Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This post is in: Open Threads, Religion
Always thought that Autumn was a better time to begin again than mid-winter… and a lot of us could use a reset button on 2014. Cheat sheet for us Gentiles here.
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Apart from that, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: <em>Shana Tova</em>!Post + Comments (76)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Free Markets Solve Everything, Open Threads, Decline and Fall
"what Wall Street sells is less like engineering than like a forecasting service for a coin-flipping contest" http://t.co/MW3Ro2VBcK
— Eric Scott Hunsader (@nanexllc) September 25, 2014
Via Noah Smith, Michael Lewis on the “Occupational Hazards of Working on Wall Street“:
… Technology entrepreneurship will never have the power to displace big Wall Street banks in the central nervous system of America’s youth, in part because tech entrepreneurship requires the practitioner to have an original idea, or at least to know something about computers, but also because entrepreneurship doesn’t offer the sort of people who wind up at elite universities what a lot of them obviously crave: status certainty.
“I’m going to Goldman,” is still about as close as it gets in the real world to “I’m going to Harvard,” at least for the fiercely ambitious young person who is ambitious to do nothing in particular…
You may think you are going to work for Credit Suisse or Barclays, and will there join a team of professionals committed to the success of your bank, but you will soon realize that your employer is mostly just a shell for the individual ambitions of the people who inhabit it. The primary relationship of most people in big finance is not to their employer but to their market. This simple fact resolves many great Wall Street mysteries…
..[T]he people who work inside the big Wall Street firms have no serious stake in the long-term fates of their firms. If the place blows up they can always do what they are doing at some other firm — so long as they have maintained their stature in their market. The quickest way to lose that stature is to alienate the other people in it. When you see others in your market doing stuff at the expense of the broader society, your first reaction, at least early in your career, might be to call them out, but your considered reaction will be to keep mum about it…
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Daydream Believers, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!
*checks news* *sees news is all about 4Chan and lattes* *switches careers*
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) September 24, 2014
And sex, Weigel — don’t forget the sex! Guess we’re just not being invited to the right parties. Suzy Khimm reports for MSNBC:
What do conservatives think of liberals today?
Here’s the view from the Heritage Foundation: Liberalism creates self-indulgent, licentious hedonists willing to cede every other kind of freedom to an increasingly authoritarian government.
“Give up your economic freedom, give up your political freedom, and you will be rewarded with license,” said Heritage’s David Azerrad, describing the reigning philosophy of the left. “It’s all sex all the time. It’s not just the sex itself—it’s the permission to indulge.”…
At the Tuesday’s event, a curious portrait of modern-day liberalism emerged. Liberalism meant Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Gawker (for wanting to punish climate change deniers), Senate Democrats (for wanting to undo Citizens United), writer Matt Yglesias (for wanting to eliminate summer vacations), the term “mansplaining” (for being a symptom of P.C. extremism), and Rolling Stone magazine (for giving voice to far-left writers in “the most frivolous consumer product in the history of frivolous consumer products,” per Williamson).
But more than anything, the panelists stressed, liberalism is an idea, and a deadly one at that: a Janus-faced monster of moral relativism and authoritarianism…
Given liberals’ fixation with pleasure, “I fear the next great frontier for the left will be trying to lower the age of consent,” said Azerrad, head of Heritage’s center for principles and politics…
(Only for voting rights, Mr. Azerrad!)
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And just as Rosh Hashanah starts, too! (Shana Tova, BJ villagers!)
Apart from celebrating, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: It’s Always ProjectionPost + Comments (205)
by John Cole| 42 Comments
This post is in: Sports, Our Failed Media Experiment
ESPN suspended Simmons longer for criticizing Roger Goodell than Goodell suspended Rice for punching his girlfriend http://t.co/KpM16PrSFR
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 24, 2014
Because the rich and powerful will have curb-jawed them to death:
ESPN pontificator Bill Simmons called NFL commissioner Roger Goodell a liar, and dared his bosses to call him on it.
So they did.
ESPN put out a statement saying Simmons was suspended three weeks for his profane tirade against Goodell.
“Every employee must be accountable to ESPN and those engaged in our editorial operations must also operate within ESPN’s journalistic standards,” the statement read. “We have worked hard to ensure that our recent NFL coverage has met that criteria. Bill Simmons did not meet those obligations in a recent podcast, and as a result we have suspended him for three weeks.”
There’s no word as to whether that suspension is paid or unpaid — such that it matters, since any millions given to Simmons pales to the billions (as in 15.2) they give the NFL.
Look- corporations are free to do with their employees, but all Simmons did was something everyone with an IQ over room temperature agrees with- he stated that Goodell is a fucking liar.
But Disney is very, very protective of their mutually beneficial relationship with the NFL, so he needed to be put in line:
So, what the hell happened here? In the first segment, Polian makes the NFL out to be the East German Stasi, where a low-level executive wouldn’t dare hide pertinent information from his or her superiors for fear of swift and merciless retribution. But then here comes Polian 20 minutes later, describing the NFL offices as a run-of-the-mill bureaucracy where of course vital pieces of information could fall through the cracks.
Bill Polian either has a hard time maintaining consistent opinions for longer than 20 minutes at a time, or something spooked him into softening his answer during that second go-round. If we assume the first answer to be the truest one, you can probably guess what that something might have been.
Nothing to see here. Move along now.
by John Cole| 54 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Shitty Cops
I just don’t understand how there are no charges against the cops who shot John Crawford in WalMart. The videos clearly show him doing nothing but walking around talking on the phone and not paying attention to anyone and more importantly, not threatening anyone, and the final video take of his death shows him throwing the gun to the floor and then being shot. It’s insane.
In other news, the conviction of a cop who was charged with beating the hell out of a student in Maryland has overturned by a judge. In this case, the police originally stated that the student had attacked a mounted officer and his horse and his injury was caused by the horse kicking him. Here’s the video of this horse kicking:
This video led to the police modifying their “account” of what happened and further led to the conviction of one of the police:
James Harrison was found guilty of second-degree assault in the 2010 beating and was given a one-year suspended sentence in Dec. 2012. He served 30 days of home confinement.
Judge Beverly Woodard did not explain the reason for her decision in tossing out the conviction; beating victim Jack McKenna called the judge’s decision “frightening.”
“It sends a message that they (the police) can do whatever they want,” McKenna, now a second-year law student, said Tuesday. “If they can get away with beating me up on national TV for doing nothing, it really makes me scared for what’s going to happen to those in a dark alley when the cameras aren’t shining.”
Jon Erzen, a spokesman for the Office of the State’s Attorney, said prosecutors, too, were surprised that the judge set aside the jury’s verdict in the case.
“They (jurors) said Mr. Harrison’s actions were not acceptable policing and they were criminal,” Erzen said Tuesday.
Harrison, along with another officer who was acquitted, were charged with beating up McKenna as students celebrated the men’s basketball team’s victory over Duke on March 3, 2010.
Harrison retired with a full pension before his trial, but now with his felony criminal record cleared – there is a chance he could go back into police work. Harrison’s lawyer did not return calls Tuesday seeking comment.
McKenna collected a $2 million dollar settlement from the police department to drop a civil lawsuit in the case, but his attorney was fuming Tuesday over the criminal conviction being overturned.
You’re probably wondering what on earth the judge in this case was thinking. That’s an interesting question:
It was only due to the persistence of Mr. McKenna’s lawyers that the cover-up and lies were shredded. At trial, in late 2012, a jury convicted Mr. Harrison on a felony charge of assault. Another officer, Reginald Baker, was acquitted, although he, too, used his baton to beat Mr. McKenna as he lay stunned and defenseless on the ground.
Ms. Woodard conducted herself unprofessionally at trial. She failed to disclose an apparent conflict of interest — she had been previously married to a Prince George’s officer who himself was convicted for brutality — until asked about it by a journalist. In court, she exhibited what many observers regarded as overt hostility toward Mr. McKenna, the victim.
In Maryland, judges sometimes toss out convictions for first-time offenders in minor cases. This is another matter — a clear case of egregious police brutality. Mr. Harrison, who was allowed to retire from the department with a full pension, may now work again as a police officer if he wishes.
Fer fuck’s sake.
by John Cole| 79 Comments
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights
The gay bashers in Philly have turned themselves in:
Three suburban Philadelphia defendants being charged in the beating of a gay couple during a late-night encounter on a city street have turned themselves in.
Police said 24-year-old Philip Williams, 24-year-old Kathryn Knott and 26-year-old Kevin Harrigan turned themselves in Wednesday morning. Prosecutors said they were being charged with criminal conspiracy and two counts each of aggravated and simple assault, and reckless endangerment.
The victims told police that a group hurled gay slurs and beat them when the two parties passed on the street on Sept. 11. One man suffered serious facial injuries, including an orbital fracture, and had his jaw wired.
Williams’ attorney Fortunato Perri Jr. said Wednesday after Williams surrendered to police that the case was not related to anyone’s sexual orientation, but was instead a “mutual confrontation” in which his client “was not the aggressor.”
Knott’s attorney, Louis Busico, has also denied that the dispute was motivated by anti-gay bias and said his client, whose family has a law enforcement background, neither threw any punches nor hurled any insults.
“She played no role in this other than going out to dinner with friends the night this happened,” Busico said outside Central Detectives on Wednesday. “We don’t deny that there was a gentleman who was assaulted. We don’t deny that this gentleman was injured. But I unequivocally deny that my client did anything to hurt this man; she wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
Ms. Knott doesn’t have just a family with a law enforcement background, he’s the Police Chief of Chalfont Township.
This Could Lead to Some Awkward Family DinnersPost + Comments (79)
by @heymistermix.com| 55 Comments
This post is in: Democratic Stupidity
They were never worried about their Democratic Party primary challengers earlier this month, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his running mate, Erie County’s Kathy Hochul, insisted over and over again.
Worries aside, Cuomo and Hochul spent about $5.9 million in the final couple of weeks and days immediately following their recent closer-than-expected Democratic primary contests.
New campaign finance filings with the state Board of Elections show that the governor spent $5.6 million, much of it on television ads, during the primary campaign in which he faced political newcomer Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law professor who captured 34 percent of the Democratic vote against Cuomo.
Cuomo, who is running against Republican Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, in the general election, has spent an average of $151,000 a day on his re-election efforts since his July campaign reporting period with the Board of Elections. In July, he had $35 million in his account; as of the weekend, the balance was $25.8 milllion.
If my math is right, Cuomo paid around $14 for every primary voter who voted his way. Perhaps if an incumbent Democrat who was photographed drowning kittens in the holy water of every church between Buffalo and Westchester were nominated, more than $14 per vote would be required, but I can’t think of another scenario where a “popular incumbent” with “Presidential aspirations” would have to spend that kind of money in a primary. If Rob Astorino can find it in himself to keep the Tea Party bullshit on the downlow, my guess is that Andy’s win this Fall will be a lot tighter than last time, when he demolished “horse cock” Carl Paladino.
He Used to be Carried in the Arms of CheerleadersPost + Comments (55)