Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans do not trust women.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

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

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Stand up, dammit!

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

He really is that stupid.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

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

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2009

Archives for 2009

Reason Goes the Full Wingnut

by | 129 Comments

This post is in: , ,

In a few years when people look back and say to themselves “What the hell happened to Reason magazine,” it might be useful for them to direct their web browsers to this Nick Gillespie post, where he just completely loses it about a photo op in which Obama and Biden buy hamburgers:

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden jaunted off to an Arlington, Virginia restaurant called Ray’s Hell Burger, where they and their posse ingested mass quantities of burgers and house-speciality “cheesy tater puffs.”

***

Obama should know better: You really don’t have to pay for fawning coverage from the Fourth Estate (now reduced for quick sale by owners!), though I’m sure all the starving members of the White House press corps are happy with the free-to-them grub, especially now that Jack Germond isn’t standing in the way of the fixin’s bar.

These sorts of ultra-lame, super-calculated P.R. stunts really chap my hide. They’re simply the obverse of official stories that Kim Jong-il doesn’t ever go to the bathroom or that Mussolini could beat even Italian champs at tennis, clearly phony embellishments to alternately make leaders either superhuman or super-normal.

I like how he skipped the Dijon mustard angle preferred by a different genus of wingnut and instead went for mentioning totalitarian regimes. Well played, Nick, although I’m sad you couldn’t work in Hitler and liberal fascism! I guess the teabag demographic is a bigger player in magazine sales than I expected.

RIP, Reason Magazine.

<em>Reason</em> Goes the Full WingnutPost + Comments (129)

The Important Questions About Chrysler

by | 43 Comments

This post is in: 

So now we know who the hedge funds were:

OppenheimerFunds Inc., Stairway Capital Management LP, Group G Capital Partners LLC and Schultze Asset Management LLC are among fund owners that tipped Chrysler LLC into bankruptcy and seek to stop its sale to Fiat SpA.

The Arrow Distressed Securities Fund, Group G Partners LP and Foxhill Opportunity Master Fund LP are also members of the group previously identified only as non-TARP lenders, in reference to the Troubled Assets Relief Program that bailed out some of the banks that support Chrysler’s reorganization, according to court documents filed today.

The group is down to nine funds, from the 20 claimed in an April 30 statement, and the face value of their loan holdings has shrunk by about 70 percent, to $295 million from $1 billion.

You’ll remember Group G Capital Partners LLC from this WSJ piece in which we learned how tough it was for our Wizards of Wall Street to push Chrysler into bankruptcy:

Geoffrey Gwin is wrestling with the knowledge that the retirement plans of some 80,000 Americans may rest in his hands.

“I am in turmoil,” says Mr. Gwin, principal of the Group G Capital Partners LLC hedge funds in New York.

Yes, the heartache. We see how that inner turmoil resolved itself. While losing their pension and health care might be tough for those 80,000 people, it may make it easier for them to know just how hard it was for Mr. Gwin to screw them. I mean, you heard him. He was in turmoil. He got over it.

And now here are the important questions I’d like to see answered, and fortunately, so would Rep. Elijah Cumming:

While the issues were described in the context of the Chrysler bankruptcy, I believe that potential conflicts could have existed regarding the debt of each Chrysler and GM. Accordingly, I respectfully request that you address the following questions:

1. Did AIG issue credit default swaps on debt securities of automobile companies?
2. Did creditors to GM or Chrysler hold credit default swaps on the debt? If so, were these AIG-issued swaps?
3. How many creditors to the auto companies also received payments as AIG counterparties?
4. What obligations are owed by the swap issuers to the holders of auto debt in the event of a bankruptcy or other default event?
5. What was the extent of the potential for abuse of taxpayer funds based on the scenario laid out above?

Thank you for your continued advocacy on behalf of the American taxpayers and for your examination of these issues. Please contact Martin Levine in my office…with any questions.
Sincerely,

Elijah E. Cummings

Member of Congress

I’d really like to see answers to those questions, and this is why:

Why take 30 or 35 cents on the dollar from Chrysler when you can get the whole buck from the American taxpayer?

“The basic story is very simple,” says economist Dean Baker of the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. “If they hold credit default swaps on the bonds, they’re totally happy with them defaulting.”

In what would rank as one of the great scams of this financial crisis, government bailouts may be colliding. Wall Street may be raking in taxpayer dollars through AIG and returning the favor by driving the auto industry into bankruptcy.

And while there is no evidence that this has happened, would anyone be remotely surprised if this is happening? Anyone?

The Important Questions About ChryslerPost + Comments (43)

These Deaths Are On You, Obama

by | 143 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

During the campaign, the wingnuts tried to smear Obama as hating the troops for some very sensible remarks he made about our situation in Afghanistan:

And that requires us to have enough troops that we’re not just air raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.

That was a sensible point, and it was met with howls of outrage from the usual suspects who broke out their GI Joe action figures and pretended that this was some sort of grievous insult to the honor and dignity of our troops. When, in actuality, not having enough troops on the ground and having to rely on bombing runs in which innocents are killed is wholly unproductive, and not only that, immoral.

So where are we now? Well, candidate Obama is now President Obama, and we have elevated the number of troops on the ground and are allegedly pursuing a new strategery in Afghanisatan. Change and all that, you could say. Unfortunately for those on the ground in Afghanistan, it is just the same shit different day:

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday he had dispatched a joint U.S.-Afghan team to investigate U.S. airstrikes that killed more than two dozen people in the western part of the country and prompted an outcry from Afghan officials.

Although the International Committee of the Red Cross said that women and children were killed in the U.S. strikes, Gen. David McKiernan told reporters in the capital that it was too early to know exactly what had happened. “We’re hopeful in the next couple of days we can have at least the initial truth,” he said.

According to the Red Cross, these numbers are not wildly exaggerated:

Red Cross officials are backing local reports that U.S.-led airstrikes in western Afghanistan earlier this week killed dozens of civilians. The U.S. military is sending investigators to the scene and President Hamid Karzai has pledged to take up the issue in meetings with President Obama.

Local Afghan officials say the incident occurred during a battle Monday and Tuesday in Farah province, when Afghan troops aided by U.S. soldiers were battling Taliban insurgents.

Local officials said bombing raids on the suspected Taliban positions killed as many as 100 civilians and residents are still digging through rubble looking for more bodies. A Red Cross team sent to the region backed up the claims of dozens of civilian deaths, including women and children.

I’m no pacifist. I understand there will be civilian casualties from time to time and that we will breezily call them “collateral damage,” but this has to stop. What is this accomplishing? What is the purpose in this? And why is the man who identified this as a problem a year and a half ago sitting by and letting this happen? A total damned disgrace, Obama.

These Deaths Are On You, ObamaPost + Comments (143)

The sorrow and the pity

by | 94 Comments

This post is in: 

John inspired me to check out the Reason website. I found some Big Hollywood grade stupidity:

Stages of Denial

Take pity on the left as it grapples with the tea party revolt

Matt Kibbe | April 29, 2009

It’s a perfect example of wingnut writing: from the “we succeeded in pissing off the left” measure of success to a gratuitous discussion of Janeane Garofalo.

The sorrow and the pityPost + Comments (94)

More on Jeff Rosen

by | 86 Comments

This post is in: 

I’m sorry if I seem a bit rattled by the attacks on Sonia Sotomayor. I think it’s a fascinating collision of blogging, the continuing nefarious influence of TNR, and the white male punditosaurus. Via commenter JDM, I see that wingnut welfare enters into it as well: Rosen’s wife works at the far-right Ethics and Public Policy Center (which also employs Rick Santorum) and Rosen gave a speech about SCOTUS nominations there a few weeks ago in 2006.

Now, I don’t know how much Rosen’s wife is paid nor how much Rosen was paid for speaking before them. And his wife’s writing doesn’t seem quite as wingnutty as much of what comes from the EPPC (though her articles do appear in The National Review sometimes).

But at a certain point, isn’t this kind of conflict of interest deeply troubling? A journalist writes an inaccurate smear job of a *potential* SCOTUS nomination while receiving having received money from a place that will oppose the nomination and which employs his wife? Not so good, no?

More on Jeff RosenPost + Comments (86)

That Dog Don’t Hunt

by | 42 Comments

This post is in: 

I’m beginning to understand why the DFH crowd hates the blue dogs:

U.S. Representative Jim Marshall is a Georgia Democrat and a member of his party’s Blue Dog Coalition, a group of lawmakers bound by a desire to restrain federal spending. The Blue Dogs have something else in common: a fondness for funding pet projects.

Marshall alone requested more than $12 billion worth of the so-called earmarks in the 2010 federal budget. His proposals range from $388,850 to aid 14 local farmers’ markets to $4.2 billion to purchase C-17 heavy-lift transport aircraft.

Overall, Blue Dogs submitted more than 2,500 individual earmarks totaling some $20 billion. That underscores the conflict between their eagerness to bring federal money home and the coalition’s criticism of the budget as laden with pork.

“It’s really hard to smack government’s wrists with the one hand while the other hand is looking for as much earmark cash as you can grab and bring home to your district,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based public-interest group.

This is why I have been telling Republicans to just shut up the past few months and stop being such, well, assholes. If they play their cards right, shut up, and let America forget that we hate them, they will be in a position to win an election once the Democrats implode.

That Dog Don’t HuntPost + Comments (42)

Amazon’s Big News

by | 101 Comments

This post is in: 

For people thinking of getting a Kindle, I can offer this advice after using version 1.0 for about a year. The more you do any of the following, the more you will like the device: read a lot, travel, skim classic reference works (e.g., Shakespeare, Democracy in America, the Origin of Species), surf the blogosphere at random moment; emphatically so if you spend time on the bus.

My pluses list goes like this:

* Public domain works are basically free. Shakespeare, Tocqueville, Machiavelli, the Federalist Papers and about ten more cost me about fourteen bucks total. Now I have them anyywhere I go.
* Unless you play music on it (for battery reasons, don’t) or you are a speed-reading champ, the memory holds as many books as you can ever want or afford.
* The rudimentary internet handles email badly, but otherwise it is great for surfing blogs and making quick purchases from Amazon. The cell-based connection does not drop as long as you stay within Sprint coverage. And it’s free.
* The legibility of the screen is great, much better than the displays on digital devices that do not use e-paper.
* The Kindle discount

The minuses:

* Although you can import PDF’s almost for free, the software chokes on unusual formatting such as figures in a scientific paper. As a professional scientist this is my single biggest beef with the device, so much so that it would be a deal killer if I had not received the Kindle as a gift. Competitive devices like the i-Rex do native PDF support but they don’t have Amazon’s generally excellent Kindle store or a free cellular internet link.
* No hard copies of your books. If Amazon or your account goes belly-up so does your library.
* Some of my favorite authors still have no Kindle edition. If anyone knows David James Duncan, Wally Broecker or (the estate of) Patrick O’Brien, let them know that they will make at least one sale.
* The page advance buttons are annoyingly easy to push no matter how you hold the device.

The version 2.0 Kindle only really addresses the last and least important of my gripes while not improving on much else as far as my needs go.

Today, however, Amazon announced an updated Kindle with a much larger screen (9.7″ rather than 6) that supports native PDF formatting. This is a huge deal that will make the Kindle vastly more useful for working scientists and anyone else who works with PDF files. If not for the steepish list price (eleven shy of $500) my v1.0 kindle would start getting nervous about unfortunate accidents.

Amazon’s Big NewsPost + Comments (101)