Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

An almost top 10,000 blog!

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

How stupid are these people?

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

T R E 4 5 O N

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

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Archives for 2009

Mistakes Were Made

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Awesome:

A Wall Street Journal analysis of AIG’s trades, which were on pools of mortgage debt, shows that Goldman was a key player in many of them, even the ones involving other banks.

Goldman originated or bought protection from AIG on about $33 billion of the $80 billion of U.S. mortgage assets that AIG insured during the housing boom. That is roughly twice as much as Société Générale and Merrill Lynch, the banks with the biggest exposure to AIG after Goldman, according an analysis of ratings-firm reports and an internal AIG document that details several financial firms’ roles in the transactions.

In Goldman’s biggest deal, it acted as a middleman between AIG and banks, taking on the risk of as much as $14 billion of mortgage-related investments. Then Goldman insured that risk with one trading partner—AIG, according to the Journal’s analysis and people familiar with the trades.

The trades yielded Goldman less than $50 million in profits, which were mostly booked from 2004 to 2006, according to a person familiar with the matter. But they piled risks onto AIG’s books, which later came to haunt the insurer and Goldman. The trades also gave Goldman a unique window into AIG’s exposure to losses on securities linked to mortgages.

When the federal government bailed out the insurer, Goldman avoided losses on its trades with AIG covering a total of $22 billion in assets.

But, but, but… Matt Taibbi said fuck!

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Middle American to put an end to Californiacation?

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The Hawk Eye has a fascinating article about how the history of the filibuster and Tom Harkin’s proposal to end (via via) it:

“Today, in the age of instant news and Internet and rapid travel — you can get from anywhere to here within a day or a few hours — the initial reasons for the filibuster kind of fall by the wayside, and now it’s got into an abusive situation,” Harkin said.

He and the constitutional scholars agree that the intention was never to hold up legislation entirely.

To keep the spirit of slowing down legislation, though, Harkin’s proposal back in 1995 would have kept the 60-vote rule for the first vote but lessening the number required in subsequent votes.

He said for instance if 60 senators could not agree to end debate, it would carry on for another week or so and then the number of votes required to end debate would drop by three. Harkin said it would carry on this way until it reached a simple majority of 51 votes.

Unless the filibuster is modified, we are probably headed for 6+ years of a vocal Republican minority in the Senate bringing all federal business to a halt. I don’t think it’s unlikely that this becomes an entirely new model of action for conservatives — it goes hand-in-hand with the teabag movement. No one realistically believes that anything Republicans are doing now — firing up their dying white base with misinformation, sucking up to crackpots who frighten most voters — is likely to give them a majority anywhere at the federal level anytime soon (if the economy is bad enough, they make get one somewhere anyway). But their strategy is one that makes it easy to maintain a disciplined voting block (step out of line and the Fox goon squad comes after you), which is all you need to gum up the works in the age of the filibuster.

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Open Thread: Sunday Morning Cartoons Edition

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Jeesh, seems like everybody’s still cranky from a long, bad week.

I know the word “anime” acts upon certain hip individuals as an emetic, but for those of you who enjoyed Spirited Away and/or Howl’s Moving Castle, I want to recommend the short (16 episodes, 4 DVDs) series Kamichu!. It’s the tale of a middle-school girl from a backwater town who wakes up one morning and discovers she’s a god… just another one of the thousands of insignificant local godlings “of whom there are as many as there are created things”… while still having all the problems inherent to being a 13-year-old girl in 1980s Japan. There are no giant robots, or mecha, or even panty shots; it’s just a gentle, droll little slice of life-plus-slightly-more, and the most Miyazaki-esque anime series I’ve seen.

In this clip, our heroine Yurie has been forced to transfer to a strange school for a month (dreadful enough for a middle schooler) so that she can attend the annual Business Convention of the Gods:

(Only in Japan would the gods not only have an annual conference, but a conference where getting your attendance card stamped at a sufficient number of educational seminars entitles one to a door prize!)

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Houston, we have no problem

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With all the focus here and elsewhere on how shitty American politics is, it’s easy to forget that we just elected a black president, something I didn’t think I’d see in my lifetime. And now one of the largest cities in the country will have an openly gay mayor, Annise Parker.

No one likes to admit this, but the forces of tolerance are making steady progress on a lot of fronts.

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Drum on Taibbi

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This is basically where I am:

But look: this is all just nitpicky bullshit. Taibbi’s piece is basically about how the finance industry owns Congress and the Obama administration, and that’s basically true. In fact, I have a piece coming out in a week or so in the print magazine that makes pretty much the same point. My approach is different, and my language is all PG-rated, but my conclusions are pretty much the same. The finance industry, through both standard lobbying and what Simon Johnson calls “intellectual capture,” has, over the decades since Reagan was elected, convinced nearly everyone that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America, and that what’s bad for Wall Street would be catastrophic for America. Everything else follows from that.

So, sure, I think Taibbi overstates Rubin’s influence and thereby understates the real systemic problem here, but hey — it’s his article, not mine. Generally speaking, he gets his facts right and he gets the big picture right: Obama’s team is nearly as dedicated to the economic status quo as Republicans are. Ditto for many — though not all — Democrats in Congress.

I think that is a pretty fair assessment.

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CPR For Downtown

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True story.

At a party in 2000 I ran into Tom Murphy, mayor of Pittsburgh, who was casting around at the time for ways to revive downtown Pittsburgh. The city itself was doing fine; the problem was (and is) that most people commute downtown from suburbs where they pay less taxes, but they use city services all day so city dwellers pay even more taxes to cover roads and police and EMTs for the commuters. Downtown was and remains mostly a dead space. Want a coffee? Need a prescription refill? A pint of milk and a bag of carrots? Fetch your car and drive ten minutes to the Foodland (or whatever they call it now) on Liberty in Bloomfield. Downtown and the fun services that go with being where people live dries up as soon as commuters leave at five.

I told him that downtown downtown needs a couple of grocery store/pharmacies and a coffeehouse or two. Nobody wants to move downtown if they need a car to get the most basic life amenities, and abundant cheap lofts won’t fix that.

Ignoring me, Murphy instead spent millions recruiting a Nordstrom’s high-end department store on the theory that a lot of people driving downtown to park at the Nordstrom’s parking lot to shop and then leave would sort of look like revitalization (to be fair I think I was criticizing him after the fact). Predictably Nordstrom’s passed for a cheaper site in a suburban mall.

Where did I get the idea? When I volunteered for Jim Roddey’s (successful) 1999 run for County Executive in Allegheny County, the campaign manager spelled spelled it out for me (to get Roddey, think of the John McCain Republica who only exists in David Broder’s fevered imagination). The Democrat, Cyril Wecht, makes Jack Murtha look upright. K., a profane, high-strung veteran who only manages Republicans, stayed downtown for the race. He told me, at some point or another, that Pittsburgh had one of the worst downtowns he had ever seen. The reasons he gave helped me realize how we could wake the city up again. How much would it cost for the city to subsidize a few grocery stores and late night coffee? Certainly less than the tax breaks that Nordstrom demanded.

Anyhow, I’m glad to see that the idea has caught on a little.

***Update***

Another true story: Murphy narrowly beat me in Pittsburgh’s first Race for the Cure. Over and over I would pass him on the straights and then he would catch me on the uphills. Pittsburgh isn’t that big a town.

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