Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

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Freedom isn’t free

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The Center For American progress tallies the cost of the Iraq war:

  • Total deaths: Between 110,663 and 119,380
  • Coalition deaths: 4,712
  • U.S. deaths: 4,394
  • U.S. wounded: 31,768
  • U.S. deaths as a percentage of coalition deaths: 93.25 percent
  • Iraqi Security Force deaths: At least 9,451
  • Total coalition and ISF deaths: At least 14,163
  • Iraqi civilian deaths: Between 96,037 and 104,7542
  • Non-Iraqi contractor deaths: At least 463
  • Internally displaced persons: 2.6 million
  • Refugees: 1.9 million

Financial costs

  • Cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom: $748.2 billion
  • Projected total cost of veterans’ health care and disability: $422 billion to $717 billion

I would like to see even one of the liberal hawks who supported the Iraq war defend all of this and/or apologize. And no, wanking in Slate about how “no one could have predicted” doesn’t cut it.

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Such a Sound Strategy

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I know Mistermix has touched on this already, but it is nice to see this splashed on the front page of the NYT:

Federal regulators warned offshore rig operators more than a decade ago that they needed to install backup systems to control the giant undersea valves known as blowout preventers, used to cut off the flow of oil from a well in an emergency.

The warnings were repeated in 2004 and 2009. Yet the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency charged both with regulating the oil industry and with collecting royalties from it, never took steps to comprehensively address the issue, relying instead on industry assurances that they were on top of the problem, a review of documents shows.

In the intervening years, numerous blowout preventers and their control systems have failed, though none as catastrophically as those on the well the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was preparing when it blew up on April 20 — an accident that has left tens of thousands of gallons of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Agency records show that from 2001 to 2007, there were 1,443 serious drilling accidents in offshore operations, leading to 41 deaths, 302 injuries and 356 oil spills. Yet the federal agency continues to allow the oil industry largely to police itself, saying that the best technical experts work for industry, not for the government.

Critics say that, then and now, the minerals service has been crippled by this dependence on industry and by a climate of regulatory indulgence.

“Everything that’s done by the oil industry is done for profit,” said Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, who demanded this week that the Interior Department investigate these backup safety systems. “Throw in the fact that regulators have taken a lax attitude toward overseeing their operations, and you have a recipe for catastrophe.”

It really is kind of amazing how successful industry has been at gutting almost every aspect of regulation in this nation. Not only was there no effective regulation of the oil industry, if regulators were simply allowing the oil industry to regulate themselves, there was no regulation at all, because that is what “regulating themselves” means. It means looking the other way. I’d sure like it if cops would let me regulate my own speed on the highway.

And adding insult to injury, we’re paying the regulators to not regulate.

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Atrios Wins, We All Lose

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Atrios, the other day, describing this story about the toxic dispersants (symptoms at high doses: headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems) being poured into the gulf by the ton to break up the oil slick:

Nick Kristof, today:

The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.

The cancer panel is releasing a landmark 200-page report on Thursday, warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health.

I’ve read an advance copy of the report, and it’s an extraordinary document. It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals.

***

“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

Industry may howl. The food industry has already been fighting legislation in the Senate backed by Dianne Feinstein of California that would ban bisphenol-A, commonly found in plastics and better known as BPA, from food and beverage containers.

Studies of BPA have raised alarm bells for decades, and the evidence is still complex and open to debate. That’s life: In the real world, regulatory decisions usually must be made with ambiguous and conflicting data. The panel’s point is that we should be prudent in such situations, rather than recklessly approving chemicals of uncertain effect.

Our corporate persons are so powerful that when we don’t know what something is going to do to us or our bodies, we say fuck it, hope nothing goes wrong, approve it, and then listen to those same interests scream about tort reform twenty years later when half a town has cancer.

This whole country has become nothing more than a slow-motion train wreck.

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Failing Up

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Once you are deemed a serious person, there is literally no mistake too big to keep people in DC from listening to you:

Robert Rubin is poisoning Washington again.

The former Treasury Secretary who presided over the nearly-fatal deregulation of the financial industry — then made $126 million nearly killing Citigroup — had been keeping an appropriately low profile in the nation’s capital ever since everything he wrought went pear-shaped.

But now he’s back, and once again trying to influence public policy.

On Friday he made his third major (and apology-free) Washington appearance in two weeks, delivering opening remarks at a conference that his pet think tank, the Hamilton Project, co-sponsored with the liberal Center for American Progress.

But the last thing Washington needs right now is another infusion of Rubinomics — by which I mean the combination of deregulatory zeal, deficit obsession, free tradeism and general coziness with fat-cat Wall Street bankers that Rubin epitomizes.

Can’t we just give this guy an op-ed column at the Washington Post with the rest of the DC fuck-ups and be done with him?

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The Fabulous Fab

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Not sure how I missed this yesterday in the Goldman Sachs news, but this kind of gives you an idea of the kind of arrogance of these pricks:

Fabrice Tourre, the Goldman executive who helped set up Abacus, emailed a friend in January 2007:

“More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now…Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab…standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!”

Seriously- who calls himself the “Fabulous Fab?” And these guys knew EXACTLY what they were doing, so spare me the “hoocoodanode” nonsense.

And while we are at it, let’s revisit McMegan’s bizarre attack on Matt Taibbi’s Goldman Sachs piece, in which she agreed with all of his facts, coined the phrase “technically true but collectively nonsense,” and then had this gem of a paragraph defending Goldman, in which she impressively combined a “hoocoodanode” with an “everyone is doing it!” (and, as commenter Downpuppy observed, was wrong both ways):

Even as an indictment of the system this thing is lacking, and showcases Taibbi’s lack of fundamental conceptual understanding. He complains about CDO’s on the grounds that Goldman hid the atrocious risks inside a fancy dan derivative package that no one could understand. But in fact, everyone was aware that CDO’s were repackaging crap mortgages–that was the point. The idea was pure portfolio theory, broadly agreed upon by everyone involved. Everyone knew a lot of the mortgages might go bad, either by defaulting or prepaying. (This is a risk for bankers, who don’t like the idea that if interest rates drop, their 7% mortgage might suddenly turn into a pile of non-interest-bearing cash which can only be invested at 5%.) But if you pool the risk, only some of the bonds will go bad, while others pay off. The result is a less risky, less volatile investment than any individual junk mortgage bond. And it would have worked, too, if it hadn’t been for those crazy kids a collapse in the housing market of a scale not seen since the Great Depression.

Someone looks stupid in the aftermath of the SEC charging Goldman Sachs.

It isn’t Matt Taibbi. And what exactly did Taibbi allege was going on:

Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the lovely ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance – known as credit-default swaps – on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won’t.

Sound familiar?

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Great White Dopes

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No one could have predicted this:

Tea party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, tend to be Republican, white, male, and married, and their strong opposition to the Obama administration is more rooted in political ideology than anxiety about their personal economic situation, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters look like Republicans in many ways, but they hold more conservative views on a range of issues and tend to be older than Republicans generally. They are also more likely than Republicans as a whole to describe themselves as “very conservative” and President Obama as “very liberal.”

And while most Republicans say they are “dissatisfied” with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as “angry.”

I’m sure you are all as surprised as I was to learn that the tea partiers were largely rich old white men who were angry. That sure is a revelation. I mean, with Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Laurence Istook, Mike Pence and company cheering them on, this is just a real revelation. Also kind of explains why they are so enamored with Sarah Palin.

I’m starting to think if we could just get most of the Republican party laid (and I mean sans wetsuit, diapers, and methamphetamines and with members of the opposite sex), they’d be a whole lot less crazy.

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The “Sanctity of Contracts”

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This is rich:

With millions of homeowners losing their homes to foreclosure during this recession, megabank JPMorgan Chase plans to argue against the Obama administration’s latest weapon in its fight to stem the problem — principal cuts for struggling borrowers — by citing the sanctity of contracts and the borrower’s “promise to repay.”

In testimony to be delivered Tuesday afternoon, David Lowman, chief executive officer for home lending at the “Too Big To Fail” behemoth, will fight back against the program which calls for lenders and investors to decrease the outstanding debt owed on a home mortgage. While his competitors at Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup plan to dance around the issue — judging from their prepared remarks — Lowman cut right to it: borrowers don’t deserve it.

Ok. Let’s go back two years and not do ANYTHING to help out the banks during the crisis and see if JPMorgan Chase sinks or swims under the load of their “sanctified contracts” without taxpayer largesse and huge government intervention at taxpayer expense. And let’s see how many homes JPMorgan Chase has foreclosed on the owners and then abandoned in areas like Cleveland, leaving the wrecked and unclaimed homes to be looted, vandalized, and serve as crack and crime dens up and until the taxpayers are forced to deal with it. Let’s make them live up to their sanctified god damned contracts and take responsibility for their mess. Let’s see how profitable they are without no-interest and extremely low interest loans from the Fed which they turn around and lend to consumers for a hefty profit.

I hate these assholes. And yet I can guarantee there will be someone in the comments defending these guys. You hippies are just being irrational and lashing out!

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