Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

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

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

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

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

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

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Most of you should go to bed and try to be better Jackals in the morning.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

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

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

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

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

All hail the time of the bunny!

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

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

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The Man Is Insane

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I got an email last week from someone who told me I just had to watch Blagojevich’s press conference, and that he was just running rough shod over everyone and that “if Spitzer had 1/10 of this man’s political astuteness, he’d still be governor of NY and would be gearing up to run for re-election.” Here are the press conferences:

This morning, Rod went on GMA and had another one of his trademark performances, in which he revealed the following:

Illinois’ beleaguered Gov. Rod Blagojevich said today that when he was deciding who would take President Obama’s Senate seat he considered appointing talk show queen Oprah Winfrey.

Blagojevich made the revelation to Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America” on the day his impeachment trial is set to begin. That trial is expected to toss him out of office.

The governor said that Winfrey’s name came up as a potential successor to Obama in the Senate.

I think any comparison of Blago to Spitzer is inaccurate. Spitzer was horny and a hypocrite, while Blagojevich might possibly be insane. I was really harsh on Reid and the Senate Democrats for their bumbling of the Burris appointment, because they kept misunderestimating Blagojevich and seemed incapable of looking at the options from Blago’s perspective. Having said that, in retrospect, I can understand how those used to the “rational” behavior of Beltway insiders might have a hard time estimating the actions of a crazy man.

The Governor’s wife lost her job last week, putting his family under increasing financial pressure, and his lead counsel quit the case. Increasingly, Blago is looking like a man on the run, with no plan, no real hope, and just flying by the seat of the pants hoping to get through the day.

It is kind of crazy that this is a Governor.

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Meet Big Hollywood’s latest star

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It looks like Tbogg has taken the pledge too. He’s all over the new Big Hollywood recruit, Jude, who turned in a spectacularly incoherent first post at BH. One of the first lines is:

Drink, and let us hope the ‘morrow has mercy, because they won’t.

There’s something about the combination of literary affectation and flawed verb-subject agreement that always amuses me (update: it’s possible that “they” refers to liberals). From there, it devolves into a 500 word rant about McCain’s green screen.

Tbogg finds this in the new guy’s bio:

Jude has also penned the main title songs for The Ellen Show(2001), the 2nd season of VH1’s Surreal Life, and ABC’s critical smash, Cavemen.

The whole bio is worth a read.

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Kristol out

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It looks like the New York Times won’t have Bill Kristol to kick around anymore. From today’s Kristol column:

This is William Kristol’s last column.

(via)

Let’s just hope he doesn’t have to get Ben Stein to help him out with his interest-only mortgage.

Update: From Michael Calderone (bold mine):

It remains to be seen if Rosenthal fills the spot with a conservative or libertarian voice. But some of the writers he’s spoken favorably of include the National Review’s Byron York and The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle.

York may be worse than Kristol, if only because he’s so proud of his hair. McArdle is annoying and often glibertarian, but probably about as good as it’s going to get for the Times conservative position.

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This year’s bubble

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As predicted, T-bills are tanking.

An economically inclined friend writes

If you just look at treasuries maturing after 2030, that’s a value of about $130 billion dollars notional, which got bid up to about $190 billion, and now have lost half that so $30 billion. You throw in treasuries issued with maturity after 2027, that’s a little over $50 billion in losses. So roughly Maddoff.

But if you want to be really scared, check out this graph of total debt as a percentage of GDP (from Matt Yglesias):

The same economically-inclined friend writes of this:

There’s no way out but an adjustment in standard of living.

Remember, an adjustment in standard of living doesn’t just mean that one of Ben Stein’s friends has to move to San Bernardino. It means people like a friend of mine with a disabled kid who just got laid off doing God knows what to get by. And I don’t delude myself that anyone I know is facing the worst of any of this.

The reason articles like Stein’s do the public a disservice is that they make it sound like the tragedy of this crisis is that a few people living beyond their means will have to eat a little shit. It’s a lot worse than that, and it affects plenty of people who weren’t raking in alimony and blowing it all on a shop that “has never come close to earning a dime”.

Update: But if the gold standard and deregulation won’t work, maybe the Sam Donaldson tax credit plan will.

Fucking idiot (Donaldson, not Krugman).

And, by the way, check out Cokie’s nonsensical assertion that the fact that unemployment is especially high in Michigan and Rhode Island is indicative of something (I’m not sure what). She says “it (unemployment) is already that in Michigan and Rhode Island” (at around 3:10). What does that have to do with anything?

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I ain’t saying she’s a gold-digger

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You’ve probably seen this elsewhere by now, but today’s Ben Stein piece in the Times is a doozy:

The woman, whom I’ve known since she was a teenager, has no job or other remunerative employment. She has a former husband, an entrepreneur whose business has suffered recently. He pays her $20,000 a month, of which roughly half is alimony and half child support. The alimony is scheduled to stop this summer.

She has a wealthy beau who pays her credit card bills and other incidentals, but she is thinking of telling him she is through with him. She has no savings and has refinanced her home repeatedly, always adding to indebtedness and then putting the money into a shop she owns that has never come close to earning a dime. Now she is up all night worrying about money. “Terrified,” as she put it. She wanted me to tell her what to do.

What could I say? I did the best I could, but I had to tell her that she was on very thin ice.

Ever since, I’ve been thinking of the troubles of this sweet woman, consumed with worry about money.

I don’t have an ounce of malice towards people like her, but good God.

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60 Minutes

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If the DHL story at the top of the hour does not hurt you to watch, you have a dark heart.

*** Update ***

Ugh:

The U.S. economy contracted violently in the fourth quarter, with gross domestic product falling at its fastest pace in more than 25 years, economists said ahead of what promises to be a grim week of economic news.

“Real economic activity fell off a cliff during the fourth quarter, producing a sharp drop in employment, output and spending,” wrote economists at Wachovia.

And the worst part is that it’s not over. Economists expect another huge decline in the first quarter, with a smaller contraction in the second quarter.

Getting worse.

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