(John Backderf, The City by Derf, via Gocomics.com)
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How’s the tuna tartare at your place this weekend?
C.R.E.A.M.
How do you spell ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ in Creole?
Further to DougJ’s discussion of how the rich are different (or at least differently motivated), comes a NYTimes story averring that “Some See a Cash Motive in Duvalier’s Return“:
Though Mr. Duvalier has long been accused of looting $300 million from Haiti before fleeing nearly 25 years ago, his lawyers and friends have said that much of his money was squandered on a lavish lifestyle of jewelry, chateaus, fancy cars and a very expensive divorce from his ex-wife…
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But about $6 million still sits frozen in an account in Switzerland, and Mr. Duvalier has publicly vowed to make every effort to get it. Haitian officials, human rights advocates and political analysts believe that Mr. Duvalier came back to the country last weekend for the sole purpose of making an end run around a new law that will make it harder for him to do that.
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“This was a gamble, plain and simple,” said an analyst, who asked not to be identified because he was close to the Haitian government and was not authorized to speak publicly. “He gambled because his money is low and his health is failing, so what did he have to lose?”
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The strategy has backfired. In a striking scene, Mr. Duvalier was taken out of his hotel by heavily armed police officers on Tuesday and formally charged with corruption and embezzlement during his nearly 15-year rule…
Further explanation at the link, in what looks to be actual journalism. You’d think $300 million would be enough to ensure a pretty good lifestyle for at least the average lifespan, but I’m told people who think like that seldom get to run the experiment.
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Even Randall Terry’s Given Up on the Repubs
No doubt jealous of all the high-visibility media Fred Phelps has been hogging with threats to picket the funeral of a murdered nine-year-old, “anti-abortion noisemaker” and professional terrorist enabler Randall Terry is making a show of running for President:
… [A]t a press conference held outside the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington today, Terry outlined loftier goals for his run for president, including freeing the tea party movement from leaders he says are intent on shying away from social issues and the humiliation of President Obama in Iowa, the state where his unlikely journey to the White House began in earnest back in 2008.
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“We will focus on a theocentric libertarian platform,” Terry told the crowd of maybe a couple dozen supporters and press.
I’m sure Ross Doubthat already has his credit card out, looking to make the maximum possible donation. If anything could make me feel sorry for libertarians, having Randall Terry claim their kinship would be it.
… Terry is mounting his theocratic political crusade from a Democratic ballot line, challenging Obama for the party’s nomination. As one reporter pointed out at the presser, Terry has described himself as a Republican in the past, and his theocentric libertarian message certainly sounds like it would appeal to Republican voters more than it would Democratic ones. But Terry said running as a Democrat effectively allows him to cut out the middle man when it comes to casting votes against Obama.
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“I don’t want to quarrel with Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee,” Terry said. “I want to focus on the madman, Obama. Obama is the central figure of voter rage. There are people, myself included, who loathe this presidency. By going against him in a Democratic primary, I can focus on him like a laser beam and I will.”
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In the past, Terry has thrown his support behind Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), who many social conservatives view as their 2012 choice. It’s not clear that Pence will run for the Republican nomination but if he does, Terry can steer clear of tangling with him by running on the Democratic side.
Translation: Sideshow Randy doesn’t want to threaten his permanent meal ticket by drawing untoward comparisons with the burgeoning Repub crop of fools, goons, carnie geeks and professional grifters currently jostling for media attention. As he very well knows, those folks’ supporters have hair-trigger tempers, and the hair triggers to match. (Whoops, uncivil!)
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It’s money that matters
I never like those New Yorker cartoons where it’s the rich people sitting around looking old and stuffy with a caption like “I remember when you called me Big Poppa”, but reader F sent me this one today and it seemed incredibly apropos.
It’s funny in theory, just as it was funny in that (hoax) Joaquin Phoenix video where he confronted a heckler with “I got a million dollars in my bank account, what have you got bitch?”. But we are getting pretty fucking close to a world where it’s acceptable to end arguments with “I have more money than you”.
Here’s Boston sports radio host John Dennis berating a listener via twitter.
And as I’ve said before, a lot of the conservative project is to convince people that this kind of reasoning is valid. It starts with Bell Curve-style IQ determines wealth and is genetic, so you if you’re poor, you’re dumb, then moves into high eggheads don’t create jobs and deserve contempt, and reaches its apotheosis in Bobo’s theory that the greatness of the composure class transcends intellect and only manifests itself as a sweet, sweet primal scent.
It all points in one direction: we owe our Galtian overlords everything, even if all those overlords do is run a crappy news channel or field calls from sports fans.
“Blue Collar” (Minor Bleg)
The confluence of the blogospheric discussions of Nixonland and labor unions made me think about Paul Schrader’s film Blue Collar, which I remember as amazing (and angry-making) but haven’t seen since it first came out in theatres during the rise of the Reaganaut “morning in America” apparatchiks. (Pause while half of you exclaim, “Wow, I hadn’t even been born yet when that happened!”)
Unfortunately, it’s not available on Netflix, the ‘DVD-R on demand’ versions available through Amazon get lousy quality ratings, and the used copies are pricey. Anybody want to give an opinion on this movie from a more recent viewing… or maybe recommend a reliable source for a copy of the 2001 reissue?
It’s such a small, small game
Back when lawyer jokes were big, I remember the joke: Q. Why are laboratory scientists switching from rats to lawyers for their experiments? A. There’s some things the rats just won’t do. The reason I’m a liberal is that I believe that sometimes the reason people ascend to the highest Galtian heights is that they are willing to do some things most people wouldn’t.
Conservatives would always have us believe that it’s their primal scent or patriotism or understanding of nominal dollars and regulatory capture (unless the rich people were liberals), but I think some people get rich simply by being bigger assholes than anyone else is willing to be. So is with Roger Ailes, the subject of an excellent recent Esquire profile.
What kind of man wins all the time? What kind of man gives his country, in roughly this order, Mike Douglas, Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the Willie Horton ad, the ad in which Michael Dukakis rides around in a tank and looks like a chipmunk, the presidency of George H. W. Bush, CNBC, Fox News (upstart-insurgent edition), Fox News (airwaves-of-the-empire edition), Fox News (“Obama sux” edition), and Fox News (Tea Party edition)? More pointedly, what kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?
[….]He asks for quarter when he has given none, asks for sympathy when he has offered none, asks for fairness when he has been “fair and balanced,” asks for consideration while admitting that the only consideration he has ever shown is consideration for his mission, whatever that may be.
And yet of course there are many ready to hail him as a genius:
There’s a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism by the name of Dick Wald. Yeah, yeah, we know — Roger Ailes doesn’t give a CNN ratings share about what some professor at Columbia journalism school has to say. Indeed, whenever he’s asked what qualifies him to be the head of a major television-news network, he gives the same answer: “I dug ditches for a living, there are no parties that I want to go to, and I didn’t go to Columbia journalism school.” But Professor Wald is no mere don, no mere pointy-headed practitioner of the liberal arts. He used to be the president of NBC News. He likes Roger Ailes. And if you ask him the secret of Mr. Ailes’s success, he’ll say it’s pretty simple: “Roger, in many ways, is just more competent. He just does it better. The anchors are better. The crispness of the reporting is better. The anchors don’t interrupt, the shows move along, and the point of view is clear. It’s just a good product. Roger found an area in which he could reach each audience member individually. That’s the big difference between Fox and CNN.”
All this shit about his “good product”. How hard is it to have buxom blondes describe titillating stories with a information crawl at the bottom?
I am not confident that our society will survive Fox News. I think we will, but only because of demographic changes. But, hey, Ailes won, pin a medal on him and build a statue. All hail the Galtian hero. He’s worth millions, what are you worth?
Two Thousand Angry MOTUs…
… and counting. Brought to you by the Guardian and Rudolf Elmer:
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, today pledged to make public the confidential tax details of 2,000 wealthy and prominent individuals, after being passed the data by a Swiss banker who claims the information potentially reveals instances of money-laundering and large-scale illegal tax evasion.
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In a carefully choreographed handover in central London, Rudolf Elmer, formerly a senior executive at the Swiss bank Julius Baer, based in the Cayman islands, said he was handing the data to WikiLeaks as part of an attempt “to educate society” about the amount of potential tax revenues lost thanks to offshore schemes and money-laundering…
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Elmer will appear in a Swiss court on Wednesday charged with breaking Swiss banking secrecy laws, forging documents and sending threatening messages to two officials at his former employer.
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He denies the charges.
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Assange… said he would pass the information to the Serious Fraud Office(SFO), examine it to ensure sources were protected, and then release it on the WikiLeaks site, potentially within “a couple of weeks”.
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“Once we look at the data, yes, there will be full disclosure,” he said.
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He would not be drawn on questions relating to the extradition case, which will be heard at Belmarsh magistrates court on 7 February, or on other leaks the site has promised are forthcoming, including information involving a “big US bank”, which many believe to be Bank of America.
More details and video at the link. Don’t know if such a public display is going to protect Mr. Elmer from being mysteriously renditioned, but any negative attention to the “global financial elite” stripmining their various nations can only be considered a win for the rest of us.