Friday, March 06, 2009

Rick Santelli Bails Out On Jon Stewart

Amazing Jon Stewart segment showing how CNBC as a 24-hour Financial Channel is horribly below average, bordering on delusional, doling out poor advice on the market month after month.
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.

The AP reports, CNBC spokesman Brian Steel “said neither the network’s executives nor [analyst Rick] Santelli would comment on Stewart’s broadcast.”

Source: Think Progress

Paul Krugman: The Unthinkable Is Upon Us

Reaping what the Republicans have sown the past 8 years is almost too unfathomable to comprehend. Alan Greenspan's model was flawed, Phil Gramm's regulations incentivized risk, the markets did not correct, and morality was systematically removed form the financial world.

How bad is it? Krugman writes:
"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.

And now that these companies have built up a derivatives market in the past 8 years valued at over $400 trillion that is unregulated and largely unknown to John Q. Public, things get exponentially worse as companies fail. The debt these failed companies default on was insured. It lives on like a zombie eating the flesh of other companies and our economy.

The bitterest pill to swallow would be maybe we let the big guys fail and out of that little guys pop up to fill the need. Isn't that capitalism?

Source: NYT

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Off Today

At a funeral. Be back tomorrow.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

The Prank Wars Continue

The Prank Wars continue at College Humor. Amir makes a blindfolded half-court basketball shot for $500,000. Or so he thinks. Classic.



Source: college humor

Reality Check On Taxes

Economist try to explain the present. Investors look to the future. Does the stock market predict or lag? We try to find out. One thing is clear, we all use past events or trends to make our points and help shape our policies.

You would think no one heard of the 1950s, our fastest growing decade ever. Historic.

What were taxes like back then? The top marginal rate was 91%.

Do Republicans think we never had any business or growth prior to the 1980s? Has their memory shriveled to just looking at today's talking points? Attack on prosperity?

Not saying I want high taxes, just showing that when people who make a lot of money pay high taxes, the country does just fine.

I said that and the DOW is up 200+ points today, using high tech Republican theory, I must be right.

Getting The Obvious Out Of The Way

Nate Silver takes on an article by Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. In it, Harvard economist Robert Barro writes about the relationship between stock market crashes and depressions. Barro thinks we're heading to a major depression. While finding his article incurious and simplistic, Nate also notes a troubling trend:
"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.]

John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Great Crash of 1929" held that the "boom" period before a crash encourages very poor economic decisions that must all eventually be paid for when the reckoning comes. By that, the stock market reacts and lags.

We are paying for poor Bush Administration decisions that let markets run themselves, backed with a Fed that made money very easy to borrow. All run by the smart guys and the banks, with all the risk insured. Seems too unbelievable.

Well watch this video and see how smart these guys are: [and I like Kramer]



Let's all be realistic about where we are coming from and where we are heading. We have change and it's going to be around for a long time. We obviously need it.

Source: 538.com

Conservatism In 4 Steps

Conservatives, Republicans, and members of the CATO institute all operate from four easy-on-the-mind positions. No thinking necessary.

1) Create a cult of personality; i.e. Reagan, Bush, Palin, Limbaugh and support the focus, no matter what.

2) Deflect all criticism with ad hominum attacks or nonsensical pronouncements. i.e., McCain insisting on knowing more about a relationship (Ayers/Obama) that does not exist.

3) Blame everybody else for your eff-ups. i.e., The ship's crew put up that (Mission Accomplished) banner.

4) Kill the messenger. The story of your failures and abuses are always true, just attack who said it. Convict Scooter Libby covered up for Cheney and Bush, but Joe Wilson, while correct, needs his CIA wife outed to prove what?

Lastly, an easy overview: everything good is done by the right, everything bad is done by the left. When in doubt sound folksy and/or like an idiot.

Go forth and multiply.

GOP Rep. Actually Reads Bill, Discovers GOP Fake Stories

There's a problem with believing your own propaganda. A cautionary tale.

Dick Spotswood
, a California-based columnist, visited Washington, D.C., last week, and spent some time on Capitol Hill. He shares a story:
"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.

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."
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.

That's what happens when you get your news from Fox, O'Reilly, Rush or even Bobby Jindal's rebuttal: you assume you're getting the truth, but in fact you're listening to people who don't know what they're talking about. That way, they don't think they are lying, they're just telling you what they heard.

So the conservatives get news with no credibility from their sources, repeat these stories, then turn around and blame the liberal media for all their real failures and political ineptitude.

Ronald Reagan used to say, "trust, but verify". What a load. Reagan loved to tell tale of the welfare queen in a Cadillac. There's something about the conservative mind that finds these anecdotes irresistible.

Source: Washington Monthly

David Plouffe: Rush Is Gold For The Dems

Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's article in the Washington Post regarding Rush Limbaugh as new Minority leader.
"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.

As much as Rush hopes Obama fails, aren't we hoping Rush fails? Oh, that's right. Obama is the President of America and Rush is a greasy-haired, pot bellied, unelected pill-popping AM radio host who looks like a before photo for Extreme Makeover or The Biggest Loser.

As a democrat myself, Rush is gold, pure gold. After the defeats in 2010, maybe they'll make Rush Pope of the Republican Party?



Source: WaPo

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

The Republican Party's REAL Leader

AmericansUnited video: The Republican Party's REAL Leader?

The party that can't stand up to an AM radio host.



Source: http://www.youtube.com/AmericansUnited

DoJ: More Memos, More Crimes

The day after releasing nine formerly secret documents detailing the Bush Administration's sweeping presidential powers to bypass legal constraints when fighting terrorism, the Justice Department is set to release some more.

Somewhere John Yoo is wetting himself. You know Bush doesn't have your back.

Yoo, who was the author of many of the legal opinions justifying detention and interrogation policies and seemed to base his legal opinions on nothing more than pre-existing Bush needs to justify torture, is being sued.
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.

And Bush got how many convictions breaking all these laws? Jose Padilla?

Source: NYT

Obama's Bulls Game Highlights Key Distinctions With Bush

Two things about this story of Barack Obama going to see his Chicago Bulls play the Wizards the other night. Policies aside, these are simple observations about the men, not their politics.





First off, it's the President going to see an NBA game. Pretty cool.

1. It's Friday night, Barack is out at game. Our previous President would be home in his PJs dipping pretzels into his milk, planning another long vacation at the ranch. Bush could not stay up past 9pm.

2. He's having a casual beer. It's always been a useless guide to likability, but I would enjoy sitting next to him, as is this child, over a cold one. Our previous President was an alcoholic and can not drink for the rest of his life due to his uncontrollable addiction to booze and other illegal substances like cocaine. Those facts aside, I don't think that stopped Bush, who never had proper counseling in his alcoholism, from self-medicating the past few years.

Maybe they are minor differences to you, but to me they highlight how we now have a full functioning man as President. We have a true man of the people, not some sheltered, flawed baby boy living in his bubble.

Republicans Go Shameless Once Again

Shameless Republicanism.

Back in the halcyon Bush days, when the GOP had delusions of Karl Rove controlling a decades long majority, the Republicans re-wrote laws and positioned Democrats as un-Partriotic for holding up the process.

Case in point, Bush appointing judicial vacancies in an attempt to stack the Federal Courts.
By 2003, a group of senators led by Orrin Hatch had completely re-written the rules on senatorial objections to would-be judges.

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.
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:
"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."

"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.
As The Washington Monthly points out:
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?

The "up and down vote" argument has been shelved. Their passionate arguments about Bush being able to stack the courts with like-minded judges, enjoying lifetime appointments, are but a memory. Remember their Bill Frist and the "nuclear option" to end Democratic filibisters?

As they saw it, an elected President had powers to do what ever he wants under their Unitary Executive Theory. Except when he is a elected Democrat. The whole "they were for it before they were against it" line rings true.

It's one thing to want to stack the deck in your favor, both parties want that. It's that the Republicans re-wrote the rules just a few years ago to their advantage and now want to change them after their Party has imploded that takes the cake.

Just settle into your loser role and stew on the fact that unelected guys like Rush are your your leaders. All this talk of attracting the hip-hop crowd and how you use twitter and it's a guy on AM radio who dominates your world.

Source: Washington Monthly

RNC's Steele Goes Soft On Rush

Michael Steele, when CNN's D.L. Hughley referred to radio host Rush Limbaugh as "the de facto leader of the Republican party" shot back, "No he's not. I'm the de facto leader of the Republican party,"

Steele went on to say Rush is a mere "entertainer" whose show is "incendiary" and "ugly."

A mere 12 hours later and it's "kiss the ring" time:
Michael Steele has apologized to Rush Limbaugh for referring to him as an "entertainer" who can be "ugly" and "incendiary," Mike Allen reports.

"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."
You be da bitch, Michael. You be da bitch. [said in female Minnesotan accent]

It's a great system where an unelected drug addict gets to influence and entire political party. This will look so amazing in the history books when the next generation is reading about conservative leadership in the "extict species" section.

Rush keeps the Republican base happy. They love him. They're lacking the intelligence to understand the world as it is. Their fear-based culture war style of politics will ensure a limited role in really shaping the future. They have a childlike approach to complex problems. They don't realize how much they are getting played by their own leaders. But they're happy.

Ignorance is bliss.

Source: HuffPo

Monday, March 02, 2009

Obama Administration Releases Bush Memos

The Bush Administration is memorizing their response to why they broke all the laws and shredded the Constitution, "I don't recall". Too bad we have the papers to help prove it. It's too late for 92 CIA interrogation tapes that were destroyed, but still plenty left to bring people to justice.

Let the sun shine in on the tip of the iceburg:
"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.

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."
Better collect John Yoo's passport.

Source: HuffPo

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Rush Limbaugh: Ideas Are Overrated

The party of Lincoln has pitifully reduced itself to the party of Limbaugh.
"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.