Shitty Journalism is the Biggest Dick of Them All

Mark Halpern getting suspended for calling Obama a "dick" is like Al Capone going to jail for tax evasion. I agree with Greg Sargent entirely, and this rant hits all the right notes:

I’m sorry, but this is crazy. Halperin’s crack was crude and dumb, but it doesn’t deserve indefinite suspension. Halperin’s use of an expletive is trival when compared with the degradation of our political discourse we witness on a regular basis from Halperin and many others — degradation that is seen as perfectly acceptable because no curse words are employed. Suspending Halperin only reinforces a phony definition of “civility” in our discourse, in which it’s unacceptable to use foul language and be “uncivil,” but it’s perfectly acceptable for reporters and commentators to allow outright falsehoods to pass unrebutted; to traffic endlessly in false equivalences in the name of some bogus notion of objectivity; and to make confident assertions about public opinion without referring to polls which show them to be completely wrong.

I care less about Halperin’s use of the word “dick” than I do about the argument he and Joe Scarborough were making — that Obama somehow stepped over some kind of line in aggressively calling out the GOP for refusing to allow any revenues in a debt ceiling deal. This notion that Obama’s tone was somehow over the top — when politics is supposed to be a rough clash of visions — is rooted in a deeply ingrained set of unwritten rules about what does and doesn’t constitute acceptable political discourse that really deserve more scrutiny. This set of rules has it that it should be treated as a matter of polite, legitimate disagreement when Michele Bachmann says deeply insane things about us not needing to raise the debt limit, but it should be seen as an enormously newsworthy gaffe when she commits a relatively minor error about regional trivia. This set of rules has it that it should be treated as a matter of polite, legitimate disagreement when Republicans continually claim that Dems cut $500 billion in Medicare, even though fact checkers have pronunced it false, but it should be seen as “demagoguery” when Dems argue that the Paul Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it.

Halperin has certainly done his part to encourage these unwritten rules, and so maybe there’s a certain poetic justice in the fact that he’s now been suspended indefitely for violating them, but still, this is over the top. I care that Halperin uncritically claims that Drudge rules the media world, and acts accordingly. I care that Halperin published a book that accused public officials of using explosive, racially charged quotes that were paraphrased, without guaranteeing their accuracy, in order to gin up media controvery. I care that Halperin does dumb things like parroting GOP predictions of a big victory when all available evidence is pointing the other way, as he famously did in the runup to the 2006 elections. I don’t care that he used the word “dick” to describe the president. Suspending Halperin for this only reinforces the bogus idea that a crass and dumb slip into foul language is worse than all this other stuff we see on a regular basis.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves about our political culture. Politicians and members of the media curse pretty much constantly, for reasons good and bad, big and small. This fact is backed up by anyone who has worked in that world. Yet, when when it leaks that someone has used bad language, everyone feels the need to condemn and shame the person who made the remarks. (You can replace everything I just said in relation to sex scandals as well)

Whatever your feelings on bad language (if you read this blog, you know I don't find it offensive, but I'm aware plenty of people disagree), to me it's a matter of what you find offensive. Is it more offensive that Rahm said "fuck" a lot, or that he has been a corporate whore during his entire political career? Is it more offensive that Larry Summers is kind of dick (GASP) or that his decision to not allow a larger stimulus directly led to the extended unemployment crisis we have now? Does it matter more that Tim Geithner is by all accounts a nice guy (he would never call someone a dick!), or that he is a tool of the banking industry?

Not only are those real issues far more important, but bullshitting about civility and focusing on personal traits is done precisely so that media figures don't have to tackle harder questions where they might be forced to do their job and come to a conclusion other than "adultery is bad" or "using bad language is mean".

It's easy to grandstand on those issues, because you can get as sanctimonious as you want with little downside. No one will stop your acesss. Your sources won't stop feeding you their unimportant gossip first.

If you look at the facts and state your conclusions (you know, the actual job of a journalist), you might piss somebody off. Worse than that, you might get held up as evidence of "liberal" bias (the type of bias many facts carry).

So we talk about the stupid stuff. We rarely hold people accountable for anything other than sex scandals (and in that case, you have to be a Democrat for it to count). Our presidential elections turn into debates over who you'd rather have a beer with, or who looks the most "presidential". When our media has debates actual policy, it rarely departs from the elite consensus surrounding an issue. Medicare and Social Security may be insanely popular, but any time they're brought up on TV it's in a roundtable discussion over who has the courage to cut them because everyone knows this needs to happen.

Joe Scarborough can lie constantly for an entire segment about how Medicare is like Chocolate Cake, and keep his job, probably more popular than ever within the beltway media for saying what everyone knows out loud. Mark Halpern can be one of the shittiest journalists on the planet for the last whoever many years, but what gets him kicked off TV is saying a bad word, that 99% of DC reports would say to each other without even blinking.

It's definitely up for debate how much a role our political media plays in the problems our country faces, but it sure as hell isn't making anyone smarter. I don't know exactly how you change this, but it is worth pointing out from time to time how terrible it is and a few of the reasons why that's the case.

Nobody Goes To Jail

Madness:

WASHINGTON (AP) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle civil fraud charges that it misled buyers of complex mortgage investments just as the housing market was collapsing.

J.P. Morgan Securities, a division of the powerful Wall Street bank, failed to tell investors that a hedge fund helped select the investment portfolio and then bet that the portfolio would fail, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

Among the investors who lost money on the deal were autoworkers for General Motors, a Lutheran financial organization in Minneapolis and a retirement services company in Topeka, Kan.

The settlement announced Tuesday is one of the most significant legal actions targeting Wall Street's role in the 2008 financial crisis. It comes a year after Goldman Sachs & Co. paid $550 million to settle similar charges.

Still, the settlement amounts to less than 1 percent of the bank's 2010 net income of $17.4 billion — or less than what JPMorgan earns in one week.

JPMorgan neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing under the settlement. The bank released a statement saying it lost nearly $900 million on the investment. It also noted that it reviewed similar mortgage investments and voluntarily paid $56 million to compensate some investors in those deals.

The bank agreed to settle the charges two weeks after Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., complained to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that new financial regulations designed to prevent another financial crisis were too burdensome on banks.

And this is how every case against Wall Street ends. With no jail time, no one losing their job, no one even having to say they're sorry. Jamie Dimon get a platform to talk about how there's too much government regulation, still be buds with Obama and Geithner, all like it never happened.

How I wish I could go back in time and tell Elliott Spitzer to stop sleeping with hookers.

Empathy Fail

Mitt Romney, net worth 200 million dollars:

"I should tell my story," Romney told a group of unemployed people in Florida. "I'm also unemployed."

Fuck.

Off.

Obama And Wall Street: Romance Renewed

After their fake break up, everyone is friends again!

WASHINGTON — A few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama convened two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, in the White House’s Blue Room.

The guests were asked for their thoughts on how to speed the economic recovery, then the president opened the floor for over an hour on hot issues like hedge fund regulation and the deficit.


Mr. Obama, who enraged many financial industry executives a year and a half ago by labeling them “fat cats” and criticizing their bonuses, followed up the meeting with phone calls to those who could not attend.


The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash — in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.

Last month, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama’s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.

“The first goal was to get recognition that the administration has led the economy from an unimaginably difficult place to where we are today,” said Blair W. Effron, an investment banker closely involved in Mr. Obama’s fund-raising efforts. “Now the second goal is to turn that into support.”

The president’s top financial industry supporters say they are confident that the support Mr. Obama needs will ultimately be there, despite the financial industry’s unhappiness over his efforts to tighten regulation of their businesses. But it is clear that those supporters will have to work much harder to win over the financial services industry than they did in 2008, before Wall Street’s bust, the subsequent clashes over policy and the sometimes bitter personal differences that lingered afterward.

I'm sure the discussion over those "hot button issues" was intense.

The Deficit: "The only thing that is off the table is enforcing our corporate tax laws"

Hedge fund regulation: "Uhhh, maybe later?"

Jail: "Don't worry, Holder's got his priorities in order!"

I also love that these TITANS OF CAPITALISM have the emotinal makeup of middle school lovers. Yeah, he gave us tons of money, protected our bonuses and refuses to prosecute the fraud we commited... but he called us "fat cats" and WORDS HURT!

Ratcheting up the stupid, the article includes a quote from a hedge fund manager who supported Obama in 2008 but is backing Romney this time because "I’m really not an ideological guy, and I think the country right now needs more practical, less partisan people." (Vomit everywhere)

And going back to the depressing, this section seems pretty telling:

To offset those defections, Mr. Obama’s campaign has deployed a corps of loyal Wall Street supporters who have fanned out to defend the president’s record and stoke fatigued donors. They include Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Group Americas; the hedge fund managers Orin S. Kramer and Eric Mindich; and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.

Mr. Mindich and Mr. Wolf were among those at the White House meeting, along with some prominent names from the hedge fund world: James G. Dinan of York Capital Management, Glenn Dubin of Highbridge Capital Management and Paul Tudor Jones.

Members of the president’s economic team and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, a former banking executive, have been more active in reaching out to Wall Street executives about policy issues, donors said, along with Mr. Messina and Patrick Gaspard, the D.N.C.’s executive director.


The campaign and its allies are also seeking to recruit a new group of high-level bundlers, supporters who recruit other donors. They include Antonio Weiss, the global head of investment banking at Lazard; Charles Myers, a senior managing director at Evercore Partners; and James E. Staley, the head of JPMorgan Chase’s investment bank.

The campaign is also courting prominent Wall Street figures who could serve as Mr. Obama’s ambassadors at firms known for leaning Republican: Lenard B. Tessler, a managing director at Cerberus Capital who donated to Mr. Romney and Mrs. Clinton in 2008, and Hamilton E. James, the president of the private equity behemoth Blackstone.

It should also be noted that with this much attention focused on courting this class of donors, issues that matter to these donors will take priority. Issues that don't, wont.

There's not a high unemployment rate among hedge fund managers, in case you haven't noticed.

"Play Ball or Live With The Consequences"

It's a popular line among people such as myself that no one on Wall Street has faced any consequences for fraud/speculation/greed/destroying the economy that they committed.

This is not true. The whistleblowers get punished:

Whistle-blowers, truth-tellers and fraud-spotters pay a miserable price on Wall Street. They are vilified. They are fired. Sometimes they are even sued. Instead of being sought after, they become persona non grata.

In this column, co-published with New York Times' DealBook, I monitor the financial markets to hold companies, executives and government officials accountable for their actions. Tips? Praise? Contact me at jesse@propublica.org

Recently, I caught up with David Maris, a one-time star pharmaceutical analyst for Bank of America who became embroiled in one of the most notorious bull/bear battles of the last decade. His story encapsulates just how broken Wall Street culture is.

In 2003, Mr. Maris put out a sell report on Biovail, a Canadian drug company. He fixed on the company's bizarre explanation of why it had missed its earnings estimates: a truck carrying a supposedly huge amount of medicine crashed at the very end of the quarter. Mr. Maris detailed why this was wildly implausible.

Desperate to deflect the attention, Biovail took the offensive. It sued Mr. Maris and Bank of America in early 2006. It also sued SAC Capital Advisors, the hedge fund, and Gradient Analytics, an independent research firm, claiming a giant conspiracy to drive down its stock price with false reports.

For a time, Bank of America stood by Mr. Maris. But it eventually caved and fired him — two weeks before the end of 2006, enabling it to not pay his bonus. Mr. Maris is now in arbitration, seeking $21 million in back pay.

"For the first few days, there were high-fives and a lot of media attention," Mr. Maris said. "People said this is what research should be. But then reality strikes the bank." Lawsuits and media coverage are unpleasant and unwanted.
...
I don't want to create the impression that Mr. Maris is suffering. He isn't. He works at CLSA, a relatively unknown but important research shop, owned by a French bank that encourages its analysts to pursue independent lines of inquiry. Another analyst who has long been a truth-teller on banks, Mike Mayo, has also landed there.

But because Mr. Maris is willing to be publicly negative on stocks, he continues to face obstacles. He is prevented from asking questions on conference calls. Companies don't allow him to bring clients on visits. Some clients seem concerned about the lawsuits in his past.


"If you asked me what's my advice for a young analyst who wants to be in business for a long time, I wouldn't tell them to follow the path I went," he says. On Wall Street, "everyone knows you play ball or live with the consequences."

Damn You Greedy Teachers

Some lavish lifestyles enjoyed by some government employees is enough to make you cringe:

Gov. Chris Christie arrived at his son's baseball game this afternoon aboard a State Police helicopter.

Right before the lineup cards were being exchanged on the field, a noise from above distracted the spectators as the 55-foot long helicopter buzzed over trees in left field, circled the outfield and landed in an adjacent football field. Christie disembarked from the helicopter and got into a black car with tinted windows that drove him about a 100 yards to the baseball field.

During the 5th inning, Christie and First Lady Mary Pat Christie got into the car, rode back to the helicopter and left the game. During a pitching change, play was stopped for a couple of minutes while the helicopter took off.

I understand that a governor might need to use a helicopter now and then but when you're telling teachers, firefighters and police officers that they're greedy leaches on the system... what an asshole.

Contempt for Ordinary People

Much credit to the loathsome David Brooks for saying out loud what many of our political elites think in private:

Britain is also blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous. But the plusses outweigh the minuses.

Ahhh the good old days. Politics is their club, and you're not invited.

"How are you not ashamed to do the job that you do?"

Don't know how I missed this earlier, but watching Matt Taibbi destroy Megan McCardle during this interview was incredibly satisfying. For background on McCardle, this Jesse Lee quote sums her up best:

It’s not so much that McArdle is wrong. It’s that she proves herself wrong and then stands on her mountain of stupid wrongness sneering at everyone who’s noticed that she’s gloriously fucking wrong about everything.

Taibbi setting up the interview:

Wanted to post the video for an appearance I did this weekend on "CNN Your Money" with Ali Velishi, in which I was invited to debate the Goldman issue with Megan McArdle of The Atlantic. Megan and I have a long history, which I don't need to get into here, but I'll say this: her ragged intellectual poverty could not possibly have been laid any more bare than it was in this appearance. In it, she actually argues that Goldman did not have any more responsibility to see that their clients made money than, say, The Atlantic magazine has a responsibility to see that Rolling Stone makes money.

I will leave it to the reader to figure out how exact a correlation there might be between a bank that sells a multibillion-dollar pool of mortgages to a client with whom it has an written contractual commercial agreement – an agreement struck under the umbrella of an extensive series of securities laws – and two magazines that have absolutely no business relationship whatsoever.

Taibbi saying "How are you not ashamed to do the job that you do?" and the stunned silence that follows the exchange is priceless.

Likewise, as Taibbi says the Atlantic magazine/Rolling stone comparison might be one of the stupidest things ever uttered on live TV in some time. All that came to mind was this:

It's 100% Owner Greed

Big Daddy Drew's column on the NFL lockout is the one I've been hoping with a big megaphone would would step up and write:

You only need to see the topline of U.S District Judge David Doty's TV ruling to know the owners are the vile pieces of shit responsible for this work stoppage. Or, better yet, read it straight from Roger Goodell's desk. Witness just how poor of a job Goodell does trying to convince you the players are to blame for this potential disaster.

Staying with the status quo is not an option.

You had record ratings, made billions of dollars, and established yourself as the dominant force in televised entertainment. So you're going to have to do better than, "Well, it's the same shit!" to convince me this deal currently puts you in dire straits.

The union has repeatedly said that it hasn't asked for anything more and literally wants to continue playing under the existing agreement. That clearly indicates the deal has moved too far in favor of one side.

That's a fucking pathetic argument. "Hey, one side is happy with the deal. IT MUST BE UNFAIR!"

You can read the rest of Goodell's letter for yourself. He also says that the league "needs" new stadiums in Minneapolis, San Diego, Buffalo, and L.A. That's a bald-faced lie. The NFL doesn't NEED new stadiums at all. It won't become financially unviable just because the Bills are still eating ass in Orchard Park a decade from now. It WANTS new stadiums, and it wants the players to help pay for them. And while I'm all for making as much money as you can, I'm not all for it if it means dicking everyone out of football for two years just because you can get away with it.

Regardless of how this shit plays out, starting tonight, this is all 100 percent the owners' fault. Maybe you'll grow tempted to start blaming the players equally as this thing drags out, but you shouldn't. This isn't like 1994, when baseball shut down because it had both asshole owners and a players union that didn't even want drug testing and initiated the labor conflict by putting down their bats and striking in the middle of the season. This is different. This was premeditated and instigated by the NFL owners. And while Goodell may continually try and spin it otherwise as we go on (no doubt with help from his accordion monkey Peter King), and while some people might start buying into joint blame, I won't. And neither should you. The players are cool. The owners are worthless titblisters. There's no need for even-handedness here.

Read the whole thing and spread the word.

If we're going to lose a fucking NFL season over this, and millions of people will lose their jobs because of it, the least we can do is make sure the blame goes to the right place.

Nobody Goes To Jail

As usual, a really great piece by Matt Tiabbi:

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

It's long, but it's really worth reading the whole thing.

Assholes Who Hate Trains

It continues:

Despite its capital costs being almost entirely covered by Washington and plenty of evidence that private investors want to move forward, project is off the tracks for now.

Just days after the White House revealed its ambitions for a $53 billion, six-year plan for an American high-speed rail network, the place where it was all supposed to begin now appears to be out of the running. Today, Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) announced that he would refuse $2.4 billion in federal funds to build a rail line between Orlando and Tampa. The project’s construction would have required $280 million in state aid to be completed, but projections had indicated that the line would cover its own operating costs.

The Obama Administration has funded the project more than any other outside of California and hoped that the scheme, which would have opened in 2016 as the first line in a nationwide network, would serve as a model for the rest of the country. Numerous private corporations — including international conglomerates such as Siemens, Alstom, and JR East — have indicated that they would be willing to pick up the state’s tab and cover construction and operations risks, in exchange for the right to operate the trains.

Yet Mr. Scott has moved to squash the project nonetheless, acting before those companies were supposed to respond to the state high speed rail authority’s request for proposals. This is a shortsighted move that will only benefit others: The federal funding will be redistributed to projects in states such as California and Illinois.

The big corporations in Florida, all huge GOP donors, are willing TO PAY THE COSTS themselves to keep this project going.

As we've seen in other states, Scott is turning this down based on some combination of wanting to stick it to the muslim usurper, pissing off liberals and generally being an asshole.

Great job Republicans, I'm sure ten years from now you'll be looking at the high speed rail in California and Illinois, congratulating yourselves on how you helped your state avoid that menace.

The Joe Buck Disgusting Act of the Week: Richard Cohen

The Joe Buck Disgusting Act of the Week is awarded to whatever event/person best deserves Joe Buck's unnecessary and over the top outrage after a 2004 Randy Moss' touchdown celebration.

This column from Richard Cohen oozes stupid:

Things are about to go from bad to worse in the Middle East. An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is nowhere in sight. Lebanon just became a Hezbollah state, which is to say that Iran has become an even more important regional power, and Egypt, once stable if tenuously so, has been pitched into chaos. This is the most dire prospect of them all. The dream of a democratic Egypt is sure to produce a nightmare.

Take a minute to absorb what he just said. He is decrying that once "stable" Egypt has been thrown into chaos. He thinks this is sure to produce a nightmare, because...

Egypt's problems are immense. It has a population it cannot support, a standard of living that is stagnant and a self-image as leader of the (Sunni) Arab world that does not, really, correspond to reality. It also lacks the civic and political institutions that are necessary for democracy. The next Egyptian government - or the one after - might well be composed of Islamists. In that case, the peace with Israel will be abrogated and the mob currently in the streets will roar its approval.

1. Richard Cohen knows what's best for Egypt more so that the Egyptian people themselves.

2. They lack the tools for a democracy... once again, because Richard Cohen thinks they do.

3. A democratically elected government might not be friendly with Israel. This is because Egypt is populated by bloodthirsty savages who of are irrationally not fond Israel, a clearly stupid and wrong position that would only be taken by morons with no capacity for reason.

It gets even worse:

My take on all this is relentlessly gloomy. I care about Israel. I care about Egypt, too, but its survival is hardly at stake.

Prediction: If you're talking about the two countries that receive more US military aid than anyone else in the world, it's a decent bet that no country's "survival" is at stake.

And what is he implying will happen? That Egypt will start bulldozing houses in land that isn't theirs and installing in their own settlements? Who would let a country get away with doing that???

I care about democratic values, but they are worse than useless in societies that have no tradition of tolerance or respect for minority rights. What we want for Egypt is what we have ourselves. This, though, is an identity crisis. We are not them.

"societies that have no tradition of tolerance or respect for minority rights"

He actually fucking said that.

You know, good democracies like like the United States, France, England, Germany, Israel. All countries with great records of tolerance and respect for minority rights throughout their history.

Let's skip a few paragraphs where Cohen talks about the Muslim brotherhood as the new Al QeadaNaziCommunists and see how he ends this masterpiece:

Majority rule is a worthwhile idea. But so, too, are respect for minorities, freedom of religion, the equality of women and adherence to treaties, such as the one with Israel, the only democracy in the region.

Wait. Is he suggesting that a democratically elected government might not like the treaties that their undemocratically elected dictator signed? STUNNING.

"Respect for minorities". "Israel". Sorry, every time I read those words in the same sentence my mind goes blank and I wake up two hours later on the floor in the fetal position. Anyone else having that problem?

Those Americans and others who cheer the mobs in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities, who clamor for more robust anti-Mubarak statements from the Obama administration, would be wise to let Washington proceed slowly. Hosni Mubarak is history. He has stayed too long, been too recalcitrant - and, for good reason, let his fear of the future ossify the present. Egypt and the entire Middle East are on the verge of convulsing. America needs to be on the right side of human rights. 

Strong statement, and a great way to end... wait there's more? Fuck.

But it also needs to be on the right side of history. This time, the two may not be the same.

And that sums up the column so much better than I could.

Just for fun, try to name the times that being on the side of "human rights" was not on the right side of history.

Yeah.

But like many pundits and politicians, Richard Cohen views "democracy" as a form of government conducted by white non-Muslims, whose foreign policy is aligned directly with whatever the United States or Israel wants to do.

When an event happens that questions their worldview (see hamas' 2009 election), smoke starts coming out of their ears and they say things about how this particular group of people "isn't ready" for democracy because they didn't like the outcome. This case is even more absurd because Cohen just *knows* that a democracy in Egypt won't work out.

Guess what Richard? The beauty of this democracy thing is that it isn't our call.

Save the Rich, Fuck Anyone Else

In a surprisingly good column by Dana Milbank comes this amazingly honest quote: (via Balloon Juice)

All of this gave the business lobby much to celebrate as chamber members discussed the State of American Business over mini-muffins and banana bread Tuesday morning. Tom Donohue, the chamber's white-maned CEO, hailed the "new tone coming from the White House" since the elections - which the chamber influenced by spending tens of millions of dollars from donors kept anonymous, Donohue explained, so opponents couldn't "demagogue them." Donohue said he's "absolutely convinced" that the new business-friendly White House will move his way on regulation and trade.

A reporter asked Donohue for a suggestion of what corporate America, with its record profits, should do to put people back to work. "I got to think about this for a minute," Donohue said, then added: "I think the most important thing to tell a company is to return a reasonable return to their investors."

What an asshole.

Nobody Cares About Your Feelings

Waaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!

NEW YORK - On the mental list of slights and outrages that just about every major figure on Wall Street is believed to keep on President Barack Obama, add this one: When he met recently with a group of CEOs at Blair House, there was no representative from any of the six biggest banks in America.

Not one!

"If they don't hate us anymore, why weren't any of us there?" a senior executive at one of the Big Six banks said recently in trying to explain his hostility toward the president.


"It's not so much just this one thing,” he said. “Who cares about one event? It's just the pattern where they tell you things are going to change, that they appreciate what we do, that capital markets are important, but then the actions are different and they continue to want to score political points on us."

"If they don't hate us anymore?"

What a bunch of whiny bitches.

Obama's Federal reserve has been printing them endless money to gamble their way to prosperity, and these people are upset that Obama won't personally whisper nice things in their ear.

Not Everyone Is Suffering

Just a reminder...

NEW YORK, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Wall Street may earn $19 billion in 2010, its fourth-most profitable year, even as regulatory changes and a weakened economy limit its ability to generate profit, New York state's comptroller said.

The comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, also said that while it is too soon to predict bonuses, the average payout may rise because banks are shedding jobs and a smaller pool of people wll be eligible to get bonuses.

All this while the Administration is ready to cave and make sure the super rich get their tax cut.

Why the fuck would you not want to have a big public fight on this issue?

There's part of me that actually thinks the lesson they took from the election was that they were too mean to big business.

Sweet Jesus.

Fuck the Poor, Save the Rich

This graph is really depressing:

99.9% of people think look at a graph and think "that's fucking horrifying".

What does an asshole like Evan Bayh take from this?

TODD: Yesterday, the Census came out and said one in seven Americans are living below the poverty line. Do you look at that story today — you know, you open up your USA Today, right, and you see that story — and you see Washington is debating the tax rates for the wealthy, and you sit there and say, isn’t that a disconnect in America right now?

BAYH: It is a disconnect, Chuck. What we need to be focused on is growth, how do we create jobs, how do we expand businesses. That needs to be job one right now. And all these other issues involving, oh, fairness and things like that can wait.

"Fairness and things" can wait when we need to give the rich more money.

What an disgraceful human being.

31 Assholes

Tax cuts for the rich! Great message, guys:

Democratic pollsters say keeping the tax cuts for just the middle class is the winning issue for the fall midterms, but at least 31 House Democrats are having none of it.

The ongoing struggle within the party has taken the focus off Minority Leader John Boehner's weekend tax gaffe, but also presents a real problem for the Democratic leadership which believes they must get a legislative victory on this to retain Congressional control.

As TPMDC laid out earlier, Democrats wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling for an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, including those for the rich. Pelosi has made clear she favors keeping them for the middle class, especially since she considers it a "black and white" issue that will help her party during the election season.

The names:

Rep. Jim Matheson (UT)
Rep. Gary Peters (MI)
Rep. Melissa Bean (IL)
Rep. Glenn Nye (VA)
Rep. Michael McMahon (NY)
Rep. Lincoln Davis (TN)
Rep. John Salazar (CO)
Rep. Brad Ellsworth (IN)
Rep. Dan Boren (IN)
Rep. Jim Himes (CT)
Rep. John Barrow (GA)
Rep. Ron Klein (FL)
Rep. Zack Space (OH)
Rep. Jason Altmire (PA)
Rep. Allen Boyd (FL)
Rep. Joe Donnelly (IN)
Rep. Jim Cooper (TN)
Rep. Frank Kratovil (MD)
Rep. Mike McIntyre (NC)
Rep. Earl Pomeroy (ND)
Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ)
Rep. Jim Marshall (GA)
Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (SD)
Rep. Sanford Bishop (GA)
Rep. Mike Ross (AR)
Rep. Rick Boucher (VA)
Rep. Harry Teague (NM)
Rep. Travis Childers (MS)
Rep. Walt Minnick (ID)
Rep. Harry Mitchell (AZ)
Rep. Jim Costa (CA)

I gotta say I can't wait to see a lot of these shitheads lose their jobs when the Democrats get slaughtered this November.

"I would like my life back."

The 4.5 million dollars a year you make as BP's CEO isn't enough to stop the pain: (via atrios)

(CNN) -- BP's CEO said Sunday he's sorry for the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the "massive disruption" it has caused the Gulf Coast, telling reporters the company hopes to corral most of the crude offshore.

"The first thing to say is I'm sorry," Tony Hayward said when asked what he would tell people in Louisiana, where heavy oil has already reached parts of the state's southeastern marshes.

"We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back."

Your Life?

This may not be the message you're getting from the Administration that thinks you're a well meaning partner in this cleanup and doing the best you can, but from the bottom of my heart:

FUCK OFF.

That is all.

Glenn Beck's 9/11 Porn

Starting a movement to relive the way we felt on September 12, 2001?

Either Glenn Beck is a terrible actor or the craziest person in the history of television.

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Douchebag Outrage Comes to an Abrupt End with AIG Bonuses

Remember that asshole from CNBC who ranted that Obama's housing bill being a bailout for "losers"?

You know, the one that was staged in an attempt to start the Great Douchebag Revolution?

Well that all came to a screeching halt when it's about defending his douchebag friends:

SANTELLI: Now, think about it this way. Maybe I'm missing something. But the outrage seems to be about M's, millions of dollars, right? $165 million, OK?

But I would think that it should be looked at as a pretty big positive, because when you go from the M, maybe you should try to go to the B's, which is the billions of dollars, and maybe that's going to even enlighten it for the T, trillions of dollars. You know, $165 million is like worrying about 16.5 cents, while $165 maybe necessitates a little more outrage. What do you guys think?

BECKY QUICK: Hey, Rick, I think the real idea here is just the idea of rewarding bad behavior, which is something you've spoken out against in the past.

SANTELLI: No, I guess what I'm saying is it's an order of magnitude. Don't you think this dynamic that the average guy reading his newspaper is really starting to be in tune with this?

A bill that helps people pay unfair morgages vs. 73 exectutives getting several hundred million dollars of taxpayer money as a bonus for bankrupting a multi-billion dollar business?

Yeah Rick, I'm sure the "average guy" would really be in a bind over that one. Someone should probably tell him that yelling ignorant shit on the trade floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange isn't the best way to guage public opinion.

Time will only tell where the Great Douchebag Revolution goes from here. And to think... they were even forming small groups!