Over at our sister site, Rumproast, they are holding a fundraiser for StrangeAppar8us, who has suffered an undisclosed brain injury. If you can help out a friend in need, that would be awesome.
If you have a blog, help spread the word, also too.
by John Cole| 19 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
Over at our sister site, Rumproast, they are holding a fundraiser for StrangeAppar8us, who has suffered an undisclosed brain injury. If you can help out a friend in need, that would be awesome.
If you have a blog, help spread the word, also too.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 64 Comments
This post is in: Good News For Conservatives
Barney Frank has announced that he’s retiring at the end of this term. He’ll be 72 when he goes, having served in Congress since 1981.
It’s tough to see Barney go, but when both the House and Senate are plagued with members who should have retired decades ago, I’m not going to mourn too much when someone who’s old enough to quit decides to buck the trend and make some room for a replacement.
Barney Out: Sad. Congressman Retiring: GreatPost + Comments (64)
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Sociopaths, Teabagger Stupidity
It appears our Galtian Overlords really can’t do anything right:
“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”
The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.
The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma — investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort — and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the banks’ appeal in March 2011.
The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.
Remember what was happening in March of 2009? On February 19th, 2009, Rick Santelli had his famous rant about a program to extend meager amounts of help to homeowners, while at the very same time the Fed was doling out trillions to his douchebag buddies. While these assholes were famously whining and screaming about socialism and government involvement in the markets (when people were discussing different compensation rules), they were behind the scenes taking trillions to help smooth over their fuck-ups.
This is what the useful idiots in the tea party are fighting for…
I Get By With A Little Help From My FriendsPost + Comments (159)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 43 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012
Nate Silver runs the numbers and thinks that the Manchester Union-Leader endorsement is probably worth about an 11 point bump in the polls. Here’s a polltracker from TPM:
As you can see, Romney (in black) has been consistently outpolling all the others, and fairly resistant to the candidate du jour. The question is whether his current shallow dive is going to deepen as Newt (in red) rises. My guess is that if it does, that tells us something about what the elusive “sane” Republicans think of Mitt vs Newt. The Republicans in New Hampshire know Romney about as well as anyone, since a lot of that state gets Massachusetts media. Now that Newt is raising front-runner money, he’s putting staff into New Hampshire, and if he can take a moment from his book tour to do some actual campaigning, the “sane” crew that’s been sticking with Mitt will have the opportunity to take another taste of essence of Newt. Of course, for the same reason that I was rooting for Cain, I’ve changed my fickle allegiance to the former Speaker, since he would be much easier to beat than Romney. I expect this ridiculous man-child to implode in the next few days, but if he doesn’t, New Hampshire might live up to their reputation as a bellwether.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 48 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
Syracuse University Assistant Coach Bernie Fine was fired yesterday over a tape recording of a call with Fine’s wife released by his accuser, who says that Fine molested him in the 80’s, when he was a teenager. The call has to be heard to be believed, but the gist of it is that Fine’s wife Laurie knew that Fine was molesting alleged victim Bobby Davis in her house, and had some suspicions about other kids, and did nothing. Davis also says that he had a sexual relationship with Mrs. Fine when he was 18.
The timeline on this incident is also puts the actions of Syracuse University, the Syracuse Police Department and the media under suspicion. Davis went to Syracuse Police in 2002 and was told the statute of limitations on his charges had passed. He then recorded the call with Mrs. Fine and provided the tape to (at least) the Syracuse Post-Standard and ESPN. Both of them apparently did nothing with the tape. The Post-Standard says that Mrs. Fine confirmed the accuracy of portions of the tape but claimed that it was “phony”. ESPN says that it had the tape authenticated by a voice expert, but did not explain why they had it for 9 years and did nothing with it.
The police department and the Syracuse DA are in a media pissing match over the Fine incident, with the DA claiming that the Chief leaked materials from the investigation to embarrass the DA’s office and to deflect blame from the PD’s inaction in 2002.
Syracuse University launched an internal investigation in 2005 when Davis brought the accusations to them. Chancellor Nancy Cantor says that the tape was not provided to the University at that time. And, at that time, Davis was the sole accuser. Last month, Davis’ stepbrother, now 45, came forward to claim that Fine molested him when he was in the fifth grade. Yesterday, a 23 year-old man claimed that Fine molested him in a hotel room in Pittsburgh in 2003. That accuser is facing sexual assault charges against a child in Maine and his estranged father says that none of it has happened.
The whole thing is ugly, but unless that call is an amazing fake, Bernie Fine and his wife are two awful human beings.
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Pet Rescue
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Beth S. has generously volunteered to put together the 2012 BJ Calendar. To recap from last week:
… you can send your submissions to [email protected]. please send photos of all your fuzzy, scaly, feathered, finned companions. let me know their names and i’ll be sure to include it on their photos…
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i will do my best to answer any technical questions and you can always send me an email at the yahoo account.
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thanks so much for your generosity in sharing your pets for the calendar!
Deadline is this Wednesday, November 30. “Big” files, highest possible resolution, are just fine. If you have trouble with the dedicated address, click on my name near the top of the right-hand column and I’ll forward your pics to Beth.
Representative submission, from commentor Feebog:
Attached are some pics of our rescue dog, Cappuchino, or Cappy for short. We got Cappy from a local rescue group, Labs and Buddies, which operates out of the West San Fernando Valley. Cappy was about a year and a half old when we got him, kind of skinny and the usual problems with rescue dogs; kennel cough and bowel problems. However, it did not take him too long to settle in. He has gained about 20 lbs. He is equal parts of Golden Retriever and Chow, or so we have been told. As you can see, he does look like a Golden, but his coloring is brindle, with brown, black, gold and gray on his back and gray and black on his belly and tail. Tonight the Mrs. was frying stuffing for tomorrow night’s dinner, and Cappy was, uh, helping.
Monday Morning Open Thread: Call for Calendar Pet PicsPost + Comments (15)
by DougJ| 147 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute
I know nothing about the study of history, so feel free to call me an anti-intellectual nihilist for saying that I can’t see the difference between Niall Ferguson’s counterfactual work and the SNL skit “What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?”
I’m not going to read Ferguson’s new book, but this blog post lays out a convincing case that Ferguson conflates race and culture in his new paean to the greatness of teh west.
Now Ferguson is suing another reviewer for writing that the book is essentially racist. I have to wonder if someone who was really concerned about being thought of as racist would write things like this about Obama:
Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.