Friday, February 26, 2010

crust on a chritch

Read this and try not to vomit:


"Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the "True Believer Syndrome." That's sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn't so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn't matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn't going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it's also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

That's why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. "The most valuable part of the bailout," says Rep. Sherman, "was the implicit guarantee that they're Too Big to Fail." Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create. "It's evidence," says Rep. Kanjorski, "that they still don't get it."

More to the point, the fact that we haven't done much of anything to change the rules and behavior of Wall Street shows that we still don't get it. Instituting a bailout policy that stressed recapitalizing bad banks was like the addict coming back to the con man to get his lost money back. Ask yourself how well that ever works out."





http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/print

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Pass the Popcorn

Thank you, Rachel Maddow, for the great opening tonight, showing the "flip-flopping" of the GOP (especially John Boehner) over what they REALLY want in the health care debate.

Monday, February 22, 2010

a rift in the spacetime continuum




Ross Douthat is the Bizarro Seth McFarlane. And a douche.

stupid internet

The headline on Google News said "Hilary Duff shows off her sparkler!"


Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a ring.

Friday, February 19, 2010

burning bright

The media is all abuzz because Tiger Woods came out of hiding today to abjectly plead for forgiveness and assure everyone he's so sorry about what happened and how he just wants to get back to living his life, playing golf, and making a living.

I'd be a lot more impressed if he had stood at the podium and said "you know what, who I fuck and how I fuck them is none of your business, this is all between me and my family, and if you don't like it, go fuck yourselves because I'm already a billionaire and I don't need to prostrate myself so you bunch of hypocritical pantysniffers can feel superior to someone. Fuck you all."

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Soylent Green is now

but he's a great cop


Bernie Kerik is going to go to jail for four years for perjury and tax fraud. It's good he has some practice being tenderly held by men from behind.

Monday, February 15, 2010

must-click

http://www.koolass.com/palin.html




The biggest reason I think she will never win the presidency is that over the last couple of years, what little bloom there was left on this rose has disappeared. Her personal travails and continuing battles in the press are taking their toll, and she will not be able to rely on what sex appeal she may have had to her followers to fancy-pageant-walk her way into the White House.

Enron was just the dry run

These fuckers need to be hanged or sent to the guillotine, and I don't mean that figuratively:


http://baselinescenario.com/2010/02/14/goldman-goes-rogue-%E2%80%93-special-european-audit-to-follow/

the Bush presidency...

...described before it began. Lots of us were right the whole damned time. All hail the Man O' Krug.


http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/01/opinion/reckonings-bait-and-switch.html?scp=13&sq=krugman%20shape%20planet%20bush&st=cse

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

not cool



Stupid move. I really can't help but think that the president unexpectedly interrupted the news conference just to stop this act of idiocy. It's one thing for people like me, at the bottom of the heap, to reach up and slap Palin for her dim-wittedness, but it's another thing entirely for the man who speaks for the President of the United States of America to publicly humiliate a dangerously popular woman from the official podium. Gibbs must apologize abjectly and immediately, and even then this moment will never go away. All that can be done now is to eat the wrong in public and hope it blows over.

Friday, February 05, 2010

hello my ragtime doll...