Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I can’t be the only one old enough to remember the SNL racist word association sketch featuring Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase.
I couldn’t find this for last night’s piece, for whatever reason. Consider this an open thread.
*** Update ***
The classic Eddie Murphy “White Like Me” sketch. is it just me, or did this Hulu come out of nowhere. I had never heard of it until a couple of days ago when Atrios linked it, and now I see it everywhere.
Clintonball sure is exciting sport:
Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who backs Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, proposed another gauge Sunday by which superdelegates might judge whether to support Mrs. Clinton or Senator Barack Obama.
He suggested that they consider the electoral votes of the states that each of them has won.
“So who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes is an important factor to consider because ultimately, that’s how we choose the president of the United States,” Mr. Bayh said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”
Josh Marshall throws an unsportsmanlike flag.
This election will never end. Ever. It is like the surge, with fewer casualties.
*** Update ***
Via Reason magazine, this:
Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton began a victory tour of upstate New York Friday by calling for elimination of the Electoral College.
At an airport news conference, the first lady said she would support legislation seeking a constitutional amendment providing for the direct election of the president.
It just never stops. The stream of stupid and self-defeating and contradictory spin just keeps coming at you like the Energizer bunny.
We need to stop and ask whether we can afford to spend $117 billion that the Treasury Department does not have on a program of dubious effectiveness. It simply makes no sense to send out checks to people who have no need for it as some kind of election-year bribe to vote for incumbents of both parties.
No, it doesn’t make any damned sense, but does probably explain the broad bi-partisan support.
I can’t believe I ever fell for the old notion of bi-partisanship. Does anything good ever come of it? Seriously, other than Holidays and award acknowledgements, can anyone think of anything that had broad bi-partisan support and was a good thing?
Deep thought of the day: any honest discussion of race will inevitably reveal that some people are honestly racist morons. This is not a bad thing.
It’s interesting to see the ideas that come and go while we collectively wait around like Wile E. Coyote for Isaac Newton to take control of the colossal mortgage mess. The Fed, for example, can keep cutting interest rates to negative infinity and it still won’t make the mortgage-backed securities worth anything. We could let the free market sort out businesses which lack the sense and/or leadership to make sustainable choices, but it looks like free-market fundamentalists only care about privatizing profit. As far as I’m concerned if we need a painful readjustment to get back to stable growth based on solid fundamentals then so be it. The pain may even spur some sensible limits on the now-discredited theory that a deregulated financial services industry will police itself.
But who am I kidding. In a Democratic country any painful readjustment always means extra pain for whoever controls fiscal policy, which means that most governments will do practically anything to avoid it. If you’re wondering how far they might go, how about buying the entire reeking CDO pile with tax dollars and handing it off to the next administration in the form of debt.
Central banks and governments in advanced economies will be forced to buy mortgage-backed securities within the next few months to stop the credit crisis, according to a former chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
“Central banks will be managers for years to come of rather interesting portfolios,” predicted Professor Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics, as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England sought to play down conversations officials have had regarding purchases of mortgage-related assets.
The major players are denying the story, as well they should. The mortgage-backed securities are literally worthless. Most firms can’t sell them at any price, and even if they could most won’t because selling a large enough batch would establish a real value for the toilet paper securities that everyone else is holding. A honest valuation would reassess a huge part of some large firms’ holdings to next to nothing, and down comes the entire house of cards.
Thus, according to the Financial Times, the central banks are thinking about literally buying nothing. The idea is to fill a huge CDO-sized hole in the balance sheets of the most irresponsible firms with taxpayer cash. That seems even worse than a bailout. It’s like buying a disease. Worse, it rewards the most irresponsible players and does nothing at all to fix the Greenspantarian system of deregulation and bailout that encourages these damaging bubbles in the first place.
Anyhow, the FT report is certainly true in a literal sense; policymakers would be negligent not to weigh every possible option for managing a crisis. We should reserve impeachment, tar, feathers, rail and pillory for the unlikely event that the idea was something more than one bullet added to a list for the sake of completeness.
I have not paid too much attention to the whole Instapunk flap that is burning up Memeorandum, because nothing is ever settled in these sorts of debates and all you end up doing is getting mired in discussions over who is and who is not racist. That being said, this Tom Maguire post had me laugh out loud:
As an example of the PC police in action we need look no further than my previous post. “Old Punk” of the InstaPunk crowd posted his thoughts on why specific behaviors of a specific subset of the black community annoys him. Frankly, there is very little in his post I would be inclined to defend, but I would be very curious to learn how widely held his viewpoints might be. As an example, I would guess his aversion to the hip-hop gangsta sub-culture is widely shared.
Well. Rather than trying to look for the message in his message, the Usual Suspects, led by Glenn Greenwald, seized on the offensive sections as an opportunity to brand Glenn Reynolds and the entire conservative movement as racists.
So let me summarize the exchange:
Obama: We should have a national conversation about race.
Old Punk: OK, here is what annoys me about some black people.
Lefties: The Old Punk is a racist, as are all righties.
One might well argue that this does discourage anything like a candid conversation.
Here is what was said at Instapunk:
I’m not proposing the generalized use of the term, just trying to be clear for once, in the wake of Obama’s call for us to have a dialogue about race. However much they may scream and protest, black people will know what I mean when I demand they concede that the following people are niggers:
– Jeremiah Wright
– O.J. Simpson
– Marion Barry
– Alan Iverson
– William Jefferson
– Louis Farrakhan
– Mike TysonYou know what I mean. They hold you back. They’re dirty, violent, and stupid. They make you look bad, and you foul yourselves by defending them, by reelecting them to office, by admiring them in spite of all their awful behavior.
And so on. Look, I read and watched Obama’s speech the other day. I read the great piece by Chris Caldwell in Financial Times. If Tom Maguire thinks that when Obama was writing his speech and Caldwell was writing his piece, what they had in mind for a candid discussion about race was a bunch of jackasses stating “Here is what I hate about niggers,” then he probably really didn’t understand the speech or the FT piece.
*** Update ***
I should probably add that I have added Tom to the links because he really is one of the last few on the right I read anymore (well, I read a bunch of them, but mostly to make fun of them. Not so with Tom.).
*** Update #2 ***
As suggested in the very first comment, in order to continue this national dialog on race, at least as it is envisioned above, black commenters are permitted to submit their list of crackers they can not stand. I will just throw K-Fed out there for starters.
Barring any credible progress on reconciliation between Shiite and Sunni groups in Iraq, supporters of throwing American blood into the country forever generally point to the movement within Sunni groups to police themselves against outside agitators like al Qaeda in Iraq. Unfortunately the program is falling apart on several levels. For one, while we were successfully exporting democracy labor strikes seem to have snuck in among the the crates.
The success of the US “surge” strategy in Iraq may be under threat as Sunni militia employed by the US to fight al-Qaida are warning of a national strike because they are not being paid regularly.
Leading members of the 80,000-strong Sahwa, or awakening, councils have said they will stop fighting unless payment of their $10 a day (£5) wage is resumed. The fighters are accusing the US military of using them to clear al-Qaida militants from dangerous areas and then abandoning them.
Assuming that American-trained and armed Sunni groups do go on strike, they will have to pay their cable bills some other way. Since central government in Iraq went the way of the Lake Sarammish Sammamish salmon that traditionally means kidnapping and extortion.
If we can’t pay the groups who we need to work with us (maybe somebody could re-find that $9 billion?) then at least we could stop killing them.
American-backed Sunni volunteer forces had set up two checkpoints at a small bridge near the insurgent stronghold city of Samarra, taking precautions not to be mistaken for enemy fighters. They had spent the night before with their U.S. allies, marking areas where their men were stationed, and said they were told everything was fine.
“Our men wore special uniforms with the translucent markings so that they would be recognized by the American planes and were deployed at two points north and south of Ishaki bridge,” said Abu Farouk, a leader of the predominantly Sunni “Awakening” forces, which the U.S. military refers to as the Sons of Iraq or Concerned Local Citizens.
At 4 a.m. Saturday, an Apache helicopter opened fire, killing six men and wounding two. The military said in a statement that the men were suspected of planting improvised explosive devices. Citing initial reports, the military acknowledged that Farouk’s group was friendly to U.S. forces and said the attack was under investigation.
This isn’t the first time that we have killed people trying to help us. When our friendly fire comes in the form of red tape rather than rockets the effect is the same. Iraqis who might want to cooperate weigh their options and decide that the risk isn’t worth it.