Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

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

Nothing worth doing is easy.

So very ready.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

This really is a full service blog.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

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Archives for 2009

Distasteful

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Great stuff:

Insurance giant American International Group will award hundreds of millions of dollars in employee bonuses and retention pay despite a confrontation Wednesday between the chief executive and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

[….]

“I do not like these arrangements and find it distasteful and difficult to recommend to you that we must proceed with them,” (AIG’s leader) Liddy wrote.

It’s distasteful to stop paying the geniuses at AIG millions of dollars in bonuses the same way that it’s distasteful to enforce our laws by investigating the Bush administration, the same way it’s distasteful to ask George Will to stop lying about science, the same way it’s distasteful to criticize Jim Cramer.

All this stuff is really a matter of taste.

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Withered and died

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The great Mary Peretz writes:

I’ve known Jim for more than 30 years. We’ve had spats two times. He was responsible once. I, the other. I’ve done business with him and made money with him. And we started The Street.com together. He is a trusted and loving friend.

He is now being battered in the press. Mostly by people whose careers are built on ridiculing others. I happened to have watched the “Mad Money” show in which he spoke about Bear Stearns. He did not not not not say that you needn’t worry if you had stock in Bear Stearns. He said you need not worry if you had a brokerage account with Bear Stearns. That was true… and still is true. But we all utter silly enough words in the ordinary course of life that we don’t have to invent them, and Jim has his share of them. I do, too.

It’s not clear what he means by “brokerage account.” Bear effectively had no retail arm. It had an asset management arm, but that likely excluded investors with under 500K (or possibly much more) in the manner of a hedge fund. How likely is it that a high roller was writing into Cramer for advice?

Moreover, during Cramer’s speech, they showed a large graphic of Bear Stearns’ stock price.

Finally, the explanation that the viewer’s mention of “liquidity” indicates a fear of losing money in a brokerage account is simply not plausible. Bear’s problems were reported to have to do with liquidity and that is almost certainly what the viewer was referring to.

Now, I know next-to-nothing about finance. But I conferred with a senior exec of a large hedge fund about this. Peretz’s claims are not believable.

Marty Pertez has been allowed to rant and rave at the New Republic for nearly 35 years. His views on the Middle East are extreme, but anyone who criticizes them is an anti-Semite.

What’s his excuse for his flimsy defense of Jim Cramer? The saddest thing to me is how loath the “illustrious” New Republic alum — Ryan Lizza, Mike Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, etc. — are to criticize him. The New Republic deserves to disappear.

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I don’t want to go to Chelsea

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This is my last day in London. Thanks to everyone for their advice and suggestions. They were very helpful.

I’m currently trying to avoid being dragged to some annoying “hip” club in Chelsea or Belgravia by my friends, who are asleep.

Which brings me to a question about this place…what’s the deal with the 99-year leases in Belgravia and Chelsea and Mayfair? Do people here really accept the fact that the Duke of Westminster (a/k/a Client Number Six) owns so much of the city? Is that what Burkeanism is really about?

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A fact’s a fact

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Although I’ve been blogging and reading the paper a bit the past few days, I’ve gotten my vacation on in a way that I haven’t in quite a while.  Checking back in with the American media with at least a slight sense of distance, it is striking how much harder they are on Obama they were on Bush.

I don’t say that as a complaint, simply a statement of fact.

David Broder has already declared that Obama’s honeymoon is over.   I don’t say that as a complaint either, but since the “honeymoon period” is largely a construct of the punditocracy which Broder heads up, this does mean that Obama’s honeymoon is over. Indeed — other Villagers like Dowd and Ignatius are already savaging Obama.

Now, by any reasonable measure, the Bush honeymoon lasted until mid-2003. One might argue that part of this was the 9/11 effect. In a time of national crisis, the media might be expected to rally around the president.

On the other hand, this recession is a national crisis too, and it has only served to amplify criticism of Obama. Whereas we were told with Bush, that because of the War on Terror, we were either with the president or with the terrorists, we are now told with Obama, that because of the recession, that we have to hold Obama to a higher standard than other presidents.

If one believes, as I do, that good decisions come from close scrutiny, then one must also believe that presidents should be scrutinized more closely during times of crisis. But it’s difficult for me to understand why this applies to Obama and not to Bush.

I realize that everything I say here may seem obvious to people. But I rarely see it stated as a matter of fact, which in my opinion it is.

What is the cause of this? Some of it is that liberals like to criticize (I know I do), while conservatives like to fall in line. Some of it is that “nonpartisan” commentators gain in stature when they attack Democrats and fall when they criticize Republicans. Maybe these facts constitute the entire explanation.

But it’s hard for me to see how this doesn’t end in ruin. Media scrutiny does, I believe, make for smarter, more careful decision-making. But it also makes for tougher political sledding. So the very thing that makes our government work also makes political leaders unpopular. And, for whatever, reason it now distributes itself differently for one party than the other.

Is this one of those systemic flaws that can’t be corrected?

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Nate Silver Explains It All

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I glanced over that WSJ piece by Scott Rasmussen yesterday, and then I looked at the gallup poll numbers, which seem to me to be remarkably steady, and then I looked at the aggregate numbers at pollster.com, and the first thing I thought was that if you take out the Rasmussen outliers, this looks relatively stable.

Today I see that Nate has gone through and explained what I already knew– Obama’s numbers aren’t crashing to earth as some are claiming.

At any rate, as a general rule I just have no faith in Rasmussen polls.

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What Am I Missing?

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I’m not really sure what the point of this piece in the WaPo is:

Obama’s more frequent and acid reminders that former president George W. Bush left behind a trillion-dollar budget deficit, a 14-month recession and a broken financial system have come at the same time Republicans have ramped up criticism that the current president’s policies are compounding the nation’s economic problems.

Obama had initially been content to leave partisan defense strategy to his proxies, but as the fiscal picture has continued to darken, he has appeared more willing to risk his image as a politician who is above petty partisanship to personally remind the public of Bush’s legacy.

His approval ratings remain strong — above 60 percent, according to the most recent Gallup poll — but have dropped from their highs almost entirely because of falling support among Republicans since he took office.

I’m not sure how noting he inherited the mess is petty partisan politics, as it seems to me it is just plain fact. He also inherited two wars. Is it petty partisan politics to note that? He also inherited Air Force One and the White House. Is it petty partisan politics to note that?

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