Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Thanks for reminding me that Van Jones needs to be slapped.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

The words do not have to be perfect.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

He really is that stupid.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

I was promised a recession.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

The revolution will be supervised.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

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Happy Valentine’s Day.

***Update***

I just saw Tim Geithner’s now famous press conference for the first time. Knowing nothing else about the man or his plans (apparently me and him both), my reaction is that he sounds like Mclovin and we are doomed. Will history prove that he’s really Tracy Enid Flick? I hope so. I guess.

Reader Interactions

31Comments

  3. 3.

    kommrade reproductive vigor

    Ohio man accused of holding woman captive in cuffs and diaper, reading Bible to her

    It would be completely unoriginal to make a Vitter the Shitter joke, so I’ll just wait quietly while Cornfederate Yanker completes another post written to the tune of "X would never happen if everyone carried a gun."

    OK, I must note this from the comments:

    Interesting…..

    I’ve paid good money to be tied up, gagged, forced to wear adult diapers and have the Bible read to me. I wonder if Troy has any plans when he gets out of jail?

  4. 4.

    Stuck

    . Knowing nothing else about the man or his plans (apparently me and him both),

    Word has it, the reason he didn’t know what he was talking about was that he changed his mind shortly before the presser, and forgot to tell himself.

  5. 5.

    R. Porrofatto

    Thought the Frontline documentary was a bit tame for the subject matter. And it would be nice if, in the process of using the word "insurance" a dozen times to explain what a credit default swap is, that someone would point out that the only reason the banker/casino boys didn’t call it "insurance" was to avoid it being regulated.

  6. 6.

    Incertus

    Just wanted to pass the word–this is the new project I’m involved with. Think of it as a Huffington Post peopled with professional writers and focused on pop culture, literature, music and film, among other things. And when I mean other things, I mean a story about getting waxed for Valentine’s day that had me crying at one point.

    I’m the poetry editor, which means I’m doing reviews and getting other people to write them–not the most exciting part of the place, but it’s what I know–but there’s a lot of other interesting stuff going on as well.

  8. 8.

    Rosali

    @R. Porrofatto: The Frontline piece was a good primer for how we got to where we are now. Partisans may disagree on where we ought to go but we ought to at least acknowledge the certifiable facts on what led to the current conditions.

  9. 9.

    Church Lady

    @Incertus – I read the waxing story. I was laughing until I cried. Not sure if the tears were from the laughter or sympathy. Funny stuff.

  11. 11.

    Incertus

    @KCinDC: I just click on them. I figure it’s an extra fraction of a penny in ad revenue to Balloon Juice, and a fraction of a penny out of the pocket of whoever’s paying for the stupid ad, which is great considering there’s not a chance in hell I’d buy the product.

  13. 13.

    Mnemosyne

    @R. Porrofatto:

    If you followed the bank bailout obsessively — and I did — there really wasn’t a whole lot that was new. Unfortunately, I suspect a lot in the program was news to people who get most of their news from cable and so didn’t really get to hear any of the underlying background or causes at the time.

  14. 14.

    Zuzu's Petals

    Seeing that clip from "The Crying Game" after all these years, I’m surprised at how obvious it seems that Dil is a tran.

  15. 15.

    wilfred

    Re: Timmy:

    If we can agree that "confidence" is still the key word in the financial slash political crisis that seems to be getting started for real these days, what are we supposed to think when Timothy Geithner’s own private fanclub magazine, the Washington Post, reveals that the newfangled Treasury Secretary and car mini czar had already spent 19 months (!) trying to find a way to get toxic assets out of US banks, before he turned on a dime and decided to present a plan with more holes than ideas a week ago?
    19 months before you figure out that something doesn’t work. And now there’s still nothing on the table that does. What is this, a late night stand-up act?

    From:

    http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

    Good blog these days.

  16. 16.

    Xenos

    Geithner could work on plans for a lot more than 19 months if he is only looking for policy choices that a) could work, and b) don’t involve receivership for all the big banks.

    I like the Josh Marshall theory that Geithner was brought in for his IMF experience at forcing structural reforms on truculent oligarchies. But if that is really what he is preparing to do he is doing an awfully good job of hiding his intentions

  17. 17.

    saucy sauce

    Geithner’s as smart as they come. It makes sense to me that the news conference debacle was the result of a) last-minute changes and b) the lack of undersecretaries et al. to do the leg work. I don’t know if the TARP will work, but I do think that if Obama and Geithner can’t make it work, no one else could.

    Let’s wait at least a month or two before deciding that we’re all doomed. This post is close to the "OBAMA’S WORST WEEK EVAR??" territory, though the Tracy Enid Flick reference walks back from that precipice.

  19. 19.

    electrophoresis

    Sorry, the claim "Geithner’s as smart as they come" doesn’t cut it. Larry Summers routinely gets described as "mind-bendingly smart" yet he’s the ignorant incompetent fool who engineered the shock therapy privatization that wrecked Russia’s economy, slammed down the Russian male’s life expectancy to below 50 years, created literally hundreds of millions of poor people without a hope in the world, and dumped essentially the whole assets of the country into the hands of 7 creepy oligarchs.

    "Smart" doesn’t mean spit. The people who got us into Viet Nam were the best and the brightest — and I do not mean that in an ironic way. Smart just lets you screw up much more monumentally, on a vastly more gigantic scale and with a much worse fallout, than "average intelligence" or "dumb as a box of rocks."

    Remember Long Term Capital Management? Almost took down the entire world economy when it went bankrupt in 1997? Run by two Nobel laureates in economics, Merton and Scholes? They were smarter than any ten of us put together, and what did that get them…?

  20. 20.

    wilfred

    Sorry, the claim "Geithner’s as smart as they come" doesn’t cut it.

    Reminds me of Halberstam’s "The Best and the Brightest", a description he intended as irony but taken as serious by the described, who then acted suitably remorseful – witness macnamara et al.

    I’m still not sure if our collective FIRE people, the BATBs of the 80’s -00’s, are just flat out stupid motherfuckers who ran the country into the ground or whipsmart pricks who got rich and passed the bill to the public.

  22. 22.

    joe from Lowell

    No, uh uh, not buying it.

    We’ve had eight years of "smart doesn’t matter." We almost had "smart doesn’t matter" a heartbeat away from the presidency.

    Smart matters.

  23. 23.

    electrophoresis

    Joel From Lowell — you’re exactly right, smart does matter. What I’m saying is that smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.

  25. 25.

    markus o' farkus

    slammed down the Russian male’s life expectancy to below 50 years

    Well, below 60 years anyway. Still absolutely, stunningly low.

  26. 26.

    chopper

    @joe from Lowell:

    competence matters. i don’t bring my busted car to a nobel-prize winning physicist. i bring it to the high-school dropout who can fix the shit outta my car.

    in some cases smart comes with competence. but the former without the latter is quite dangerous.

  27. 27.

    electrophoresis

    Wisdom is really the issue. Our culture worships intelligence and swoons over a high IQ, but we never bother to concern ourselves with a WQ — Wisdom Quotient.

    Smart means being able to solve a problem. Wise means knowing which problem to solve.

  28. 28.

    Elie

    #21 — I’m with Joe — smart matters

    The hard part is not just the intellect, but the ability of leadership at the top (Hopefully Obama) to insert the political and social sensitivity to moderate the brutality of a given policy choice on the population. We could have a "fix" of sorts right now and let the whole damned thing collapse. The externalities of that choice would be too horrible and therefore cannot be a choice.

    So yeah smart matters, but along with smart must come principled and courageous leadership at the top to weigh in and sometimes moderate some of the decisions.

    Additionally, sometimes there are no good options that don’t involve suffering. From some of the comments above, do some of you really think that one can always make big decisions (at least for this kind of scope) and always have a result that doesnt result in some really bad stuff for people?

    In this huge case, the fuck-up has already happened. The choices are not probably great and we have lost some degrees of freedom (or perhaps can gain some) with time. Its not a perfect process esp given the unprecedented situation. Let us hope that luck is present as well. I never underestimate the importance of that,

  29. 29.

    ricky

    I

    like the Josh Marshall theory that Geithner was brought in for his IMF experience at forcing structural reforms on truculent oligarchies.

    Teh Timmah…Transgender/Transparenct/Truculent

    This is one weird thread.

  31. 31.

    Jim in Chicago

    When even economists at the American Enterprise Institute and Alan Greenspan are calling for nationalization of the insolvent banks, you’d think Obama and Geithner would have enough political cover to do what’s needed.

    We have 2 successful models for how to deal with this situation: Sweeden in the early 1990s and our own Resolution Trust Corporation in the S&L Crisis. Instead, we seem determined to follow the one very UNsuccessful recent model we have for dealing with insolvent banks: Japan in the 1990s.

    I JUST DON’T GET IT!

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