Fred Smoot is awesome

Smoot, shown here pwning Dallas, has been brilliantly spreading hateful rhetoric against the C*wb*ys at local schools.

No, no, I'm not referring to THAT.

Via the Sports Bog:

"This week we come back and play the Cowboys, so you know what time it is," Smoot told the elementary schoolers. "I'm gonna teach y'all at a young age to hate the Cowboys."

It just gets better after that.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that several of the post-reading kid questions had tangential references to football. Like, one kid asked Smoot about the favorite game of his career; "probably this year, when we went down to Dallas and beat the Cowboys to death," he said.

Another kid asked about the team's record; "right now we're 6-3," Smoot said. "After Sunday, we'll be 7-3."

I mean, he was dousing these kids with flammable anti-Cowboys propaganda and then turning a verbal flamethrower on them. What ever happened to educational objectivity?

A third kid asked Smoot if he was the champion of football; "Yes, we're the champions of football, because we are the Redskins," he said.

A fourth kid wanted to know Smoot's favorite color; "burgundy and gold, that's my favorite two colors," he answered.

This is exactly what we need. The Redskins organization should be sending out as many players as possible to various local schools and instilling a hatred of Dallas at an early age.

Smoot leaves us with this:

"We hate Dallas," Smoot said. "We hate Dallas. It's just been like that, and it's always gonna be like that. I got family members that love Dallas so I don't even talk to them during the week. That's just what it is. I literally don't talk to them....You know, I was in that Mississippi [State]-Ole Miss hatred battle, and once I got here and Darrell Green kind of sat me down and said look here, this is how it is, this is your Ole Miss now. And I kind of bought into it..."

More fun with your money

[Sec. Henry Paulson, pictured shortly after bailout bill passage]

No one could have seen this coming. Giving 700 billion dollars with no strings to the Bush administration was such a good idea:

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.

"Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no," said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. "They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks."

And then there's this:

The nation may be diving headlong into recession, but that's not stopping financial firms from a cherished year-end tradition: the awarding of bonuses.

The number of bankers who will share the bonus pool has also decreased because of layoffs, the report found.

The top executives will likely get paid "primarily in paper," meaning stocks and stock options, according to Alan Johnson of Johnson and Associates. Pay will be down, he said, but there will still be "thousands of people who make millions of dollars."

In the report, he said, however, that "thanks in part to the financial bailouts and mergers we've seen recently, the decline in incentive payments won't be as drastic as first thought."

Awesome. Well at least we've got that transparency we were promised:

[Neel Kashkari, the former(by several weeks) Goldman Sachs Executive in charge of giving away your money]

To see Neel Kashkari field questions from a crowded room, one might think he's still being paid by Goldman Sachs rather than American taxpayers.

The interim assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial stabilization yesterday had a tone of impatience during a question-and-answer session, leaving some attendees feeling cheated.

. . .

When it came time for questions, the former Goldman Sachs executive told the eager audience that he had time for just "two or three."

In response to the first question, about the government's latest lifeline for beleaguered insurance company American International Group, Kashkari gave a clipped response before quickly moving on.

"This morning's action at AIG was a one-off event" that was necessary for the financial stability of the markets, he said. "He didn't say anything that I couldn't have learned from going to the Web site," griped one mortgage entrepreneur. Treasury spokeswoman Jennifer Zuccarelli said it's not unusual for public officials to answer a few questions before moving on. Kashkari's impatient tone comes amid a growing desire for openness about how government agencies, including the Treasury, are handling billions of taxpayer dollars being used to prop up Wall Street.

Yesterday's news that the Treasury and Federal Reserve increased the size of American International Group's rescue to around $150 billion from $123 billion intensified concern that Uncle Sam isn't spending wisely.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News sued the Federal Reserve for information under the US Freedom of Information Act, claiming the Fed refuses to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans as well as the troubled assets the bank is accepting as collateral.

The more news that comes out about this thing, the worse it seems. It's important to remember that the those who strongly advocated passing this bailout weren't innocent bystanders caught up in a whirlwind, they knew what they were doing.

They were giving 700 billion dollars to the Bush Administration's Treasury Secretary without any meaningful strings attached. And it's not like you needed news stories like these to know that it probably wasn't going to end well.

One more reason to hate the C*wb*ys

As if you needed any more, just thought now would be a good time to remind everyone that NFL Hall of Famer, former Dallas C*wb*y and douchebag Michael Irvin once stabbed a teammate in the neck because he refused to get of out of a barber's chair to let him get his hair cut first. The C*wb*ys organization, classy as they are, then paid the rookie not to go to police or the media about the incident.

I'm not making this up.

Open Left Meets the Obama Administration

This is awesome:

Veteran Democratic official Mike Lux has been tapped by Barack Obama to serve as an adviser and progressive liaison during the transition period, the Huffington Post has learned.

Lux, who worked on the Clinton administration transition efforts in 1992, confirmed the hiring but, citing a need for clearance, declined to offer further information.

The staffing move provides the Obama team with an important outlet to the progressive community -- a constituency from which the president-elect currently enjoys great support but one that has a wide range of priorities and will be holding Obama most firmly to his campaign promises once he takes office.

After working in the Clinton White House on issues ranging from health care and the budget to school lunch policy, he founded Progressive Strategies LLC and began writing for the site OpenLeft.com in July 2007. He also helped co-found a number of progressive institutions including: Americans United for Change, Center for Progressive Leadership, Grassroots Democrats, Progressive Majority, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, and Women's Voices/Women Vote. He writes for the Huffington Post.

As readers of this site know, I consider Openleft to be the most intelligent, and well written progressive blog there is. The fact that someone associated with that site has an official role in the transition team is unthinkably cool, and reflects extremely well on the Obama himself.

A history lesson

Jan. 22, 1983. The NFC Championship between the Washington Redskins and the Dallas C*wb*ys. Shall we say... "selective" highlights.



I love the old crowds at RFK Stadium so much it hurts.

(Happy Veteran's Day, everybody).

Like "Maverick", BUT MORE BADASS

President Elect Obama's Secret Service Codename:

The Secret Service traditionally has given pithy, private names to those whose lives they protect. The monikers are a throwback to a time when electronic communications were not encrypted, and they no longer serve a security function. Still, they give an occasional peek at the players' personalities, in addition to serving as great trivia questions.

President-elect Barack Obama: R E N E G A D E

Now, lets compare this to past Presidents:

Dwight Eisenhower - Scorecard or Providence
John F. Kennedy - Lancer
Richard Nixon - Searchlight
Gerald Ford - Passkey
Jimmy Carter - Lock Master/ Deacon (close 2nd place in my opinion for best)
Ronald Reagan - Rawhide (yee frickin' haw Gorbachev)
George H. W. Bush - Timberwolf
Bill Clinton - Eagle
George W. Bush - Tumbler (I'll let J.N. take care of this one)

Just How Batshit Was Richard Nixon?

I referenced this in my last post, but rereading it is making me laugh so hard that it seems worthy of a post in its own right. Last year, the Nixon Foundation released what could well be the funniest memo ever written by a president in office. Slate summarizes:

Among these was an extraordinary piece of Nixoniana: a meandering 11-page memorandum (PDF) that Nixon sent in 1970 to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, urging that White House staffers talk up what a warm human being "RN" was. (As was his habit, in the memo Nixon referred to himself repeatedly in the third person.) Nixon complained that "average voters" regarded RN as "an efficient, crafty, cold, machine." To help correct this common misconception, Nixon cited "warm items" (Page 3) such as "the calls that I make to people when they are sick, even though they no longer mean anything to anybody" (Page 4). "I called some mothers and wives of men that had been killed in Vietnam," he added, helpfully.

Because he was Nixon, he resented somewhat the social imperative that the president be courteous. "[W]e have gone far beyond any previous president … in breaking our backs to be nicey-nice to the Cabinet, staff and the Congress … around Christmastime," Nixon groused (Page 3). "I have treated them like dignified human beings and not like dirt under my feet" (Page 4), he continued. Connoisseurs will recognize this last as a choice illustration of Nixon's rhetorical tendency to render the thing he denies (that he treats subordinates "like dirt under my feet," that he is "a crook," that the press will "have Dick Nixon to kick around") much more vivid than the denial itself ("not," "won't").

The public's failure to appreciate RN in "the whole field of warmth" (Page 4), Nixon believed, stemmed in part from his own humble reluctance to recite "all the good deeds" he had done. "The President does not brag about all … he does for people" (Page 4). He had kept to himself, for instance, that "when I learned that Alex Butterfield's daughter … had been badly injured, I told Alex to bring her to the office even though I knew she would be embarrassed about her appearance" (Page 5). Nixon resigned in August 1974 after Oval Office tapes showed that he had worked to cover up the White House's role in the Watergate burglary. He never did persuade the American people "with regard to the whole warmth business" (Page 6), and the 1970 memo, which appears below and on the following 10 pages, stands as a poignant illustration why not.

In other words: Really seriously fucking batshit. Amazingly batshit. Batshit like no one you have ever personally met.

This dude was our president.