Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

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

People are complicated. Love is not.

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

Fight them, without becoming them!

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

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

Wait, what?

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

American history and black history cannot be separated.

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

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

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

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Archives for 2009

The problem is Stewart’s messianic streak

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MoDo’s gal pal Alessandra Stanley weighs in on the Cramer-Stewart showdown:

Mr. Stewart has always had a messianic streak to his political satire, as when he ripped into Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on “Crossfire” for “hurting America.” He is now focusing on business news cable networks like CNBC, which not only failed to foresee the credit crisis, but, in his view, sided with the bankers and helped inflate the bubble.

And while it’s never much fun to watch a comedian lose his sense of humor, in an economic crisis, it’s even sadder to see supposed financial clairvoyants acting like clowns.

My two cents on the Cramer thing is this: if we’re going to ever have a meaningful public discourse in this country — and I don’t think we probably will — it will be because of encounters like the Stewart-Cramer one. It’s sad to me that much of the “serious” media describes honest attempts at asking tough questions as something only someone with a Messiah complex would do.

DougJ +5.

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I Hope We Are Both Wrong

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Me, discussing what I think will come from a future health care plan:

Again, the only real question is will we be able to summon up our American ingenuity and in our Solomonic wisdom make a single-payer system that tries to adopt the best of both worlds, does neither, yet still manages to make the members of the gilded class even richer and leaves us with the worst health care system in the industrial and post-industrial world.

Megan McCardle (via Sullivan):

All of the problems with the Medicare reimbursement structure–and the problems are large–are a result of a historical legacy that has hardened into a nearly immovable system. You can add to it, but no one has so far had much success with the substantial changes that would be necessary to make the system function better. It’s like trying to maneuver an aircraft carrier in your bathtub.

If we get national healthcare, we will not get anything like the neat little systems proposed by academics who can assume away many of the political problems. I am aware that proponents would rejoinder, that yes, they know it won’t be perfect, but . . . But I’m not making the perfect the enemy of the good. A national healthcare system in the United States will not merely be something sadly less than ideal–it will be nothing like most of the internally coherent proposals. It will be something jury rigged out of Medicare, S-Chip and insurance mandates, ugly and very expensive.

I just don’t see how anything will come out of Congress with enough votes that won’t be a disaster. Most of our elected representatives are entirely too beholden to the special interests that they represent. And I do mean most all of them. You can probably count on one hand the number of people in the House and Senate who genuinely have the best interests of the American people at heart (anyone here think Chuck Schumer and Chris Dodd and Maxine Waters and John Murtha and Diane Feinstein have covered themselves with glory lately?). Joe Biden voted for the bankruptcy bill in 2005, and probably has his hands as deep as anyone in the protection of credit card company abuses, and we just elected him Vice President (in fairness, there was no choice between Biden and Palin. Palin simply was not an option). Granted, admitting they are all awful plays into the Republicans hand, but the simple fact of the matter is I have very little confidence in Congress. The Democrats are only marginally better, and I never found “The Democrats are worse” to be a very persuasive message the last eight years anyway.

It is sad, but I am that cynical.

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A Defense of Jim Cramer

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(TDS version for non-Hulu users).

Not a very good one, but a defense nonetheless. Re-watching the Daily Show beatdown, I just get the sense that Cramer is genuinely sorry. Additionally, Cramer is sort of collateral damage in all of this- remember, the spineless crap-weasal Rick Santelli was the original target, and for all his bluster, he refuses to show up. Cramer just got involved because he has a big mouth and doesn’t realize when to keep it shut. Say what you want about Cramer- he showed up. Where was Santelli?

But watching that, I really felt like Cramer is a conflicted guy. He knows the advice he is giving is bad, he knows he has been caught gaming the system, and he knows it shouldn’t be that way. But he just can’t help himself.

*** Update ***

This:

if i were Cramer I would go punch Santelli in the neck.

Agreed.

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Maybe It Is Working After All

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The emerging conventional wisdom is that the appointments process is broken:

H. Rodgin Cohen, “the leading candidate for Deputy Treasury Secretary, has withdrawn from consideration,” George Stephanoupoulous reports. He adds, “Cohen had risen to the top after the withdrawal last week of expected deputy treasury secretary pick Annette Nazareth.”

Something’s wrong with this picture.

Maybe there is something to that. On the other hand, this is a description of H. Rodgin Cohen at Naked Capitalism:

Sullivan & Cromwell has long been the outside counsel for Goldman, and outside counsel is a vastly more important role for a securities firm than just about any other type of business. In the stone ages, when I worked for a few years at Goldman, certain S&C partners had so much clout at Goldman that they could get a mid-level banker fired. And even then, “Rodg”, head of the banking practice, was a very influential figure at Goldman.

After I left Goldman, I was involved in a behind the scenes role on a deal that broke new ground from a regulator standpoint. Cohen was representing the other side, the target of a minority investment. I was later told by a senior bank regulator that Cohen worked against my client’s interest in a particularly duplicitous way.

So Cohen is not only deeply tied to entrenched interests, but he plays a ruthless game, with a mild manner that would lead you not to suspect him of that sort of behavior.

Considering the role Goldman Sachs and other ruthless insiders had in creating this mess, I’m thinking it is pretty clear the appointments process and the tough standards Obama has set are working as intended.

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Cramer On Stewart

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My immediate reaction is that the whole experience hurt to watch. It would be great if someone could explain to me why Jim Cramer did not stay home.

Jon Stewart in brief: people like Jim Cramer sell stock trading as a clever game, knowing full well that small investors like his viewers will get creamed if they follow his manic trade-every-day advice. His network works like a cheap PR firm for the major criminals of the mortgage investment bubble and bears all the more guilt because most people in it saw through the happy bullshit they sold to the rubes.

Cramer responds: Every time I met one of my good friend CEOs he told me everything was fine! Now that a truck-squashed rattlesnake can tell who the criminals are I make useless noises of disapproval on my show. What else could I do?

Cramer must follow some obscure school of rhetoric where that even counts as a response. Want to know if a firm is in trouble? Interview the CEO! There’s no way that the down to earth guy who the board would f*cking lynch if he told the press anything other than happy nonsense would lie to you.

By the way, Cramer’s pathetic performance emphasizes an important weakness of celebrity journalism. It is not a coincidence that CNBC reporters do crappy journalism and worship access to the top names. If Jim Cramer did his job as a journalist then celebrixecutivess like Vikram Pandit would stop talking to him. Believe it or not this explains a shocking range of journalism’s symptoms. Why do reporters grant anonymity to the most inane and innocuous statements? Why does lying to reporters never seem to have a consequence? Why Judith Miller?

The answer is that reporters want important people to keep taking their calls. For a reason that escapes me, people who are paid to understand politics all seem to think that “access” to people with a PR staff will get them some special insight when the only difference between speaking to them anonymously and asking their spokesperson is that the person can lie and most people will never know. Naturally the public would know if you called him on it, but then he wouldn’t take your calls. Catch 22!

Somewhere on the internets (late. lazy.) there is a passage where Seymour Hersh explains his strategy for breaking original stories. First he gets to know ordinary people who work in insteresting places. Occasionally one of them passes on something interesting. He calls other ordinary people to follow it up. After a while he has a complete story and calls the important people involved, but surprisingly they often don’t want to talk to him. In the end Hersh and journalists like him (off the top of my head, Murray Waas, Charlie Savage, Scott Horton and a few others) don’t get to pass on gossipy baloney directly from the source. Instead they have to settle for a real story and an on-the-record semi-non-denial from someone’s spokesman.

I can see how that would sound crazy and disingenuous to Cramer and the guys at CNBC.

***Update***

See the whole interview here.

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