Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Let there be snark.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

The words do not have to be perfect.

This blog will pay for itself.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

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

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

How stupid are these people?

When we show up, we win.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

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Special Election in NY

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Not to step on DougJ’s toes, but Daniel Larison has some interesting thoughts on the special election between Tedisco and Murphy:

Taken in isolation, this outcome wouldn’t matter much. But if Murphy does win it will mean that an out-of-state transplant made up a 20-point deficit against a fixture of regional politics in less than six weeks, and he will have done it in a district where Republicans enjoy a registration advantage of many tens of thousands (71,000 to be exact, which is approximately 25% of the size of the 2008 turnout). When Ogonowski lost a special election for MA-05 in a landslide, there were more than a few Republicans who went wild at how well he had done in a House special election in deep-blue Massachusetts. In that case, Ogonowski’s smaller-than-expected margin of defeat was supposed to signal a Republican resurgence in 2008 (which did not happen), which was never very credible, but are we really supposed to believe that a Democratic win in a traditionally Republican district in a special election doesn’t say something significant about the political fortunes of the GOP? When Gillibrand won in 2006, it could be written off as part of a wave and a reaction against Sweeney’s scandals, and when Gillibrand was re-elected and Obama carried the district it could be written off to some extent as part of another wave and a reaction against the financial crisis and recession, but if the Democrats hold the seat for the third time that begins to suggest a pattern. It may mean that the GOP’s strongholds in the hinterlands of the Northeast, already disappearing in New Hampshire, are also eroding in upstate New York.

I would agree that this should probably be seen as bad news for the Republicans at large in NY, but I am not sure I think there is anything to be really learned about the public and Obama from the outcome of this election, whatever it may be. Now I know full well should Tedisco win, the usual suspects will have banner headlines shouting “OBANOMICS REFUTED” and “THE WORM HAS TURNED- GOP BACK IN BUSINESS.” That doesn’t mean that it is true, nor do I think it means anything really significant should Murphy win. From what I have read (most of which was here and at the Albany Project) leads me to believe that this is just a really attractive Democratic candidate versus a Republican who has run a really, really bad campaign.

Am I wrong to think there is no larger significance to this election? Also, I thought it was weird that Larison frequently referred to Murphy by name but only called Tedisco the “GOP candidate.”

At any rate, I’m hoping DougJ can keep us posted on what is going on.

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Site Changes

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Tomorrow the PJ Ads come down, so you all can finally stop complaining about that.

I have thrown up the Amazon link below to the left, and I am working on getting into a blogads network and dealing with the impossible feat of activating a google adsense account. Expect things to look a little funny tomorrow until I have the time to get things set up.

Also, this is why I was so happy with PJ media. I hate dealing with this nonsense.

*** Update ***

This is a test:

Hrmm.

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Stop Blaming It On The CRA

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More testimony and evidence that the CRA is not to blame for the current crisis:

Amid the ongoing debate over mortgage lending reform, a top federal regulator took a seat before Congress last week and debunked the myth — popular among conservatives — that a law encouraging loans to low-income communities has been largely responsible for the nation’s housing crisis.

“I can state very definitively,” Sandra Braunstein, director of the Federal Reserve’s consumer and community affairs division, said during a House Financial Institutions subcommittee hearing Wednesday, “that from the research we have done, the Community Reinvestment Act is not one of the causes of the current crisis.”

As a newly minted Democrat, I honestly have ZERO idea why Republicans are so eager to blame this mess on the CRA when there simply is no evidence to support it. The CRA is not one of those things that was ever on my radar when I was unknowingly spewing wingnut talking points, but right now, anywhere you go in the wingnuttosphere and there is a full-throated and frothing rant about the evil CRA. Here is a vintage effort by Stanley Kurtz (obligatory link to Sadly, No’s! comparison of Kurtz to Big Gay Al, which makes me laugh every time I listen to it) which combines the CRA, ACORN, Fannie Mae, Obama, the Chicago Woods Foundation (Boo- AYERS!) and Bill Clinton. The only things missing were gay marriage, Iraqi WMD, and ANWR.

I hate to be this cynical, but other than just trying to avoid any blame for the mess whatsoever, the only reasons I can think of for them continuing to try to pin this current financial crisis on the CRA are pretty ugly and better left unsaid.

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Credit Card Reform

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This is surprising:

In a blow to financial firms, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday signed off on legislation that seeks to ban abusive credit-card practices.

While consumer groups and key Democrats lauded the committee’s move, the 12-to-11 vote in favor of the controversial bill was very narrow. Thus, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), said he would work with lawmakers–both Democratic and Republican–to modify the bill and broaden support before the bill hits the Senate floor.

“My intent is to work things out and move forward. This was going to be difficult–I knew that,” Sen. Dodd told reporters after the vote. “This is the first step in a process.”

The bill seeks to prohibit card issuers from unfairly raising interest rates. It would prohibit applying rate increases retroactively to existing balances and it seeks to boost consumer disclosures. Additionally, it seeks to limit certain over-the-limit fees and interest charges and creates new requirements for card issuers looking to extend credit to youngsters under the age of 21. The amended bill would also make it easier for gift-card recipients to use the cards.

The bill probably doesn’t go far enough to rein in the abuses, so it will be interesting to see what the House does.

Also, “youngsters?”

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Sometimes you get a bad king

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You all know the joke (repeated in “Annie Hall”) about the two old ladies at the diner, where one says “The food here is terrible, I can barely eat it” and the other says “I agree, and the portions are so small!” That’s exactly how I feel about the New York Times. The paper can be unbearably pretentious, it employs MoDo and Frank Bruni, it botched its WMD reporting terribly, it created the whole Whitewater story out of whole cloth…and it makes me want to cry to think it might disappear!

There have been a couple of really good articles about the head of the Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (“Pinch”), over the past few years, both titled “The Inheritance”, one in the New Yorker and one in Vanity Fair. Both quote Gay Talese saying of Pinch that “Sometimes you get a bad king.”

As you probably know, there is no record of serious papers in the United States being publicly owned. The Washington Post, New York Times, and, until recently, the Wall Street Journal are or were owned by the Graham, Sulzberger, and Bancroft families respectively. Pinch essentially inherited the paper from his father. And for all the hand-wringing about the inevitable death of newspapers, his poor business decisions are certainly a large part of why the paper is on death’s door. Michael Calderone summarizes the Vanity Fair piece pretty well:

Bowden makes his case by talking to those who know Sulzberger and running through a laundry list of past mistakes: buying back $1.8 billion worth of stock (that’s now junk); not diversifying enough (unlike the Washington Post buying Kaplan); passing up on investing in Google and Amazon; the $1.1 billion purchase of the New England papers (including the Boston Globe).

Make no mistake: if the newspaper industry were still doing well, some of these decisions would have been good ones. But it seems colossally stupid not to have hedged by investing in other areas rather than doubling down on the newspaper business. I wonder, though, if his doubling down on the newspaper business was really so different from the Big Three doubling down on SUVs or banks doubling down on CDOs and mortgage-backed securities. It’s tempting to think that the serious newspapers were doomed because they could exist only as long as the dynasties that ruled them kept producing effective monarchs. But maybe these hereditary monarchs aren’t really so different from the monarchs produced by our supposedly more meritocratic executive system.

That said, this quiz (from Arianna) comparing Pinch Sulzberger to George W. Bush is a classic.

You decide: is it W or is it Pinch? [Answers below]
1. Which of these men had a father who was considered stupid but is now thought to be a genius compared to his son?

2. Which of these men is currently on the defensive about his support for an incompetent woman in his office?

3. Which of these men may have to ask for the resignation of a subordinate because of a mounting scandal?

4. Which of these men appointed as his top deputy a loyal member of his father’s regime?

5. Which of these two men’s favorite TV series was “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and even owned a watch with the inscription “Live Long and Prosper”?

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Defining normal

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I don’t find this especially offensive, but it is interesting to hear Michael Barone define normal (via WM):

This is similar but not identical to a point I’ve often made: that the Republican Party is the party of people who are considered, by themselves and by others, as normal Americans—Northern white Protestants in the 19th century, married white Christians more recently—while the Democratic Party is the party of the out groups who are in some sense seen, by themselves and by others, as not normal—white Southerners and Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, blacks and white seculars more recently. Thus it’s natural for the Democrats to be more fissiparous.

The notion that Republicans are good, upstanding God-fearing Amurkins while Democrats are left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers plays an important role in America’s official political discourse. It’s there when candidates are criticized for not wearing socks and for vacationing in Hawaii. It’s there when other, more patriotic candidates invite reporters to barbecues at one of their many houses.

Also, feel free to make up your own jokes about public bathrooms, adult diapers, dildos, and wet-suits here.

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Random historical note

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Some of my best friends are from the small West Indian nation of Guyana (although Guyana is on the South American continent, its history and culture are much closer to that of Trinidad than of, say, Brazil) and they emailed me the obituary of Janet Jagan, a woman from Chicago who became president of Guyana and who died a few days ago at the age of 88. It’s an interesting story:

Born Janet Rosenberg in 1920, she was a student nurse at Cook County Hospital in Chicago when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern University and the eldest of 11 children of an Indo-Guyanese family of sugar cane workers. His grandparents had arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured laborers.

They married, despite the fierce opposition of her parents, who were Jewish, and in 1943 they moved to British Guiana, where he established a dental practice and they both became involved in radical politics. In 1950, they founded the People’s Progressive Party, and in 1953, in elections under a new Constitution providing greater home rule, Dr. Jagan became chief minister. But the Jagans’ Marxist ideas aroused the suspicions of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sent warships and troops to topple the new government. The Jagans were jailed.

[….]

Dr. Jagan returned to power in 1957, and Mrs. Jagan became labor minister.

Again, their politics, along with their admiration for Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, caused alarm in a foreign capital — this time, Washington. According to long-classified documents, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Central Intelligence Agency in 1961 to destabilize the Jagan government. The C.I.A. covertly financed a campaign of labor unrest, false information and sabotage that led to race riots and, eventually, the ascension of Forbes Burnham, a black, London-educated lawyer and a leader of the People’s Progressive Party who had become a rival of the Jagans. He became president and prime minister in 1966.

[….]

After her husband died in 1997, she ran for president and won. At campaign rallies, her followers respectfully called her “bhowji,” a Hindi term meaning “elder brother’s wife.” But her government was plagued by street protests and tension with the opposition People’s National Congress.

It’s a typical story, in a way, for a poor country in the Western hemisphere buffeted by failed Marxist ideas and murderous Euro-American interventions.

On a lighter note, how can it be that no Merchant-Ivory style movie has been made about Janet Jagan yet? This has Oscar written all over it.


Update. From the comments, there is this PBS documentary about that Jagans.

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