Tunch is being ornery, so you will have to just make do with this out of focus picture of Lily, who kept trying to jump up and lick the camera while I was taking her picture:
Have at it.
Archives for 2009
Trifecta
Republicans don’t like their black committee chair.
“He’s on a short leash here,” said one top House GOP leadership aide.
The National Republican Congressional Committee has a problem Nancy Pelosi.
[T]axpayers can only hope McChrystal is able to put her in her place.
WorldNetDaily wants to torpedo Chai Feldblum, a Jewish nominee for the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
I’m telling you, the entire federal government is going to have to be fumigated some day when these deviants and degenerates are finally sent packing.
Peak Wingnut should arrive any day now. Ayup.
No Honor Among Thieves
In the movie the Sting, there is a scene near the end of the movie before the big scam goes down, and Redford’s character Hooker is talking to Gondorff (Newman) and asks him how many folks he has scammed. Here is his response:
Two or three hundred I guess. Sometimes played two a day when I was in Shea’s mob. We had it down to a business.
(pause)
‘Course Chicago was a right town then. The fix was in. The dicks took their end without a beef. All the Wall Street boys wanted to make
investments for us. Even had marks looking us up, thinkin’ they could beat the game.(pause)
Yeh, kid, it really stunk. No sense in bein’ a grifter if it’s the same as bein’ a citizen.
I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot, lately, especially after the story yesterday in the NY Times about the private equity firms running legalized Sopranos-style bust-out operations.
It just feels like the fix is in for the average guy every where you look these days. The top story at the Times now is the market surge because there was bad news for the dollar. What is bad for America is good for the Wall Street boys.
Meanwhile, one party in Congress is completely devoted to defending the rights of insurance companies to screw their customers, the ratings agencies have paid no price for their part in the meltdown last year and are still slapping triple A ratings on anything that moves so that the big swinging dicks on Wall Street can swindle pension funds out of their holdings- I’m really looking forward to that hoocoodanode/come to Jesus in a few years. The pension funds are already horribly underfunded, social security is strained because employment is so bad that people are collecting benefits early, setting the stage for the Republicans to push through some way to tinker with social security, benefits are running out for a lot of people collecting unemployment and the jobs market has not recovered, and banks are failing left and right and Congress decided the banks didn’t need to pay fees to the FDIC for a decade or so.
But hey- Goldman is turning a profit. Fuck it all.
The GOP Outreach Continues at Full Speed
Cute:
The National Republican Congressional Committee is urging Gen. Stanley McCrystal to put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “in her place” for weighing in on Afghanistan — prompting one female Pelosi ally to blast the House GOP as “80 percent male,” “100 percent white” — and completely out of touch.
On Monday night, Pelosi told Charlie Rose “should go up the line of command” instead of publicly opining on strategy — prompting a swift, sneering reaction from the GOP committee.
Mocking the first female speaker as “General Pelosi,” an NRCC spokesman wrote, “If Nancy Pelosi’s failed economic policies are any indicator of the effect she may have on Afghanistan, taxpayers can only hope McCrystal is able to put her in her place.”
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who is close to Pelosi, could barely contain her anger.
Pelosi is, of course, 100% correct. I kind of happen to think that McCrystal was kind of screwed anyway you looked at it when he was in London, because his report had been leaked and people knew what he thought already- he had no choice but to answer the way he did to that question. On the larger point, though, Pelosi is completely correct. He should be going through the chain of command with his opinions and plans. No one who has ever spent more than a few hours in the military would dispute this.
The GOP Outreach Continues at Full SpeedPost + Comments (76)
Prediction is hard, especially about the future
Nate Silver and the rest of the 538.com crew have just finished thoroughly eviscerating the Republican polling firm Strategic Vision. There have been a number of less serious anomalies with Rasmussen as well (though Rasmussen had an excellent record with the 2006 and 2008 races). And not too long ago, Stu Rothenberg was caught mouthing GOP talking points about the race in NY-20. Rothenberg has also made a number of other comments (here; here) that make it clear he leans Republican personally.
So here’s something interesting: Rothenberg is currently predicting a small number of losses for Democrats in the House (it looks like a dozen or less from this) while Charlie Cook says there’s a 50-50 chance that Democrats will lose 40 or more (Rothenberg, by contrast, shows only a total of 31 Democratic seats as being at all in play and most of these he ranks as relatively safe).
I find the intersection of political prognosticating and political messaging to be a fascinating place. I think that most of the major prognosticators (Cook, Rothenberg, Sabato — with obvious local exceptions, previously Chuck Todd) play it straight with their predictions (if not their other comments) for the simple reason that to do otherwise would hurt them professionally. But politics is full of self-fulfilling prophecies, people like to back a winner, fundraising depends on the perception of how likely a candidate is to win a race, and so on. There’s an interesting tension between trying to accurately predict things (as, say, Carville/Greenberg’s Democracy Corps group does or, be bipartisan here, Mike Murphy generally does) and saying crazy stuff about having “the math” that you think will help your side win.
I often wonder what someone like Michael Barone thinks he’s accomplishing by spewing right-wing nonsense when he could be using his former respectability to further his political agenda.
Prediction is hard, especially about the futurePost + Comments (62)
Marty Peretz Auditions for the Weekly Standard
From the magazine that brought you such penetrating insights as “Sonia Sotomayor is mean,” we now have the latest bit of psychobabble:
What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an “optimal margin of illusion,” that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?
Joe Klein handles this quite nicely, and correctly notes the cause of this- Obama standing firm on Israeli settlements.
How long before Peretz is waving a tire gauge asking to see Obama’s birth certificate?
Marty Peretz Auditions for the Weekly StandardPost + Comments (145)
This Is Her Week
Vote for Bitsy:
Rumor has it, Bitsy has long been a fan of Colbert and his understudy Jon Stewart. Go vote.