to expansionary austerity, which is tearing the Euro Zone apart right now.
We are looking at a breakup of not just the Euro, but the real possibility of a breakup of the European Union because of this sort bloody-minded imbecility.
It’s amazing just how much the press seems to eat up the idea of Newt as an intellectual, while pretty much everyone who has ever worked with him seems to think that he’s an unstable wanker.
My money is on everyone who has ever worked with him.
.
He showed up to a press conference for Florida governor Rick Scott, and asked for a urine sample for a drug test:
Gov. Rick Scott and his drug testing policy became the unwitting target of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” on Wednesday as a reporter for the show broke into budget news conference and asked the governor to “pee into this cup.”
“You’ve benefitted from hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars over the years so would you be willing to pee into this cup to prove to Florida taxpayers that you’re not on drugs,” asked Comedy Central reporter, Aasif Mandvi. It was a reference to the governor’s drug-testing requirement imposed on all state employees and all welfare recipients.
Scott looked straight at him, didn’t miss a beat and said: “I’ve done it plenty of times.”
Mandvi then attempted to hand the sealed, official-looking collection cup to the governor. “We could all turn around, that’s fine,” he said.
At one point Mandvi persuaded other reporters to pass the cup to the front row but Scott ignored it. Mandvi asked again. “I hate to keep harping on this, would you pee in a cup?” Scott shot back: “You don’t get to run this.”
Last session, Scott persuaded the legislature to pass a law requiring all welfare recipients to pass a drug test but the measure was challenged by state Sen. Arthenia Joyner, D-Tampa, and the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and put on hold by an Orlando court. Scott is appealing the ruling.
Remind me to never ever piss off anyone on The Daily Show, not even Steve the Intern, ever!
The following image has been floating around Twitter (hash tag #wordingfail). I added the emphasis.
It appears that CNN thinks that any accusations of sexual impropriety against a Republican is “false”.
I’m not sure how much is the increased corporate ownership/consolidation and how much of this is 40+ years of the ‘Phants playing the ref.
FWIW, the this time, it’s not just an allegation of sexual harassment, it’s an allegation of a 13 year long affair that ended a few months before he entered the Presidential race, and she has records of repeated cell phone calls and text messages.
Jon Stewart is rejoicing.
Because, as entertaining as the Republican presidential primary, aka “the Clown Show,” is, our man Herman takes this to a whole new level of assholitude:
Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain has suggested that the Taliban are playing a role in Libya’s new government, adding another foreign policy misstep to his stumbling campaign.
The week opened with Cain struggling to answer whether he supported US president Barack Obama’s foreign policy in Libya. He ended it trying to blame reporters for the moment, which was captured on video and quickly spread around the internet.
Cain’s critics seized on Monday’s incoherent answer as the latest evidence that he is unprepared to be the party’s nominee. On Friday, Cain gave his critics more grist for their increasingly substantial mill.
“Do I agree with siding with the opposition? Do I agree with saying that Gaddafi should go? Do I agree that they now have a country where you’ve got Taliban and al-Qaida that’s going to be part of the government?” Cain asked reporters in Orlando, Florida. “Do I agree with not knowing the government was going to – which part was he asking me about? I was trying to get him to be specific and he wouldn’t be specific.”
(emphasis mine)
Seriously, the Taliban? The Taliban is inflitrating the government of Libya?
I guess that must be because Afghanistan is located right next to Libya.
Jeebus, they are 2½ hours apart. That’s two and one half freaking time zones apart!
They don’t even border on the same freaking time zone.
I’m with Rachel Maddow. This is not primarily a Presidential campaign, it is performance art:
In the latest case, we have Warren Olney, the host of “On Point,” equating homosexuality with child rape:
Allegations of child sex abuse have destroyed the carefully cultivated image of Penn State’s football team and brought down the university’s administration. They’ve also exposed once more the vulnerability of children, when a sexual predator can hide behind the façade of an institution bent on protecting its reputation. Foster children were assigned to former coach Jerry Sandusky’s care, even though charges against him were investigated for years. Today, Penn State’s Board of Trustees expanded its probe into the cover-up. With 500,000 children desperate for loving homes, we look at efforts to widen the pool of available parents. Should gays and lesbians qualify?
That’s Olney’s lede from his show on gay foster parents.
And then he lets an anti-gay bigot, Jerry Cox of the Arkansas’ Family Council, which has been designated as a hate group by the SPLC, spew his filth without challenging his cherry picking and outright lies.
But Warren Olney still has a job, while Lisa Simeone, an entertainment reporter, got fired for being a spokesman for a Occupy Wall Street Group, and now NPR has dropped its distribution of World of Opera produced by WDAV in an attempt to get her fired from that show.
Yep, you got it. They are trying to get an entertainment reporter fired, and shut down an opera show.
To be fair, On Point is distributed by PRI, not NPR, though PRI was weaseled big time on this, “Thank you for contacting Public Radio International. We share your concern. Although PRI does not have editorial control over the show -we distribute the program and KCRW produces-once we heard the program yesterday, we began having discussions with the editorial staff of To the Point, and those discussions will continue.”
The problem is that public broadcasting suffers from Barack Obama syndrome: It sees liberals as a captive audience to be belittled and scorned in an attempt to suck up to to right wingers who will hate them anyway.
If you give, they will continue to do this, so when they call, write back, and say that balance does not involve sanctioning hate speech and leaving outright lies unchallenged.
As it stands today, Warren Olney is still secure in his job, and NPR is still trying to get Lisa Simeone fired, so public broadcasting is not is not an institution for “mindful human beings,” to quote Ronald Reagan, Jr. on Dick Cheney.
I’m not saying that these people are inherently evil, but they are so weak that they are willing allies of evil.
Do you remember the theatrical release of the Atlas Shrugged Movie, imaginatively named Atlas Shrugged Part I? It was first movie of a 3 part series based on Ayn Rand’s magnum opus.
Yeah, I didn’t think so. It left theaters so fast that I don’t think that they had time to finishing the lettering on the sign.
Well, in their attempt to further
rip-off
monetize their gullible objectivist fanboi base, they made a fairly substantial DVD release that they are now having to recall:
100,000 “Atlas Shrugged” DVDs have been recalled for an important danger they posed to unwary consumers: the title sheet suggested that viewers help someone out besides themselves.
Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand that tells the story of an alternate reality version of America where all the millionaires get sick of the government taking over their inventions so they go on strike. The original title sheet for the movie said that in it, “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…” This grave error posed a risk of fire. As in, it would make Ayn Rand fan’s heads spontaneously immolate upon reading it. So the producers recalled the 100,000 DVDs to replace the sheet.
The new sheet will read, “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of rational self-interest comes to life…” (Emphasis added.)
Needless to say, the idea that the overpaid* self-styled supermen succeeded in refuting Ayn Rand’s core message and now feel ethically compelled to correct this, at significant personal cost, is just chock full of Irony.
*If they are paid at all they are overpaid.
Jim Romenesko has resigned from the Poynter Institute.
His blog there was the go-to place for media happenings like M&A, layoffs, and scandals.
He was already weeks away from a long planned retirement from the site, when he would go part time, and start his own blog. (Now updated on my blogroll, but the RSS feed is not yet active.)
The cause was lack of quote marks around some of the quotes.
Romenensko has been meticulously linking and attributing while summarizing for years, and has never gotten a complaint, and the fact that it is a quote is clear from context.
There is some sort of dumb ass pissing contest going on at Poynter.
I give you deadbeat dad teabagger Congressman Joe Walsh:
I’ve seen politicians at confrontational meet and greets, and heard of one where the politician walked out (The well justified action of MD State Senator Bobby Zirkin when dealing with the [literally] insane CB screaming at him).
Sometimes a politician replies with mockery and scorn, see Barney Franks’ epic take-down of teabagger hecklers.
As you can see above, Joe “Not the Guitar God” Walsh is not even attempting an epic take-down, he’s just throwing an epic hissy fit.
I was half expecting him to throw a stroke.
No wonder his wife dumped his sorry ass.
My son was talking to me as I was perusing the blog Wall Street Jackass, and he asked if everyone on Wall Street was a jackass.
I told him, “No, they have janitors there too.”
It appears that BoA CEO Brian Moynihan is incensed at the criticism directed at bank of America:
Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan said he’s “incensed” by public criticism of his company and is pushing back by reminding local leaders of its contributions to their economies.
Moynihan, 52, told employees in a global town hall meeting last week from the firm’s Charlotte, North Carolina, headquarters that the “place to win the battle” over the bank’s battered public image is at the state and municipal level.
Bank of America’s outreach campaign is part of Moynihan’s effort to turn around the lender since he took over as CEO in January 2010 following two taxpayer bailouts. His plan to charge some debit-card users a $5 monthly fee drew reprimands from President Barack Obama and lawmakers, including U.S. Senator Richard Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who said customers should withdraw their deposits in protest.
“I, like you, get a little incensed when you think about how much good all of you do, whether it’s volunteer hours, charitable giving we do, serving clients and customers well,” Moynihan said during the Oct. 18 gathering. To the bank’s critics, he said, “You ought to think a little about that before you start yelling at us.”
Moynihan is laboring to rebuild the bank’s reputation with customers, employees and investors. Even before the debit-card fee sparked protests in Los Angeles and Boston, state attorneys general blamed the bank for using improper documents to justify foreclosures. To help reverse a stock decline this year of more than 50 percent, the lender is cutting expenses by eliminating more than 30,000 jobs.
If you don’t want people to complain about your bank, start by not treating your customers like sh%$.
Mr. Moynihan, why don’t you ……… Well, Jon Stewart said it best. (see vid)
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.
Personally confirm this, because his is probably lying.
The latest case is (probably) former GOP golden boy Mark Rubio who was caught lying about his family being expelled from Cuba by Castro:
During his rise to political prominence, Sen. Marco Rubio frequently repeated a compelling version of his family’s history that had special resonance in South Florida. He was the “son of exiles,” he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after “a thug,” Fidel Castro, took power.
But a review of documents — including naturalization papers and other official records — reveals that the Florida Republican’s account embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-half years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.
The supposed flight of Rubio’s parents has been at the core of the young senator’s political identity, both before and after his stunning tea-party-propelled victory in last year’s Senate election. Rubio — now considered a prospective 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate and a possible future presidential contender — mentions his parents in the second sentence of the official biography on his Senate Web site. It says that Mario and Oriales Rubio “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.” And the 40-year-old senator with the boyish smile and prom-king good looks has drawn on the power of that claim to entrance audiences captivated by the rhetorical skills of one of the more dynamic stump speakers in modern American politics.
The real story of his parents’ migration appears to be a more conventional immigrant narrative, a couple who came to the United States seeking a better life. In the year they arrived in Florida, the future Marxist dictator was in Mexico plotting a quixotic return to Cuba.
Rubio’s office confirmed Thursday that his parents arrived in the United States in 1956 but noted that “while they were prepared to live here permanently, they always held out the hope and the option of returning to Cuba if things improved.” They returned to Cuba several times after Castro came to power to “assess the situation with the hope of eventually moving back,” the office said in a statement.
Yeah, right.
In 1956, Castro was in exile in Mexico until December 2.
His “revolution” was little more than a quixotic joke in 1956.
His parents ditched Cuba in 1956 because they did not want to live there any more.
Lame…
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:
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.)
Paul Ryan is suggesting that Republicans should double down on killing Medicare as a political strategy.
Convince your side that this is what you want to do! Please!!!!
Throw us in that briar patch!