Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

This really is a full service blog.

Consistently wrong since 2002

So very ready.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Stand up, dammit!

Wait, what?

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Innocent people do not delay justice.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

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Archives for 2009

The New Welfare Queens

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Michelle Obama served food at a food bank, and a picture accompanying the write-up has caused outrage among the usual suspects. Take it away, K-Lo:

Robert Rector has been pointing out for longer than I can remember that America has the wealthiest poor people in the world. And here seems to be a photo illustrating that: Michelle Obama was at a homeless shelter. While distributing lunch, one of the men she was serving lunch to took a picture of her on his cell phone.

You honestly must have to work hard to be this ignorant and out of touch. Put aside the fact that no one knows this man’s situation, and it may very well be that he is recently unemployed and may not have that luxury cell phone for much longer. This guy may very well be a fraud (or, has been suggested in the comments, a volunteer or someone who just stopped by to see the First Lady), but no one has any idea from the picture. However, what shocks me is that I thought initiatives like this were common knowledge:

Beginning Thursday, a San Francisco startup tech company is going to help the homeless reconnect with society.

The company, GrandCentral Communications, will offer free voice-mail service through local shelters. Users will be able to dial in from anywhere to access messages from, say, family members, social workers or potential employers.

“It’s a stake in the ground,” said Craig Walker, GrandCentral’s chief exec. “It’s a tether to the rest of the world.”

Often, one of the hardest things about “pulling yourself up by your boot straps” is the difficulty in getting a callback from an employer when you have no phone or permanent address. I am not sure how you get to be this callous, this out of touch, and this clueless, but these folks, who cheerleaded the nation’s way into this mess, have mastered it.

Up next, K-Lo mocks the unemployed for their fancy clothes. I am so sick of these people. They mock things they simply do not understand, they are completely out of touch with the concerns and reality for the majority of their fellow citizens, and then, when the tax cuts of the Bush years are going to be allowed to expire (as was always planned- you do remember the “sunset provisions”), they shout “class warfare.” Just plain sick of these people.

*** Update ***

More here.

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Slip Sliding Away

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More bad news:

Another 651,000 jobs were lost in February, adding to the millions who have been thrown out of work in this recession.

In a stark measure of the recession’s toll, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that the national unemployment rate surged to 8.1 percent last month, its highest in 24 years.

The economy has now lost more than 4.4 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007, and economists expect that the losses will continue over the rest of the year and into 2010. The economy lost an upwardly revised 655,000 jobs in January, when the unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent. Some economists expect that the nation’s businesses could cut another two million jobs and that unemployment could reach 9 to 10 percent by the time a recovery begins.

Clearly this news today makes the point that we must move quickly to cut the capital gains tax rate.

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The Snot-Boogie Rules

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Gail Collins rants about the story we talked about the other day:

I am having a tough time dealing with news that the former president of Countrywide Financial, the mortgage company that did so much to dig the hole in which we all now reside, is making a killing buying up delinquent mortgage loans from the government at bargain basement rates.

“It’s like Jeffrey Dahmer selling body parts to a clinic,” sniped one of my friends.

As Eric Lipton reported in The Times, Stanford Kurland, who was president of Countrywide during the years when it was selling mortgages with temporary low “teaser” rates that later turned into permanent unaffordable ones, now leads Private National Mortgage Acceptance Company, known to its friends as PennyMac.

In what one company official said was “off-the-charts good” business, PennyMac buys troubled mortgages from the government (which got them from failed banks) at rates like 38 cents on the dollar. Then it offers the beleaguered homeowners a chance to refinance at far more favorable terms. PennyMac makes money, the homeowner gets an affordable mortgage and the government gets a share of the profit.

Everybody’s happy! Except, of course, those of us who helped come up with the other 62 cents on the dollar.

From the NY Times magazine piece on the impact of the foreclosure crisis in Cleveland:

As early as 2000, a handful of public officials led by the county treasurer, Jim Rokakis, went to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and pleaded with it to take some action. In 2002, the city passed an ordinance meant to discourage predatory lending by, among other things, requiring prospective borrowers to get premortgage counseling. In response, the banking industry threatened to stop making loans in the city and then lobbied state legislators to prohibit cities in Ohio from imposing local antipredatory lending laws.

From the opening scene of the first episode of the Wire:

Suspect: I’m sayin’, every Friday night in an alley behind the Cut Rate, we rollin’ bones, you know? I mean all them boys, we roll til late.
McNulty: Alley crap game, right?
Suspect: Like every time, Snot, he’d fade a few shooters, play it out til the pot’s deep. Snatch and run.
McNulty: What, every time?
Suspect: Couldn’t help hisself.
McNulty: Let me understand. Every Friday night, you and your boys are shootin’ craps, right? And every Friday night, your pal Snot Boogie… he’d wait til there’s cash on the ground and he’d grab it and run away? You let him do that?
Suspect: We’d catch him and beat his ass but ain’t nobody ever go past that.
McNulty: I’ve gotta ask you: if every time Snot Boogie would grab the money and run away… why’d you even let him in the game?
Suspect: What?
McNulty: Well, if every time, Snot Boogie stole the money, why’d you let him play?
Suspect: Got to. It’s America, man.

Snot Boogie was eventually shot and killed, so I guess, technically, the market does regulate itself. There is a lesson to be learned here.

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Memewatch: too fast, too furious

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It’s interesting to watch these things evolve. Brooks last week:

But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

Roger Cohen yesterday (via John and Kevin Drum):

But that does not change the fact that Obama, in his restorative counter-revolution, must be careful to steer clear of his French temptation.

Jay Leno last night:

“The financial [crisis] seems big enough,” Leno said. “[Obama is] also taking on energy and health care. Is he biting off too much? Should we just go, ‘All right, let’s fix the economy; next year we’ll talk about health care or energy.’ Should you pick one and focus on that? It’s like we’re doing everything all at the same time.”

Broder yesterday:

But many of these governmental pros clearly are doubtful whether this administration — or any other — can make it work.

Brooks today:

I’m still convinced the administration is trying to do too much too fast and that the hasty planning and execution of these complex policies will lead to untold problems down the road.

All of these critiques have one thing in common: they offer no substantive criticism of any particulars of any policy but rather an overall pessimism about the possibility of doing anything. In that sense, this is a classic example of a Beltway meme. It has no basis in any definable or quantifiable reality, but instead exists only as an unspecific reaction in the guts of various Beltway wisemen.

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Times Change

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It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans imagined themselves as defenders against moneyed elites. That was great.

It is kind of remarkable to watch conservatives collectively pivot from Palinist elite bashing to Santelli-fueled Galtism in about three months. Figuring out how someone can do that is a challenge only if you’re the kind of person who cares about ideas.

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I Suppose This Was Inevitable

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Should have seen this coming:

Heh. Thanks to Cyrus, who sent those in.

BTW, I am having the weirdest thing happen with my receiver and my dvd player. When I switch to the dvd setting so I can hear dvd sound through my receiver, the picture on my tv widens. I have no idea what is going on. I’m using that ridiculously expensive cable (HDMI, maybe?).

NM. Fixed it. I just switched some cables around. Several hundred movies to choose from and I am watching Star Wars. Again.

The Watchmen comes out tomorrow, and from another thread, a solid prediction:

I expect the Watchmen to be declared one of the all time great conservative movies by the end of tomorrow, once again missing the point.

Something to look for tomorrow.

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