Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

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

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

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

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

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

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

We still have time to mess this up!

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

“woke” is the new caravan.

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

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

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

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

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Archives for 2009

Socialism Sighting

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Despite criticism from fellow Republicans, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina Monday defended his statement that the U.S. should consider nationalizing some banks.

Critics, including the chairman of Charlotte-based Bank of America and many politicians, have slammed the idea. That doesn’t bother the outspoken Graham.

“Politicians are worried about words,” he said Monday. “I’m worried about outcomes.”

Graham said the government has already poured billions into banks with little to show for the economy. Bank of America, which has received $45 billion in bailout money, is currently worth $27 billion in market capitalization.

“The truth is we’ve put more money into the Bank of America than it’s worth,” Graham said. “That’s not nationalization. That’s just stupid.”

Graham broached the idea Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“This idea of nationalizing banks is not comfortable,” he said then, “but I think we have gotten so many toxic assets … that we’re going to have to do something that no one ever envisioned a year ago (and) no one likes.”

His comments surprised many Republicans.

“That’s going above and beyond being a maverick,” said Glenn McCall, York County GOP chairman and a Bank of America executive. “That’s saying that socialism in our country would work better than letting folks use their God-given talent to create and foster economic growth.”

I don’t know what is the most surprising aspect of this story- that the most lucid description of what we are doing under TARP has come from Lindsey Graham (“The truth is we’ve put more money into the Bank of America than it’s worth,” Graham said. “That’s not nationalization. That’s just stupid.”), that Lindsey Graham now seems to be openly agreeing with Krugman, Roubani, and others, or that the Bank of America exec thinks that dumping billions into failed businesses isn’t socialism and that boatloads of money is not only a talent, but a God-given one at that. Then again, you do always hear the saying that “God must love the poor, because he made so many of them,” so maybe McCall is on to something and America has just been blessed with a lot of “talented” people.

*** Update ***


LauraW reminds us that there is some must see tv tonight on PBS, as Inside the Meltdown will be playing. A preview: Never mind. The preview is screwing up the page.

Set the DVR.

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They Wuz Robbed

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TIME Magazine employs Mark Halperin, and yet their list of the year’s 25 best blogs does not include a single wingnut. It’s almost as if TIME recognizes that rightwing blogs are a self-contradicting construct in a party/mentality better suited to the I-talk-you-obey format of talk radio. Remember the times when Erick Erickson tried to make RedState relevant by “forcing” the party to pay attention to his blog? Those were precious.

Needless to say thin-skinned media obsessives on the right will declare war againt TIME (TWAT?) any moment now.

***Update***

Now I have to go see what this Slashfood thing is all about.

***Update 2***

Pork floss just made my day.

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To edit or not to edit

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I realize some of you may be sick of my Washington Post chat fixation but I found this interesting:

Raleigh, N.C.: Good afternoon. What are the ground rules for the roundtable on “Meet the Press”? For example, if someone argues that Obama is bad because the sky is purple, are you allowed to say, no, the sky is actually blue? In a related question, how are your columns fact-checked? It just seems like commentators/pundits are held to an incredibly low standard for accuracy.

Eugene Robinson: We are allowed to state the true color of the sky. And here at The Washington Post, our columns are read by the best copy editors I’ve ever known. They save us all from embarrassment regularly.

Not this time, I guess (from TPM earlier today):

Mum’s the word for George Will and the Washington Post when it comes to explaining how misinformation on global warming got into Will’s most recent column.

Yesterday morning we called Will to ask him about the misrepresentations in his Sunday column. We also called Fred Hiatt, the editor of the paper’s editorial page, to ask about the editing process that the Post’s editorial page employs. Neither chose to answer our questions.

[…]

We’re hearing that the Post’s editing process for opinion pieces is virtually non-existent. Maybe that makes sense in some cases — it certainly seems reasonable to give most columnists a freer hand than straight news reporters get. But it’s difficult to know for sure when the Post won’t talk about it. And that approach sure didn’t serve the paper well here.

Update: While Robinson mentions copy editors, not fact-checkers, he does do so in the context of a question about fact-checking.

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Making Things Up, One Day At A Time

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Malkin has quite a doozy up at memeorandum right now:

On Nov. 4, after Barack Obama clinched the White House, the market closed at 9,625.28.

In mid-morning trading today, the day President Obama signs his massive Generational Theft Act into law and a day before he unveils a massive new mortgage entitlement, the Dow dropped to to 7,606.53.

Now, imagine if President Bush had presided over a 2,000-point stock market tumble in the same time period — during the first few months of his presidency.

Great start, O.

A couple things make things make this post wingnuttier than normal. Put aside the fact that George Bush presided over a market crash from 14,000 to 8000, this is the the same Michelle Malkin who spent the last few months ranting about the Office of the President Elect:

Okay, it’s one thing to take your campaign website, transfer it to a dot-gov domain, and invent an “Office of the President-Elect” out of whole cloth.

But now we’ve got Sen. Obama standing in front of a podium, in front of the world, for his first transitional press conference with an official-looking sign that reads “Office of the President-Elect.” Is that the official seal of the U.S. on the sign? Do they have authority to use it? What other make-believe offices are they going to invent between now and Inauguration Day? I can’t ever recall in my lifetime any mention of such an office. Can you?

Now, apparently, Malkin suddenly believes that the Office of President Elect holds real power, much more so than the actual Presidency, because she wants to credit the market decline from November 4th until now to… Barack Obama.

The simple fact of the matter is that when George Bush took office in 2001, the market was at around 10,500. During his administration, it rose to around 14k at the peak. When he left office, it was at around 8000. I am not making this up, so if you do not trust me, you can check the data for yourself. Slide the graph around and do your own thing. Check any date you want.

In fact, the market has only fallen a couple hundred points from when Obama took office, Malkin knows it, and now she is just flat out making things up and hoping you are stupid enough to not notice. Everyone knew they would attempt to blame the Bush administration’s failings on the Democrats and the Obama administration, and the facts really are stacked against them so they have a tough job, but quite honestly, I thought they would be a little bit better at it than this. The crazy people ranting about black helicopters have more credibility, and at least try to make a coherent argument. The nut of her argument is “If you pretend Obama was President two months and a few weeks before he took office, he is to blame for the market declines during that time period.” Really, it is that stupid.

This is just silly, and they are really just phoning it in.

*** Update ***

It occurred to me that this is quite possibly stupid enough that it can be the centerpiece of the discussion of Meet the Press with David Gregory this weekend.

And while we are at it, as silly as it is to say that the market has dropped several thousand for Obama when he was not even President, I see a lot of harrumphing that everything is the Republican’s fault (and I am at times am guilty of this). That isn’t entirely accurate, either, as many people have noted repeatedly during Obama’s selection of his economic and financial team. There is, to an extent, a broadly bi-partisan base to blame this whole ponzi scheme on. Rubin and Clinton played a role in the deregulation, and let’s not forget who re-appointed Greenspan. And when you read stories about this global meltdown, it makes it even more obvious that it is simplistic to simply blame this mess on one political party. The Republicans should get their fair share of it, and I think they should shoulder much of the blame simply because they were in charge the last eight years and have pushed an agenda of tax cuts and higher spending on top of a platform of widespread deregulation, but a lot of people are guilty for this mess.

More here from Steve Taylor.

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Time to clone Nate Silver

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This piece by Sharon Begley makes me rethink my desire for Newsweek to go bankrupt. It’s about a study of done and how to tell which ones are likely to be right:

The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit’s accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock’s first clue. The media’s preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced. They are, in short, hedgehogs, not foxes.

[….]

If there are three possibilities (say, that China will experience more, less or the same amount of civil unrest), throwing darts at targets representing each one produces a forecast more accurate than most pundits’. Simply extrapolating from recent data on, say, economic output does even better. But booking statistical models on talk shows probably wouldn’t help their ratings.

I went to a panel discussion by some poly sci professors the Friday before the election where they carried on about the Bradley effect and the vagaries of polls and how it wasn’t clear at all what would happen on Tuesday. My friend who was with me got worried and asked “is it really so up in the air?” I said “No, the election will go more or less exactly how Nate Silver is predicting it will go.” And it did.

Full disclosure: I found this article via Howie Kurtz.

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Another Madoff

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Stopping what it called a “massive ongoing fraud,” the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday accused Robert Allen Stanford, the chief of the Stanford Financial Group, of fraud in the sale of about $8 billion of high-yielding certificates of deposit held in the firm’s bank in Antigua. Also named in the suit were two other executives and some affiliates of the financial group.

In the complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Dallas, the S.E.C. accused Mr. Stanford and two associates — James M. Davis, a director and chief financial officer of Stanford Group and the Antigua-based bank affiliate, and Laura Pendergest-Holt, the chief investment officer of both organizations — with misrepresenting the safety and liquidity of the uninsured CDs.

Also, last night, someone forwarded me a link a breathless piece about “FX dislocation” or something of the other that sounded very ominous and foreboding, and I honestly had no idea what to make of it, so I won’t even bother linking it now because I think it is irresponsible to fearmonger in these uncertain times, but there sure seems to be a lot going on out there right now.

Also, the DOW is down a couple hundred today, and I have no idea what is driving that, although if I had to guess it would be the auto industry stuff.

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Make Of This What You Will

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via Hot Air, this:

So you don’t subscribe to Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” school of thought?

That was a terrible thing to say. I mean, he’s the president of all the country. If he succeeds, the country succeeds. And if he doesn’t, it hurts us all. Anybody who would pull against our president is not exactly thinking rationally.

That was Pat Roberston…

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