Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

The revolution will be supervised.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

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

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

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Another Tanqueray and Tab?

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Keep ’em coming, we got a long drive ahead of us:

When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 — at least in the Hollywood telling — they didn’t count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster.

Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.

With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies.

The United States government alone will need to borrow nearly $2 trillion in 2012, to bridge the projected budget deficit for that year and to refinance existing debt.

Indeed, worries about the growth of national, or sovereign, debt prompted Moody’s Investors Service to warn on Monday that the United States and other Western nations were moving “substantially” closer to losing their top-notch Aaa credit ratings.

I’m sure this is nothing that can’t be cured another round of tax cuts, deregulation, and a sustained assault on public employees by the wingnut welfare recipients at Reason.

This is what happens when you turn over the financial future of your country to people with the intelligence, integrity, and long-term planning skills of Ernie McCracken.

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Revenge of the DFH

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This, if true, is hysterical:

Olbermann says a source in the Bayh camp cited “left bloggers” as a reason for his leaving. “People said mean things to me!” What a fucking loser.

In addition to patchouli, it appears the DFH has another weapon in his arsenal to defeat centrists- the sternly worded blog post. I think every centrist, right now, should be required to answer whether they could ever be driven from a race by “left bloggers.” Because if they can, then I think these Senators should, at the very least, be forbidden from voting on matters of war and national security.

And could someone deploy the Mother of All Blog Posts against Ben Nelson?

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Double Your Pleasure

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The NY Times is full of cheer today:

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index, a widely watched measure of the housing markets in 20 metropolitan areas, rose 0.4 percent from September on a seasonally adjusted basis. It was the fifth consecutive month that prices were up.

Underneath this apparent good news were some disquieting signs of deterioration, however.

But seasonal adjustments tend to hide any weakness in the cooler months, when fewer houses are sold. On an unadjusted basis, the index was flat in October.

“We’ve started to see the possibility of either a leveling off of prices for a few months or perhaps a double-dip,” said Maureen Maitland, the vice president for index services at S.& P.

One of the most frustrating things about politics is when you know one group of people is right about something, but they are just powerless to do anything. Krugman, Atrios, and dozens of others have been warning about a double-dip recession (Krugman was just warning about it on the Sunday shows), and the stimulus bill should have been bigger and not had all those ridiculous tax cuts, but because of the way our legislature is set up, nothing can be done about it.

That is what has been adding to my angst the last couple of weeks regarding the health care debate and the kill the bill folks. On a lot of things, I think they are absolutely right- the public option would be better, I think the mandates will be politically dangerous and suck, there should be more subsidies, single payer would be better, there shouldn’t be abortion restrictions, and so on. On so many of these things, I agree with the DFH crowd. The problem is, I don’t see any way of getting that done, and one of the things I like about Obama is he understands the art of the possible and takes what he can get. Personally, after the behavior I saw from Big Pharm, the insurance industry, the AMA, and medical providers, I’m to the point I would just nationalize the entire damned health care system like the British NHS. And I’m starting to ramble.

At any rate, the DFH crowd is probably right about the economic future- Atrios has been more right than most. And once again, they will be ignored and the centrists and the blue dogs and the self-annointed fiscal conservatives will rule the day, as we all go down the crapper together.

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On Centrism

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Larison:

Looked at from either side of the spectrum, Lieberman has been anything but interesting. He has been the reliable defender of the “centrist” consensus established in the ’90s that finally accepted welfare reform and insisted on U.S. hegemony abroad. In practice, this “centrism” can be used to justify the most extreme, violent and destructive policies, but it is considered reasonable and acceptable because it does not partake of “fringe” ideas and enjoys the support of respectable, “serious” people. The trouble for liberals who accept this consensus is that they feel a constant pull to align themselves with corporate and financial interests in addition to endorsing every military action and security measure imaginable.

Back when I was a full-fledged wingnut, I used to point to Democrats like Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman as “good” Democrats.

I was (and probably still am) a moron.

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Waste Not, Want Not

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Read this:

In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.

But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.

The projects run the gamut — from a cutting-edge, $270 million water treatment plant in Nasiriya that works at a fraction of its intended capacity because it is too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate, to a farmers’ market that farmers have not been able to decide how to divide up space for, to a large American hospital closed immediately after it was handed over to Iraq because the government was unable to supply it with equipment, a medical staff or electricity.

I sure could go for another lecture about fiscal conservatism from Republicans right about now.

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Whatever

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This will never work:

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a new “social contract” with the world’s banks to make them more responsible to society.

Mr Brown told a G20 meeting in Scotland it was not acceptable that banking success was reaped by the few but failure was “borne by all of us”.

He called for a fund for future bank bailouts to be considered, possibly paid for by a tax on transactions.

Brown seems to fail to understand a few things. First, contracts, social and otherwise, are for the little people. That is why the bankruptcy bill was passed a few years back at the behest of the industry- to keep the proles in line and to guarantee the banks can bleed you dry- while trillions in unmentioned loans and guarantees and bailout bucks are thrown to the banks when they shit the bed. They screw up, we give them trillions, they lavish themselves with bonuses. It is the circle of life in our own global corruptocracy.

Second, privatizing the profit and socializing the costs was not an accident, it was the plan. Go read McClatchy’s recent series on this.

Third, the fund will not work, because the banks will just buy off enough Senators and congressmen to waive the rules as they did for fees during the last decade. And should they actually be required to put some money in a fund, not only will the charges be passed on to us so we can get hit both ways with higher banking fees and taxes spent on propping these robbers up, but then once the money is in the “fund,” you can;t just have it sitting there, can you? You will have to invest it in something! And then you can write unregulated CDS on that, and then you can write some more CDS on the CDS, and you see where this is going, with the inevitable next round of hoocoodanode. Goldman and a few others, with their tentacles deep into the higher reaches of government, will no doubt survive and prosper, and we will be treated to months of sycophants and useful idiots explaining we just don’t truly understand how smart the Goldman guys are. “Best of the best! They know what they are doing!” They sure do…

Nothing short of breaking up all the large banks, executing the credit ratings agencies, and then a strict and ruthless enforcement regime will help, and there simply is no willpower for that. Not only is there no willpower for this, as both parties are bought and paid for in full, but if there was any movement on this front, wingnut teabaggers would scream about socialism and tyranny, Reason magazine would scream about government involvement in the private sector and the free flow of capital and the glory of the invisible hand, moderate Democrats everywhere would worry about such public involvement, Joe Lieberman would spend months posturing in front of cameras with a furrowed brow, and whoever was tasked with enforcement would be found in bed with a hooker or whatever else is required to destroy them.

In short, we’re just screwed. Learn your place, deal with it, and learn how to grow food. Watching the way the big money boys have shaped the debate, whipping people who would be helped into a froth about socialism, it just seems so clear to me now after spending the last two decades in a haze. “Sorry unemployment is at 10 percent and you are losing your health insurance while I give myself a couple million dollar bonus, but socialism and Hitler and abortion on demand and death tax oh my God two gay men want the same rights as you! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE!”

Such a joke.

/dirtyfuckinghippy

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The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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DougJ’s earlier post today on Cheney reminded me of this article from Walter Pincus the other day:

Morale has sagged at the CIA following the release of additional portions of an inspector general’s review of the agency’s interrogation program and the announcement that the Justice Department would investigate possible abuses by interrogators, according to former intelligence officials, especially those associated with the program.

A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh interrogation practices, said that although vigorous oversight is crucial, the public airing of once-classified internal assessments and the prospect of further investigation are damaging the agency. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he said.

At the same time, former inspector general John L. Helgerson, whose review of the program was largely declassified Monday, said that the release, though painful, would ensure that the agency confronts difficult issues head on, instead of ignoring or trying to bury them.

Unlike virtually everything else in Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap, I tend to trust Pincus and his body of work, so I have no doubt that morale might be low.

What astounds me, though, is that morale might be low at the CIA because the Justice department might prosecute people who- get this- BROKE THE LAW. Imagine that- the Justice department has duties other than politically motivated prosecutions, micromanaging US Attorneys, and stocking the department with religious nuts and gay-bashers.

And what I find even more astounding is that the Republicans and Dick Cheney are, so far, successfully pivoting and presenting themselves as the defenders of the CIA, when it has been Dick Cheney and the neocon establishment that has spent the last four decades undermining, attacking, and debasing the CIA. It wasn’t the liberals who cooked up Team B– that would be George Herbert Walker Bush who approved it, Paul Wolfowitz who was part of the team, and Richard Perle who was instrumental in making it happen. It wasn’t Ted Kennedy and the liberals who spent the entire last decade undermining the CIA and basically making George Tenet say whatever the hell Dick Cheney wanted them to say, that would be the Republicans. It wasn’t Dennis Kucinich who ignored the August 6th CIA memo about bin Laden, setting the stage for the largest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t the dirty hippies at the DNC who created the Office of Special Plans to create an excuse to attack Iraq and directly undermine the intelligence from the CIA, that was Dick Cheney and Doug Feith and company.

And let’s not forget that it wasn’t Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer who outed a covert CIA agent and then conducted a full-on media jihad against her and her husband. No, again the honors for that go to Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Bob Novak.

So if morale is low at the CIA and they are feeling a little butthurt, they might want to think about how things have happened the last few decades. They aren’t in the position they are in because of Eric Holder. Far from it. And if they can’t figure this out on their own, and need me to point this crap out, then quite frankly, I don’t think they are smart enough to be handling classified intelligence in the first damned place.

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