Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This blog will pay for itself.

The words do not have to be perfect.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

White supremacy is terrorism.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

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

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

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Archives for 2009

Private jails

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No one could have predicted that privatizing the criminal justice system could lead to something like this (via Atrios):

In one of the most egregious cases of judicial corruption ever seen, federal prosecutors charged Ciavarella and another Luzerne County judge, Michael Conahan, with taking $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in private lockups.

The judges pleaded guilty to fraud last month and face sentences of more than seven years in prison.

The high court approved the recommendations of Berks County Senior Judge Arthur Grim, who was appointed to review cases handled by Ciavarella. He advised expunging the records of low-level offenders who appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom without lawyers — a group he has said numbered ”easily into the hundreds.”

I’m sure these kids had all done something wrong, though. Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.

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Broken social contract

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Last night’s Law and Order episode dealt with a complicated story involving a Madoff-like figure. The episode ended with the daughter of the Madoff-like guy asking the police for protection out of a fear that she would be attacked by the victim of the Madoff-like scam. It certainly seems like the idea of retribution against the rich is in the air. Here’s the Times on what’s going on in Europe:

Tempers are flaring across Europe as the economic pain deepens and more people lose their jobs.

Just ask Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the ailing Royal Bank of Scotland, whose house and car were vandalized early Wednesday. Or Luc Rousselet, the manager of a 3M factory in France, who was barricaded in an office for a second day by workers demanding better severance packages for 110 employees who are being laid off.

And here’s a Connecticut tv station. JMM writes:

what interests me about this meta-story is the way it shows the implicit social contract under deep strain and some people operating totally outside of it without realizing it at all.

[….]

There are real and wholly legitimate — just not always openly articulated — social bargains that explain why it is that the overwhelming number of people are content with the fact that some people make $45,000 a year and other people make $45,000,000 a year. It’s not just a given. And when parts of that bargain get upset, things can change very fast.

Personally, I don’t favor harassing, let alone attacking, the wealthy bankers and other assorted riff-raff who may have caused this financial crisis. But I do wonder what role fear of uprising plays in a society like ours. So I’m going to pose a question that some of you may know the answer to: during the Great Depression, did some wealthy interests see the New Deal as a way to keep the angry poor from rising up? Are there examples elsewhere in the world where fear of a populist uprising affected wealthy interests’ attitudes towards social programs?

Update. Chuck writes:

That is what the “social contract” is about, fear that the have nots will simply take or break.

Do others agree with this? Would this be considered a radical sentiment or is perfectly reasonable? Confucius wrote that

The prince is like the boat, the people, like the water. Water can support the boat, but can also overturn it.

Is this more or less the same thing? Should the very wealthy in our society be considered the princes, and the rest of the population the water?

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ATTN: Microsoft

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What exactly was the point of me manually turning off my user account control so I would no longer get spammed with questions every time I tried to install software if your security system was just going to spam me with notifications that MY USER ACCOUNT CONTROLS HAVE BEEN TURNED OFF?

I have spent the last three hours trying to fix something and am ready to scream.

*** Update ***

I will cut the first person to start crowing about the superiority of Apple. I have both an Apple and a Vista machine. They are good for different things.

*** Update #2 ***

Speaking of technology, this from Marc Ambinder made me laugh out loud:

I’ve been critical of the White House New Media office before, but I think they deserve kudos today for instigating and executing the President’s first online town hall meeting. (Macon Phillips, the new media director, and Jesse Lee, the online programs director, spent a long time putting this together.) One — the White House says that Obama wasn’t briefed about the questions in advance. Two — several questions weren’t softballs. Three — the White House web servers had enough bandwith to accomodate the demand. (To test them, I pulled it up simultaneously on several computers without a program.)

Yes, Marc, that sure was a rigorous stress test of the system you did there. Good thing the White House was pushing enough bandwidth to accommodate millions of citizens AND those three extra computers in your office. I hope the banking industry stress tests are a touch more rigorous- “To test the banks out, I had everyone in my family simultaneously withdraw twenty dollars from an atm, and things seemed ok!”

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More Necessary Legislation

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Also, I think we need a bill banning the sale of Georgia, California, Iowa, and New York to the Germans– just to make sure it doesn’t happen. Bachmann is so crazy it upsets me that Will Ferrell is male.

Speaking of Ferrell, I stayed up entirely too late last night and watched his special on HBO, and I didn’t think he was going to be able to keep in character for the whole 90 minutes, but he did. At around 65 minutes into the special, he went on a riff about a brigade of monkeys with spear guns at Fort Bragg that was so funny I was crying and having trouble breathing I was laughing so hard. Also amusing was when he gave the crowd nicknames. A personal favorite was “Scholar of Unnecessary Subjects.” If you get a chance to watch it, do so.

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No one ever called him No Drama Ed Henry

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Ed Henry has a rather breathless and self-indulgent story about his brave battle to make Obama explain why he didn’t freak out about the AIG bonuses more quickly:

The most amazing part of the exchange to me is that I didn’t go into the East Room intending to ask President Obama about AIG.

After frantic preparation for the prime-time newser with several colleagues, especially lead CNN White House producer Tim McCaughan, I had several provocative questions in my pocket.

But none of them had much to do with the financial crisis because I assumed several of my colleagues would exhaust the topic of AIG before my turn came up.

Ed, it wasn’t that bad a question, but it’s not like you just made history either. You asked a slightly frivolous question and got a mild smack down. Move on.

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Someone Explain This

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The AIG mess gets better:

Amid the flap over bonuses at American International Group Inc. two of the company’s top managers in Paris have resigned. Their moves have left the giant insurer and officials scrambling to replace them to avoid an unlikely but expensive situation in which billions in AIG trading contracts could default.

Representatives of the Federal Reserve, AIG’s lead U.S. overseer, are talking with French regulators and AIG officials to deal with the consequences of a complicated legal scenario in which the departures of the managers in Banque AIG, a subsidiary of AIG’s Financial Products unit, could trigger defaults in $234 billion of derivative transactions, according to people familiar with the situation and a document AIG provided to the U.S. Treasury.

I have no experience with this realm of the shadow finance industry, no experience with contracts, and no idea if this is normal, but this doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why exactly would we allow contracts to be written that could trigger hundreds of billions of default swaps if one person decides they want to quit their job. What kind of insanity is this? Is there a reason for this? Is there a legitimate and logical explanation? For an outsider, this just looks completely nuts. It really looks like they have bought their own bullshit and really do think they are the masters of the universe.

*** Update ***

More here from Emptywheel, but many of you in the comments suggest this is not too shocking or quite normal for contract law. Like I said, I have no experience with this sort of thing, and often times things that looks crazy have very legitimate reasons for existence. Having said that, I would still suggest that any system that allows for so little redundancy that the removal of two people can trigger a quarter trillion in defaults is a house of cards built in breezy weather on a fault line over a nuclear bomb.

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The End of Rockefeller Laws?

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Some good news:

Gov. David A. Paterson and New York legislative leaders have reached an agreement to dismantle much of what remains of the state’s strict 1970s-era drug laws, once among the toughest in the nation.

The deal would repeal many of the mandatory minimum prison sentences now in place for lower-level drug felons, giving judges the authority to send first-time nonviolent offenders to treatment instead of prison.

The plan would also expand drug treatment programs and widen the reach of drug courts at a cost of at least $50 million.

New York’s drug sentencing laws, imposed during a heroin epidemic that was devastating urban areas nearly four decades ago, helped spur a nationwide trend toward mandatory sentences in drug crimes. But as many other states moved to roll back the mandatory minimum sentences in recent years, New York kept its laws on the books, leaving prosecutors with the sole discretion of whether offenders could be sent to treatment.

“We’re putting judges in the position to determine sentences based on the facts of a case, and not on mandatory minimum sentences,” said Jeffrion L. Aubry, an assemblyman from Queens who has led the effort for repeal.

“To me, that is the restoration of justice.”

While good news, that still seems to me that they are trying to do things on the cheap. Depending on how many people have their sentences modified and the number of fewer people incarcerated, I can imagine a drug court and treatment programs blowing through 50 million in no time. There are people who can probably speak from a position of expertise on this issue (Mark Kleiman, I’m looking at you), but I imagine a substantial sum of money will be needed for rehab programs.

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