Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

“But what about the lurkers?”

We are aware of all internet traditions.

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

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

So many bastards, so little time.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

You cannot shame the shameless.

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

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

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

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

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

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

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

When I was faster i was always behind.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2009

Archives for 2009

The Geithner Plan

by | 141 Comments

This post is in: ,

Missed the announcement, but if these posts from Atrios are accurate, it appears that I am not the only one who has no idea what is going on. This was pretty awesome:

Administration officials were greeted with sarcasm and laughter Monday night when they briefed lawmakers and congressional staff on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s new financial-sector bailout project, according to people who were in the room.

The laughter was at its height when Obama officials explained that the White House planned to guarantee a wide swath of toxic assets — which they referred to as “legacy assets” — but wouldn’t be asking Congress for money. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a bailout opponent in the fall, asked the officials to give Congress the total dollar figure for which they were on the hook. The officials said that they couldn’t provide a number, a response met by chuckling that was bipartisan, but tilted toward the GOP side. By guaranteeing the assets, Geithner hopes he can persuade the private sector to purchase a portion of them.

So why exactly did team Obama rush out to make this announcement when it is pretty clear they are just making shit up as they go along? And is it possible that Tim Geithner could be the man that sinks the Obama presidency?

I have no idea what to do or how this situation can be fixed, but it is pretty clear that neither do the masters of the universe. At what point did our banking and financial system change from middle-aged white guys in blue suits who said “no” to everything into folks like this:

I give up. If you can tell me how this plan is different or better than the status quo, I am all ears.

The Geithner PlanPost + Comments (141)

Not A Serious Nation

by | 71 Comments

This post is in: ,

You have to be kidding me:

Now it appears the case has expanded beyond Phelps’ activities.

The party took place in November at a house on Blossom Street near Five Points.

It was at that house where someone snapped the photo of Phelps taking a hit on a marijuana pipe called a bong.

Lott says the picture indicated a law was being broken in his jurisdiction. He said he couldn’t ignore the violation just because Phelps is rich and famous.

We’ve now learned that since investigators began trying to build a case, they’ve made eight arrests: seven for drug possession and one for distribution. These are arrests that resulted as the sheriff’s department served search warrants.

We’ve also learned that the department has located and confiscated that bong.

Sources say the owner of the bong was trying to sell it on eBay for as much as $100,000.

The owner, who wasn’t even at the party, is one of the eight now charged.

When I read crap like this, I just want to give up. Apparently there is nothing else of importance for the local authorities to contend with, so there is an investigation into a bunch of jackasses smoking pot.

A country that does this and puts Tommy Chong in jail (nice work, Joe Biden) just isn’t a serious nation. Dissolve our federal, state, and local governments. Dissolve the courts. Screw the stimulus package. Let the banks fail. Let’s just say to hell with it all and let the country die a quick death and hope the Chinese do a better job governing us than we did.

And let me also make the point that yes, often times being rich and famous does give you access to more favorable situations in our screwed up system of justice, but some times, it goes the other way. Just like Paris Hilton got screwed with her jail time because she was a celebrity, Michael Phelps is about to get boned by some overzealous cop because he is famous. And if you want to argue otherwise, then what you are saying is that police agencies around the country have nothing better to do than to hunt average everyday folks down and bust them because they saw a picture of them doing a bong hit. If that is the case, then maybe Sen. Ensign was right the other day- the states need to do some budget cutting, and they should start with the police.

Not A Serious NationPost + Comments (71)

Rule by Rush

by | 82 Comments

This post is in: 

Just popped into WaPo to ask a question about why cable tv is so anti-stimulus:

Rochester, N.Y.: Is the debate over the stimulus package shaping up to be a bit like the debate over the impeachment of president Clinton, where media elites are on one side — against the stimulus — and the American public is on the other — for the stimulus? Aside from one partisan Rasmussen poll, polls consistently show support for Obama and House Democrats on the stimulus, but nearly everyone on TV and in the opinion pages is on the Republican side.
Robert Barnes: I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with your premise. Seems more likely to me that the polls show one thing but the constituent calls to congressional offices against the stimulus are showing something else.

I now know that the way to make my opinions heard by the Village is to send silly putty and balls to my Congressmen.

Update: This is funny too from the same Q&A.

Dunn Loring, Va.: Do the Post editors get together and decide what question their reporters should ask at a presidential news conference, or did Michael Fletcher come up with his question about A-Rod on his own? If the latter, how much longer while he be on the White House beat?
Robert Barnes: I don’t know how Michael decided to ask that question, but he’s certainly got people talking. From what I see reading the papers or watching tv, there is a lot of interest in the A-Rod story, so what’s wrong with getting Obama’s reaction? I know when I was a kid, about the only way I would have read about the president was if he showed up in the sports section.

_______________________

Stafford, Va.: How about that hard hitting A-Rod question from your Post colleague? Was that really more important than asking about AIDs funding, Zimbabwe, global warming, Venezuala, NAFTA, lack of NATO assistance with Afghanistan and a host of other issues?

Robert Barnes: But I feel I should give voice to the other side.

Rule by RushPost + Comments (82)

Obama’s Impossible Position

by | 152 Comments

This post is in: 

It seems unfortunate to me that George Bush’s legacy will leave Obama with countless sophie’s choices where the only way to avoid giving up his precious reasonable moderate image, at least in the eyes of the media, will entail doing genuinely heinous and extremist things. For the first tangible example look to yesterday’s decision to abuse the State Secrets privilege in a torture case. The only justifiable decision here would be to revoke the Bush DoJ’s attempt to use State Secrets to block not only specific evidence but any hearing at all. However, doing so would almost certainly compel a wider investigation and likely criminal charges against former government officials. To avoid being seen as the President who put his last administration on trial Obama must resort to the exact same heinous abuses of power that made the Bush DoJ into a national disgrace.

However, it also seems likely to me that the substantive difference between Obama’s administration and the Bush years will become increasingly evident as time goes on. At the very least, given his past writing, Marty Lederman must be shitting a two story colonial townhouse right now. I have to assume that Lederman and other principled hires at the DoJ will either ensure that decisions like this do not happen again or else he will resign.

I doubt that Marty’s old blog can avoid talking about this decision for much longer, and given their connection to the guy who now has John Yoo’s desk it also seems unlikely that they would write without taking his perspective into account. At the risk of sliding towards Kremlinology I will keep an eye on Balkinization for evidence that principled elements within Obama’s DoJ hope to prevail in steering the administration away from this disastrous and legally indefensible course.

***Update***

The mood is not happy at Balkinization. The title more or less says it all.

You Cover It Up, You Own It

Obama’s Impossible PositionPost + Comments (152)

Checkmate

by | 79 Comments

This post is in: 

Bob Herbert piles the love on Obama:

There is always a tendency to underestimate Barack Obama. We are inclined in the news media to hyperventilate over every political or policy setback, no matter how silly or insignificant, while Mr. Obama has shown again and again that he takes a longer view.

There was no way, for example, that the Daschle flap was going to derail the forward march of a man who had survived the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fiasco. It’s early, but there are signs that Mr. Obama may be the kind of president who is incomprehensible to the cynics among us — one who is responsible and mature, who is concerned not just with the short-term political realities but also the long-term policy implications.

***

The simple truth is that most Republican politicians would like Mr. Obama to fail because that is their ticket to a quick return to power. I think the president is a more formidable opponent than they realize.

Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle. While Lindsey Graham was behaving like a 6-year-old on the Senate floor and Pete Sessions was studying passages in his Taliban handbook, Mr. Obama and his aides were assessing what’s achievable in terms of stimulus legislation and how best to get there.

I’d personally like to see a more robust stimulus package, with increased infrastructure spending and fewer tax cuts. But the reality is that Mr. Obama needs at least a handful of Republican votes in the Senate to get anything at all done, and he can’t afford to lose this first crucial legislative fight of his presidency.

The Democrats may succeed in bolstering their package somewhat in conference, but I think Mr. Obama would have been satisfied all along to start his presidency off with an $800 billion-plus stimulus program.

I guess the real questions are how long he is going to keep running rings around the GOP, and whether his policies are good and we are lucky he is playing the Republicans like a fiddle. It certainly does seem that President Obama couldn’t care less about the news cycle, and is, as always, thinking long term. From the presser last night:

Obama: Well, I don’t think — I don’t think I underestimated it. I don’t think the — the American people underestimated it. They understand that there have been a lot of bad habits built up here in Washington, and it’s going to take time to break down some of those bad habits.

You know, when I made a series of overtures to the Republicans, going over to meet with both Republican caucuses, you know, putting three Republicans in my cabinet — something that is unprecedented — making sure that they were invited here to the White House to talk about the economic recovery plan, all those were not designed simply to get some short-term votes. They were designed to try to build up some trust over time.

And I think that, as I continue to make these overtures, over time, hopefully that will be reciprocated.

***

That doesn’t negate the continuing efforts that I’m going to make to listen and engage with my Republican colleagues. And hopefully the tone that I’ve taken, which has been consistently civil and respectful, will pay some dividends over the long term. There are going to be areas where we disagree, and there are going to be areas where we agree.

Compare that statement to the conventional wisdom last week in the media, in which Obama was rebuffed, the outreach had failed, and we were told that the dinner and drinks led to no Republican votes, and so on. The talking heads in the media are thinking short term, the President is not.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

CheckmatePost + Comments (79)

Bacevich In The News

by | 78 Comments

This post is in: ,

I know there are a lot of Bacevich readers in the audience here, so I thought I would pass along this link to his participation in a discussion at the TPM Book Club last week (post 1, 2, and 3, and then his participation in a discussion of the future of conservatism that featured this:

The Left has won the culture war, and, at least in the near-term, its victory is irreversible. In social relations, the right to choose trumps all other considerations: to fornicate, marry, breed, abort, divorce, and abandon. That a single mother with six kids should opt for another eight because she feels like it captures the distilled essence of the cultural moment that we have entered. Somehow ritual expressions of support for “family values” don’t quite provide an adequate response.

When it comes to economics, faux conservatives–Ronald Reagan in the vanguard–collaborated with liberals in abandoning even the pretense of prudent fiscal management. The blindingly obvious result: debt and dependency. “Today,” writes Niall Ferguson in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, “America is Argentina.” Just so. We can’t pay our bills so we pretend we’ll never have to. Those in power pay lip service to our collective obligation to future generations and then cynically ignore that obligation, appropriating trillions in the hope that somehow or other we can spend our way out of the hole that we’ve dug for ourselves. The only obligation with which the present generation is likely to keep faith is a self-assigned one: to binge, vainly trying to satisfy its own appetite for consumption. What exactly in this Ponzi scheme should conservatives be exerting themselves to preserve?

Bacevich’s statement about the left “winning” the culture wars is so obviously true, but never really explored. The future of conservatism and the fate of the GOP were leveraged for short-term political gain (Terri Schaivo, anyone), and they lost all the battles they were fighting anyway. All that remains now are the tail ends of fights about gay marriage, and despite Prop 8 and other setbacks, the future is clear. Republicans and conservatives will lose this battle, as well.

Bacevich In The NewsPost + Comments (78)

The Geithner Plan

by | 77 Comments

This post is in: ,

NY Times allegedly has some details:

The Obama administration’s new plan to bail out the nation’s banks was fashioned after a spirited internal debate that pitted the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, against some of the president’s top political hands.

In the end, Mr. Geithner largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, according to administration and Congressional officials.

Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.

He resisted those who wanted to dictate how banks would spend their rescue money. And he prevailed over top administration aides who wanted to replace bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid.

Because of the internal debate, some of the most contentious issues remain unresolved.

On Monday evening, new details emerged after lawmakers were briefed on the plan.

It intends to call for the creation of a joint Treasury and Federal Reserve program, at an initial cost of $250 billion to $500 billion, to encourage investors to acquire soured mortgage-related assets from banks.

The Fed will use its balance sheet to provide the financing, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation might provide guarantees to investors who participate in the program, which some people might call a “bad bank.”

A second component of the plan would broadly expand, to $500 billion to $1 trillion, an existing $200 billion program run by the Federal Reserve to try to unfreeze the market for commercial, student, auto and credit card loans. A third component would involve a review of the capital levels of all banks, including projections of future losses, to determine how much additional capital each bank should receive.

The capital injections would come out of the remaining $350 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

A separate $50 billion initiative to enable millions of homeowners facing imminent foreclosure to renegotiate the terms of their mortgages is to be announced next week.

Some of President Obama’s advisers had advocated tighter restrictions on aid recipients, arguing that rising joblessness, populist outrage over Wall Street bonuses and expensive perks, and the poor management of last year’s bailouts could feed a potent political reaction if the administration did not demand enough sacrifices from the companies that receive federal money.

The depressing thing for me about this is that even after spending months reading almost every story I can find about this, after compulsively following Calculated Risk and Naked Capitalism and inviting folks like Nour Rhoubini and others into my home, I still have only a passing understanding of what is going on. I’m not the smartest person on the planet, but I am not Dough Feith stupid, yet every time I look at this stuff it doesn’t take long before I am in over my head. This stuff has become so hopelessly complex, with so many interlocking relationships, that even if you assume everyone is acting in good faith, it is difficult to make sense of it all. Factor in the sad reality that a lot of people in this sector appear to be incapable of acting in good faith, and there is no chance that the average person can understand what is going on.

On the other hand, I do understand this, and it is terrifying:

I was there when the secretary and the chairman of the Federal Reserve came those days and talked to members of Congress about what was going on… Here’s the facts. We don’t even talk about these things.

On Thursday, at about 11 o’clock in the morning, the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States to a tune of $550 billion being drawn out in a matter of an hour or two.

The Treasury opened up its window to help. They pumped $105 billion into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks.

They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic and there. And that’s what actually happened.

If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o’clock that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.

More here, where the possibility of martial law was discussed. The whole thing makes you feel helpless, to an extent. This clearly something that is so important that it could shake the foundation of our society, yet it is so hopelessly complex that you are powerless to understand it, let alone take control of the situation.

*** Update ***

Many folks wonder why I have soured so much on the Republican party (not folks that still read and comment here, mind you, but every other day I get an email from someone wondering why I went “insane” or telling me that I have gone “nuts,”), and this is a good time to explain why. Watch that Kanjorski video, and tell me it does not scare the hell out of you. Then remember that it was in that context, with that in the background, that the then Republican nomineee, with his sidekick Sarah Palin, engaged in a series of stunts regarding the bailout, suspending his campaign, resuming his campaign, babbling about cancelling the debates, all while the House GOP played their little games, ending in this:

Watch the Kanjorski video again, think about that context, then watch John Boehner go in front of the cameras and say they voted against the bailout because Nancy Pelosi was mean. There was a loaded gun pointed at the head of the American economy, and the Republicans were bitching about the color of the uniforms worn by the SWAT team there to rescue them.

I don’t think it is nuts to have soured on the GOP. I think it is nuts to support them.

The Geithner PlanPost + Comments (77)