Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

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

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

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

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

All hail the time of the bunny!

This really is a full service blog.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

The words do not have to be perfect.

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

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

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

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

We will not go back.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

“Alexa, change the president.”

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

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Archives for 2009

An Obvious Solution

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The Washington Post details the problems states and municipalities are having paying for services:

Philadelphia officials are leaving 200 police positions unfilled and cutting back on overtime.

Sheriff’s deputies in Polk County, Fla., are picking up more work after the state highway patrol froze hiring and four local police agencies disbanded.

And police in Atlanta are shouldering a 10 percent pay cut after all 1,770 employees and the police chief agreed to a furlough of four hours per week.

The nation’s economic trouble has hit state and local law enforcement, with two out of three large departments reporting budget cuts or hiring freezes. And at the same time, leaders at more than a quarter of the 233 departments that responded to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum say they are noticing an uptick in property crime that they blame, at least in part, to economic unrest.

Clearly there is an obvious solution for this problem, as any good Republican or centrist will tell you- MORE TAX CUTS. Seriously, though, the craziest thing about the centrist compromise over the stimulus bill is that for whatever reason, they stripped out a ton of aid that would go directly to the states, create immediate jobs. At a time when the economy is shedding 600k jobs a month, not firing a police officer is almost as good as hiring a new one.

There are other solutions and workarounds, of course. Police departments could refocus their mission and move away from the inordinate amount of time and money they spend arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating non-violent drug offenders, but we all know that won’t happen. Even in 2009, America is still firmly in the grips of reefer madness, as Michael Phelps can surely tell you.

If only we had made the Bush tax cuts permanent and forever ended the “death tax,” we would not be having these debates, as everything would just take care of itself.

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Is Steele in trouble?

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You may have seen this story already:

Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors.

Federal agents in recent days contacted Steele’s sister, a spokesman for Steele said yesterday.

[….]

The recent allegations outlined four specific transactions. In addition to the payment to Steele’s sister, Fabian said that the candidate used money from his state campaign improperly; that Steele paid $75,000 from the state campaign to a law firm for work that was never performed; and that he or an aide transferred more than $500,000 in campaign cash from one bank to another without authorization.

The bank transfer was made against the explicit wishes of other Maryland Republicans

Now, the usual rule here is that IOFYAR IOKIYAR, but remember, it’s often not okay if you are a Republican who is distrusted by the real wingnuts in the party (just ask Harriet Miers), as Steele is. And the NRCC treasurer scandal, which led to the retirements of Congressmen Jim Walsh and Tom Reynolds (and possibly others as well), is still pretty fresh in people’s memories.

I wonder if there will be a move to dump Steele now.

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Assholes

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Here is an actual transcript of a conversation between a man, Paul Kelleher, and Bank of America when Keller called to tell B of A and his mother’s other creditors that his mother had died:

Paul Kelleher: Yes, I’m calling to inform you that my mom died on the 24th of January.

Bank of America Estates representative: I’m sorry. Oh, it looks like she never even missed a payment. That’s too bad. Well, how are you planning to take care of her balance?

PK: I’m not going to. She has no estate to speak of, but you should feel free to just go through the standard probate procedure. I’m certainly not legally obligated to pay for her.

BOA: You mean you’re not going to help her out?

PK: I wouldn’t be helping her out — she’s dead. I’d be helping you out.

BOA: Oh, that’s really not the way to look at it. I know that if it were my mother, I’d pay it. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.

Apparently, this is standard practice:

Kelleher’s reported conversation, the former rep said, “sounds like how I would have attempted to collect” in such a situation. “I would have asked: ‘How do you plan on paying for this?'”

The (former B of A) rep said that employees were encouraged to walk right up to the line of actively deceiving a caller about the consequences of non-payment. “As long as you don’t get caught [lying],” the former rep added, “there’s no really no punishment.” The former rep did not work in the estates unit, but confirmed, based on direct knowledge of B of A’s practices, that it operates similarly to the former rep’s own unit.

When I read things like this, I don’t feel so good about having a credit card company whore as vice-president or about the 19 Democratic Senators who voted for the bankruptcy bill.

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Sunday Morning Open Thread

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The pets say you have spent too much time at the computer. Go for a walk or something:

Claim your pets, folks, and don’t forget about CBS Sunday Morning.

*** Update ***

What the hell? We have a fraud. Someone sent the peeing puppy in as their own pet, when it has been making the rounds of the internet for some time.

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Culture of Corruption

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So after I got my fat ass off the exercise bike (aka the “six hundred dollar towel rack”), I turned on the radio and started to go about the Saturday morning house cleaning. Normally I just listen to Click and Clack and then Whad’ya Know?, get all smacked up on coffee, and then chase Tunch around with the vacuum cleaner (he hates it, so this is one of the few points in the week where I have the upper hand in our relationship), but this week I decided to listen to some rock station.

At any rate, I was buzzing around the house when all of a sudden, I realized that not only was “Bad Medicine” playing, but that I was singing along, and I knew all the words. It was mortifying, and the first thing I did was look to make sure no one had seen me, even though I live alone.

This will never happen again, I swear.

*** Update ***

BTW, I mentioned I love James Brown, and you all know about my love of the Dead and Little Feat, but if I had to choose another band that never fails to make me happy, it would be these guys:

That isn’t one of their best known songs, but it is one of my all time favs.

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Once in a lifetime

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Ron Brownstein — the one political reporter I take seriously (and not just because of this) — has a good piece on the current political big picture:

“No president in my lifetime has had this opportunity to fund public investments,” says Robert Reich, a University of California (Berkeley) public policy professor who advised Obama’s campaign.

[….]

From a Democratic perspective, much of that investment — for new roads, transit systems, or school construction — serves the dual function of creating short-term jobs and encouraging long-term growth. But the bill also emphatically expands programs targeted more at the far term than the near term — from aid to schools in low-income areas ($13 billion) to expanded college loans ($16 billion) and scientific research ($10 billion).

In normal times, Congress might never enlarge so many programs at once. But, as with Reagan’s tax cut, the crisis-induced demand for action may suspend the normal laws of political gravity — and allow Democrats to redirect federal priorities as boldly as Reagan did. “This is a once-in-a-25-year opportunity to [implement] a lot of our agenda,” a top House Democratic aide says. Largely for that reason, most congressional Republicans are likely to resist the plan, no matter how many more tax cuts Obama offers them.

I think this is about right.

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