Via JenJen in the comments, Ben Folds playing chatroulette in front of a live audience:
Archives for April 2010
Three Amigos
Three Republican House members have opted-out of their leadership’s ban on earmarks: Don Young, Anh ‘Joseph’ Cao and Ron Paul.
It’s easy to understand why the most crooked and the most vulnerable Republicans would opt out. Paul’s a more interesting case.
The Paul formula for staying in office is simple: he brings home all the pork he can, and he does top-notch constituent service, making sure that everyone his district gets their Social Security checks on time.
There’s nothing wrong with what Paul is doing, but “I bring home pork and keep the government checks flowing” sure wasn’t the centerpiece of his Presidential campaign.
(via)
All the Lies Are Brown
Not just a Repub wet dream…
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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… which, of course, is why Cosmo Boy will not stop lying about Maddow’s phantom candidacy. An articulate left-wing lesbian is the perfect Teabagger boogie-monster, an ideal image to scare the rubes into emptying their wallets for the clean-cut fella with the sincere expression. But there are plenty of good progressives, and even some Democrats, who wouldn’t mind chipping in to fund a Maddow run for Ted Kennedy’s old seat, either.
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And Scott Brown, while no Rhodes Scholar, is very media-cunning — he had a successful career as a male model, his wife is an anchor on the ‘middle-of-the-road’ Boston local news station, his daughter made it to the top handful of contestants on American idol. None of the stuff on the video above is actionable; if confronted, Brown can skate handily between ‘I was too polite to disagree with those wicked commentors saying naughty things’ and ‘some low-ranking office staffer must’ve lost the while-you-were-out messages Rachel left’, with a side order of ‘Jeez, can’t you uptight progressives take a joke?’
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I’m afraid Scott Brown may turn out to be the working political version of Sarah Palin.
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Open Thread
Here is a moment of zen for you on this Friday morning:
It is good to be the king.
Also, new petitions for you to take part in on the right over there.
Steering the Titanic With a Canoe Paddle
This week’s This American Life is devoted to the closing of NUMMI, an auto plant that was a joint venture between Toyota and GM. It’s both touching and infuriating.
The story of how the worst plant in GM was transformed by Toyota’s methods is an affecting tale of human redemption. “Old, fat” UAW members, accustomed to drug abuse and filing grievances, became some of the most efficient workers in the world. They also underwent personal transformations. One guy who had been ashamed of the cars he built put postcards under the windshields of NUMMI-built vehicles he saw around town, asking the owners what they thought of them.
The infuriating part of the program is how it took GM 15 years to learn the NUMMI lessons, mostly due to management, but the UAW played its part. The title of this post comes from one NUMMI manager’s attempt to explain why GM changes do slowly.
The podcast is free through the weekend, and available here [mp3] or through iTunes.
Steering the Titanic With a Canoe PaddlePost + Comments (35)
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
It’s the economy, stoopid:
Employers added 162,000 non-farm payroll jobs in March, the government reported Friday, the strongest job growth since the nation entered recession in December 2007 and the strongest confirmation yet that the U.S. economy is on the mend.
In another bit of good news, the unemployment rate in March held steady at 9.7 percent, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Although the mainstream economic forecasters had expected even higher job growth in March, by about 40,000 posts, those higher forecasts anticipated strong hiring by the government to carry out the census. The number of census workers hired in March was less than half of expectations, meaning March’s number reflected actual private-sector hiring.
This is excellent news for the American people and great news for Democrats.
As a side note, I just want to state to all the people out there who think good journalism is dead, you really need to be reading McClatchy. Read that piece and see how clear, concise, and easy to understand it is. They really are the only print news of any value any more.
See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Make a Shitload of Money
Via Jim Henley, this charming story about one of my favorite issues:
As the bottom fell out of the housing market and complex mortgage-backed securities began tanking in 2007, a strange thing happened at Moody’s Investors Service, one of the largest firms that rate bonds for the risks they pose to investors.
Moody’s blue-ribbon board of directors stopped receiving key information from an internal committee that was supposed to keep the board informed of risks to the company, a McClatchy investigation has found.
Instead, the ad hoc risk-management committee suddenly disappeared, precisely at the time when the board and management should have been shifting to higher alert as the financial world began quaking.
***The findings of the new McClatchy investigation not only call into question the value of the new regulatory approach lawmakers are drafting; they also help underscore the widespread criticism that many corporate boards practice crony capitalism rather than independence.
I’m doing breathing exercises right now. Until the way the ratings agencies work and are funded fundamentally changes, this shit will keep on going on. And if you read the article, none of the proposed financial reform changes address this problem.
It still amazes me how little scrutiny the ratings agencies have gotten in all this.
See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Make a Shitload of MoneyPost + Comments (35)