Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Fight them, without becoming them!

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Let there be snark.

Consistently wrong since 2002

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

Wait, what?

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

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

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

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

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Books are my comfort food!

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

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Archives for 2009

Mine Was A Scientist’s Autobiography That Went Out Of Print In The 60’s, But I’m Weird That Way

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Sadly, yesterday I spent most of the day looking for time to write a four paragraph post and still almost got in trouble with the boss twice. In the end I decided that it was pedestrian and deleted it (shorter version: I wonder why UAW line workers who saw their contractually guaranteed pensions hosed did not get a front page tongue bath at the Washington Post). It looks like these days the best that I can do is steal quotes from around the internets.

So, Bob John Rogers.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Indeed. Open thread.

***Update***

By demand, the book was Lady With A Spear, by Dr. Eugenie Clark. Good luck finding a copy.

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Tapper’s twitter

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At the American Prospect, Adam S. writes:

Huh, I wonder why Jake Tapper, press access warrior, has blocked me from following his Twitter feed.Touchy, touch.

Time for a blogger ethics panel?

UPDATE: Tapper has also blocked Talking Points Memo.

Bonus Tapper: His exchange with White House Press Secretary  Joe Gibbs (sic) over “transparency that you and the president herald so much.” I think you’re supposed to believe in transparency too, Jake.

Tapper seems to be retaliating for getting mocked about obsessing about Obama’s Leno joke.<br><br>Update: Just to make sure no one misses anything important, I’ll be posting updates from Jake Tapper’s twitter feed throughout the day. Here’s the most recent one:

giggles overheard as kids hoe new WH organic garden. @yunjid doing story w/said garden for WN tonight

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Ending the Death Penalty

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Some good news from New Mexico:

Gov. Bill Richardson, who has supported capital punishment, signed legislation to repeal New Mexico’s death penalty, calling it the “most difficult decision in my political life.”

The new law replaces lethal injection with a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The repeal takes effect on July 1, and applies only to crimes committed after that date.

“Regardless of my personal opinion about the death penalty, I do not have confidence in the criminal justice system as it currently operates to be the final arbiter when it comes to who lives and who dies for their crime,” Richardson said.

Europe’s human rights watchdog on Thursday hailed the decision as “a victory for civilization.” The American Civil Liberties Union called it “a historic step and a clear sign that the United States continues to make significant progress toward eradicating capital punishment once and for all.”

But the New Mexico Sheriffs’ and Police Association opposed repeal, saying capital punishment deters violence against police officers, jailers and prison guards. District attorneys also opposed the legislation, arguing that the death penalty was a useful prosecutorial tool.

One of the things I have never understood is the seeming breakdown on opposition to and support for the death penalty. I have never figured out why conservatives, the people who flip out about zoning boards and if their taxes are raised 3% and who shout limited government until they are blue in the face have absolutely zero problem with the government taking that which is most precious- someone’s life. All this posturing about the “ability to tax is the ability to destroy” just seems silly when you turn a blind eye to the government executing people.

And I’m not saying that I don’t have strong opinions about what should be done to certain people. There was a picture of Charles Manson released the other day, and it makes me sick that that murderous cretin has spent the last four decades living relatively comfortably (although I still think existence in modern prisons is hell). I understand the desire for a death penalty, but I just can’t support it when we know that there are prosecutors who act in bad faith, we know there are police who perjure themselves, we know there are witnesses who make mistakes, we know that confessions are coerced, we know that there are two systems of justice in place for the rich and the poor, and we know that dozens of people on death row have been released after it has been determined they were innocent. With all that information, I simply don’t understand how anyone could support the death penalty.

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Inside the Madoff Operation

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This insider description of life inside the Madoff operation is a fascinating read, but this stuck out:

Did he think something was fishy? “It never dawned on me that Bernie was running a criminal operation down on the 17th floor. I thought he was just a quirky guy. Now, in hindsight there are a lot of things that point to illegal activities. The emails, for instance, were clearly handled that way so that nobody could access them. They didn’t want any record if someone got suspicious and wrote so to a colleague, for instance, or you pressed the search bar and the word Ponzi came up.”

The salaries, said the employee, also in hindsight, were so large because Madoff wanted to keep people happy; he wanted allies in case they found out what was really happening. “Nobody left because they could never get another job that paid as well as this one. Some people, after his arrest, speculated that it was kind of like hush money; nobody asked any questions because the Madoffs were nice, protective, generous.

“The Madoffs had all of us out to Montauk for yearly weekends. We didn’t go to their houses but they put us up in hotels. They had a barbecue lunch on the sand and a formal dinner under a tent at the yacht club. On Sunday they took a small subset of employees on a fishing trip.

I can’t be the only one who immediately thought of this.

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Creeping Galtism, Part III

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Matt Yglesias flags this from Bloomberg columnist Carol Baum:

The government needs Liddy and Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit and Bank of America’s Ken Lewis to continue working to restore their firms to prosperity in the same way the looters in Rand’s novel need Hank Reardon and Francisco d’Anconia and Dagny Taggart, respectively, to run their steel mills, copper mines and railroad.

I sincerely believe that the key to understanding how our society works is realizing that our elites in media, government, and business (and probably other areas I’m forgetting about) are fully invested in the idea that their status is justified. As that idea becomes increasingly hard to defend, they fall back on increasingly ridiculous arguments. It’s just too painful to accept the fact that large portions of our system are, at worst, scams, and, at best, inefficient, unmeritocratic old-boy-networks.

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Dodd Man Walking

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Sure seems like Chris Dodd took a bullet for the Obama team, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why he is the fall guy in all of this. He, after all, was the one who wanted the toughest rules in place, and then was negotiated downward by the folks at Treasury. Here is his latest statement:

“I’m the one who has led the fight against excessive executive compensation, often over the objections of many. I did not want to make any changes to my original Senate-passed amendment but I did so at the request of Administration officials, who gave us no indication that this was in any way related to AIG. Let me be clear – I was completely unaware of these AIG bonuses until I learned of them last week.

“Reports that I changed my position on this issue are simply untrue. I answered a question by CNN last night regarding whether or not a specific date was aimed at protecting AIG. When I saw that my comments had been misconstrued, I felt it was important to set the record straight – that this had nothing to do with AIG.”

That makes sense, is consistent, and the only thing missing is who it is at Treasury that set him up for the fall. And why. When all hell broke loose with the AIG stuff this week, the folks over there sure knew where to stick the long knives and quick, and Dodd looked to have no idea what hit him.

*** Update ***

Al Giordano says nonsense, and I am being played the fool. Which should not be surprising to anyone at all.

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