“If I had only followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today,” Stewart said, “provided I’d started with $100 million.”Fake news shows like The Daily Show should do finance.
"So why has this zombie idea -- it keeps being killed, but it keeps coming back -- taken such a powerful grip? The answer, I fear, is that officials still aren't willing to face the facts. They don't want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it's very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over. And temporary nationalization is still, apparently, considered unthinkable."The problem was letting companies get too big to fail. That notion made these large companies not worry about the risk, if things got bad, they knew the government would come in and bail them out.
"the Journal is engaged in an ongoing project to use the stock market as proxy for the performance of the economy as a whole, and by extension, the performance of the Obama administration."CNBC does the same thing. Deep analysis? They are cheerleaders. All these brain boxes had little useful insight and failed to predict the current recession, yet now they know how to get us out? The article's main flaw was it looked at previous financial situations and historic dates and did not really correlate enough to draw a serious conclusion. Add to that, we now have a new culture of CNBC and hedge funs and short selling that we never had before. The market does not know how to take care of itself anymore.
"The failure of markets to price assets efficiently is arguably one of the principal causes of the current economic crisis."What Barro has done over the years at Harvard as a right wing economist, helping shape economic theory, is what brought us here. Now he gets to be a mouthpiece for Murdoch's rag to undermine Obama. Their strategy will be to claim that, if the treatment is not instantly effective, the physician must have caused the disease. [I love how all these guys want Government out of the markets, then when they cause they markets to fail, they want the government to come in exactly the way they deem necessary and then complain when it's not perfect for them in 6 weeks.]
"Met with Republican Rep. Mary Bono Mack from Riverside County's Coachella Valley. While a social moderate, Sonny Bono's widow is a solid conservative. Talked to her about Obama's $780 billion stimulus legislation. She's outraged that the plan has "$1 billion wasted on a magnetic-levitation train from L.A. to Sin City" -- all at Nevada Sen. Harry Reid's doing.I bet she still tells the train story as if never being called out. Wow, reading the bill actually informed Bono Mack of what was in the bill. Her head was later removed from her ass.
After expressing my doubt that the Las Vegas line was actually in the bill's language, Bono Mack directs her staff to "get him the bill, it's right there, show him." A few minutes later, a staffer emerges with a copy and quietly says "it's not in the bill."
"But if the GOP sticks with its strategy of failure as the only option, further eroding its brand with the people who decide elections, we may find out what it means for a political party to hit rock bottom."Failure as the only option? That nails it. The GOP personifies failure. They can only bring failure to the situation. They frame debates and policy from such an out of touch approach, they never really address the problem. But what does Plouffe know? He was only an architect of the most successful, well run, paradigm-shifting, Presidential campaign ever.
“This was an assault on the law itself,” Mr. Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said. “It’s as if 200 years of our history and the Constitution could just be dispensed with in the face of a terrorist attack. For me, it totally intensified the absolute need for a serious criminal investigation of both the authors of these memos as well as the people who put them up to it.”As Bush would have said, "bring it on".“
"These memos appear to have given the Bush administration a legal blank check to trample on Americans’ civil rights,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. Referring to the Office of Legal Counsel, the section of the Justice Department where Mr. Yoo worked, Mr. Whitehouse said, “We need to get to the bottom of what happened at O.L.C. and ensure it never happens again.”So many memos, so many crimes: interrogation, surveillance and detention policies, domestic surveillance without warrants, harsh interrogation techniques including waterboarding are just a few. All on the wrong side of the law.
By 2003, a group of senators led by Orrin Hatch had completely re-written the rules on senatorial objections to would-be judges.Now that Republicanism is dead and Bush is pre-jail, the party of faux-morality has taken a 180 degree turn on its stance when Obama is filling these same vacancies. They suggest:
Left without the traditional tools, Senate Democrats started filibustering the most extreme right-wing nominees. This, Republicans said, was literally unconstitutional and an affront that tore at the fabric of our system of government. "Advice and consent," the GOP said, meant giving every judicial nominee an up-or-down vote. Anything else, they said, would be an outrageous insult to our democracy.
"President Barack Obama should fill vacant spots on the federal bench with former President Bush's judicial nominees to help avoid another huge fight over the judiciary, all 41 Senate Republicans said Monday."As The Washington Monthly points out:
"Regretfully, if we are not consulted on, and approve of, a nominee from our states, the Republican Conference will be unable to support moving forward on that nominee," the letter warns. "And we will act to preserve this principle and the rights of our colleagues if it is not."
In other words, Republicans are threatening a filibuster of judges if they're not happy.
Even by the standards of the congressional GOP, this is truly ridiculous. The same people who said judicial filibusters were literally illegal are threatening to launch judicial filibusters. What's more, they also want to see the failed former president's unsuccessful judicial nominees put on the federal bench for life -- just a gesture of goodwill.They want Democrats to use Bush's, the worst President in history, appointees?
Michael Steele has apologized to Rush Limbaugh for referring to him as an "entertainer" who can be "ugly" and "incendiary," Mike Allen reports.You be da bitch, Michael. You be da bitch. [said in female Minnesotan accent]
"My intent was not to go after Rush - I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh," Steele said. "I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. ... There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership."
"The Obama administration threw open the curtain on years of Bush-era secrets Monday, revealing anti-terror memos that claimed exceptional search-and-seizure powers and divulging that the CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other treatment of terror suspects.Better collect John Yoo's passport.
The Justice Department released nine legal opinions showing that, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration determined that certain constitutional rights would not apply during the coming fight. Within two weeks, government lawyers were already discussing ways to wiretap U.S. conversations without warrants.
The Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions, but the documents themselves had been closely held. By releasing them, President Barack Obama continued a house-cleaning of the previous administration's most contentious policies.
"Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech a few hours before the documents were released. "Not only is that school of thought misguided, I fear that in actuality it does more harm than good."
"One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas," - Rush "Mr. Oxycodone and Hydrocodone" Limbaugh.The point was directed at Newt Gingrich which is a great sign for the party. Rush goes on to say that politics is all about winning election. First off, a very transparent indictment on the greed and avarice and general lack in actually governing of the Republican party. Secondly, his GOP has failed in the past 2 election cycles. Well done, old scared white guy. Pop a pill, enjoy the long slow spiral down the toilet bowl of life.
