This is good news. The 100:1 sentencing disparity was fueled by 12 part hysteria, and about 8 parts by a desire by Ronald Reagan and His Evil Minions™ to use incarceration as a way to suppress the black vote.
Year: 2010
Wanker of the Day
Neel “Cash and Carry” Kashkari penned an article in (where else) The Washington Post, pens an OP/ED titled, “No more ‘me first’ mentality on entitlements,” suggesting that individual Americans need to suck it up, and abandon their already meager social safety net, and not expect to be bailed out by the government.
Kashkari ran the TARP. He gave out billions, of bailouts to ‘me first’ bankers, and then got a cushy job with PIMCO, so he doesn’t have to worry about eating cat food* to survive.
3 Words: Not Enough Bullets
*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.
Quote of the Day
Most presidents start wondering—or, more often, worrying—about their “legacy” well into their first term. Or, if they have a second term, they worry even more feverishly about what posterity will think of them. Obama need not wonder about his legacy, even this early. It is already fixed, and in one word: Afghanistan. He took on what he made America’s longest war and what may turn out to be its most disastrous one.
It should be noted that Mr. (Dr?) Wills was one of 8 academics historians who had a dinner with him in June 2009, and gave him advice, and this is what he, and most of the other, guests said to his face.
I hope that Obama is just desperately wrong on Afghanistan, because the alternative is that we are killing our hundreds soldiers, and thousands of Afghans, because Obama feels the political need to “look tough.”
Judge Suspense Portions of Arizona’s “Papers Please” Law
I’m a hard liner on immigration, but I oppose this law.
It has been passed by people who as a matter of course disenfranchise Arizona hispanics for political advantage, so the judge’s ruling is a welcome development:
A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law from going into effect, a ruling that at least temporarily squashed a state policy that had inflamed the national debate over immigration.
Judge Susan Bolton of Federal District Court issued a preliminary injunction against sections of the law, scheduled to take effect on Thursday, that called for police officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws and required immigrants to prove that they were authorized to be in the country or risk state charges. She issued the injunction in response to a legal challenge brought against the law by the Obama administration.
If you want to get tough on illegal aliens, go after the employers.
Economics Update
The obvious lede here is the fact that the Fed has released its Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions, better known as the Beige Book, which was not good, weakening slightly from June’s Beige Book, but it is not downright awful.
This is the already anemic stimulus, and a mild restoration of inventories running out of steam.
If you want some more detail, you can look at the Dallas, Richmond Fed Manufacturing surveys have shown a sluggish economy, and the Chicago Fed National Activity Index has fallen.
We are also seeing that consumer confidence fell to a 6 month low in June.
Additionally real estate is really pretty pathetic, with the number of renters skyrocketing as the home ownership rate has hit an 11 year low, so much for the Bush/Greenspan real estate wealth.
Note that home sales did rise sharply in June, over an expiration-of-the-tax-credit crippled May, but it still was the worst June ever recorded.
Mortgage news was mixed though, with mortgage applications falling slightly, though the number of applications for home purchases rose slightly.
Finally, durable goods orders fell for the 2nd straight month in June.
A Public Service Announcement
Courtesy of the Group News Blog:
If You are on Twitter
Check out the hash tag #Wookieleaks.
A sample tweet:
Protocol droid fluent in 6 mil languages discharged for violating DADT. #wookieleaks
I Wish That I Could Write Like Matt Taibbi
He has a post up, The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant, and he notes that the tea-baggers‘ fascination with mythical reverse racism mirrors these sick f%$#s:
Years ago a friend of mine in the media told me a story about an experience he had covering the execution of John Wayne Gacy in Joliet, Illinois. You won’t find anyone in the world who’d have been sad to see serial child murderer in a clown suit like Gacy die, but this reporter friend of mine said the crowd outside the prison on execution night freaked him out almost as much as Gacy had. There were something like 400 people outside the gates at Joliet and there were people selling commemorative t-shirts and pounding beers and chanting (“Kill the Clown!” was a popular one) all night.
At the moment of truth the crowd cheered and my friend turned to interview a scraggly-looking twenty-something with thinning long hair whom he described as looking like a too-old version of the Todd Ianuzzi mean-teenager character in Beavis and Butthead. The guy was into his second six-pack and smiling goofily like he’d just gotten a half-price rub-n-tug from a Thai massage parlor. He says to my friend: “You’re not against capital punishment, are you?”
“I’m not against capital punishment,” my friend says. “I’m against enjoying capital punishment.”
I’m with my friend on this one. As far as I see it, there are three positions on capital punishment. There’s being against it. There’s being for it. Then there’s putting six-packs of beer in a cooler and driving to a hideous prison complex in the middle of the night with four hundred strangers to cheer like fans at a baseball game for the execution of some fat old child killer. Dude, if that’s what you call recreation, you’re either dangerously bored or seriously fucked up.
Taibbi notes that these people really get off on this, though he is rather more optimistic than I am, he sees them as “Basically see are a bunch of middle-aged white people who spent their teens listening to Eddie Murphy albums and deep down are a lot more worried about their credit card debt than they are about ACORN taking over the government,” but I disagree.
I see them as a lost generation, and absent a cataclysm on par with the Axis defeats during WWII, I do not see these people returning to normalcy.
In any case, go and read the whole thing.
In the Annals of the Unsurprising
A study has shown that the Roberts Supreme Court is among the most conservative in decades.
Big surprise.
Stewart On L’Affaire Sherrod
I get this stuff delayed, no TV here, just my lapotop, but Jon Stewart has the team in the history of Television.*
*With the exception, of course, of when the late Patrick McGoohan was writing and directing The Prisoner by himself.†
†Yes, I know. He assembled a talented team around him. I’m just making a funny.
Wanker of the Day
Chris Dodd, who is saying that Elizabeth Warren is not confirmable as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Now that he is not running for reelection, I guess that he’s looking for a lobbying gig with the finance industry:
“She’s qualified, no question about that. The question is whether she’s confirmable,” Dodd added. “The issue is [if] you can’t confirm somebody, if you go six or seven months without someone in that job, you’ve got a problem.”
Progressives have been strongly pressuring the Obama administration to appoint Warren ever since the Wall Street reform bill passed in Congress. Some have argued that she be given a recess appointment if a minority of senators block her confirmation. Dodd objects to that idea.
“I think that would be a huge mistake,” Dodd said, in response to a question from TPMDC. “Recess appointments. No, no, no.”
“I think those are, you know, Republicans used to do it, I think that’s a mistake,” Dodd added. “Except in the most extreme circumstances where you need someone because of an emergency pending, but as a routine matter, I think it’s a fundamental mistake.”
Go Cheney yourself Mr. Distinguished Gentleman from Connecticut.
Palin Endorsement Torpedoes NH Senate Candidate
New Hampshire is not a particularly liberal place, but they do place a value on a modicum of sanity, so it is no surprise that when Sarah Palin endorsed Kelly Ayotte for Senate, her numbers fell, particularly among self declared moderates.
I guess that the whole “Mama Grizzly” thing is more of an Albatross around ms Ayotte’s neck.
Heh.
House Calls Obama Veto Threat on JSF Engine
The House Appropriations defense subcommittee has voted to fund the F136 alternate engine for the JSF (see also here) which runs full face into the implied threat of an Obama veto (SecDef Gates has said that he would recommend a veto, but that is different from Obama himself threatening a veto).
I’m of mixed emotions on this matter.
I think that the F-35 is over priced, behind schedule, and useless for any likely future war, but I remember the history of Pratt & Whitney’s F-100 before GE started competing with them with their F-110 engine, and it was not pretty, so I think that the engine is a good idea.
I think that the Pentagon is worried that any dollars spent on this will drive up the front end costs, making it more likely that the program will be canceled, and they are willing to eat the additional costs of P&W being the soul source on the back end.
Blue Dog Dem Goes Chicken for MRIs
Stupid is as stupid does
Ben Chandler of Kentucky spoke approvingly of the days when people paid their doctors with chickens, and a constituent got it on tape.
He voted against the healthcare bill, because he’s a Blue Dog, and he kisses health insurer’s asses.
Obviously, this is not as bad as Sue Lowden’s doubling down on barter for MRIs, he was just being nostalgic, but it’s likely that his Republican opponent will hammer him for it anyway, and I, for one, am glad.
We need fewer faux Dems in the Congress.
Not Enough Bullets
BP has given their CEO, Tony Hayward, his waking papers.
Only, he gets to stay on until October, at full pay, and he still has his millions in stock options, and in 2 years, he is eligible for a pension of £600,000 a year.
On the brighter side, he is literally being sent to Siberia, as, BP is, “Planning to nominate him as a non-executive director of its Russian joint venture, TNK-BP.”
If you are one of the hyper-rich, you are safe from the consequences of your actions, which is why these f%$#s act the way they do.
If they win, they make a sh%$ load of money, and if they lose, they are still set for life.
One note here, he will be replaced by Bob Dudley, who is an American, which just goes to show that the BP board does not get the USA.
I think that they think that an American CEO will defuse American anger at them.
They are wrong. Americans are suckers for a British accent, we love being conned by people with British accents, just look at the success that lying charlatans like Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Andrew Sullivan have done selling their crap as gold.
The problem here is that something bad happened, and the more people looked at BP, they saw that it is a corrupt criminal psychopathic organization, even by the standards of the oil industry.
The Frothy Mix of Lube and Fecal Matter That Is Sometimes the Byproduct Of Anal Sex ……… *
Former Pennsylvania Senator† Rick Santorum is looking at running for President in 2012.
Part of me is horrified at the prospect of his insanity and demagoguery polluting the Republican Presidential primary campaign, but another part does not believe that it’s possible for the cesspool known as the Republican Party can get any more polluted, and a third part of me is eager to comment on what is surely to be a first class clown show.
Time to start stockpiling snark.
*If you don’t understand, you have been living under a rock, but the answer is only a Google away.
†While he lived in Virginia, and had no home in Pennsylvania, which is a neat trick.
Quote of the Day
Maybe if all these people dye their hair blonde and rename themselves Jon Bonet the American people will start to notice. And let’s remember- wikileaks is the real problem. Not our policies.
— John Cole, on news that 45 civilians were killed by a coalition missile strike in Afghanistan
Indeed.
News of the Unsurprising
It turns out that one of the reasons that executive compensation has been skyrocketing lately is that compensation boards game the system to maximize pay for the executives, who, after all, hired them in the first place.
Imagine that.
I would remind everyone that the pot for wages are not infinite: When they get 7 or 8 figure paychecks, it means that everyone else there gets less.
I once figured that Michael Eisner’s compensation at one point in the mid 1990s, $550,000,000.00,* or about $73.45 a second, would have added about $6.00/hour to the pay of every Disney employee, which in turn would likely have saved money through reduced turnover.
It doesn’t matter to them though, they just want to make more than the next CEO.
*For that, he did some rather wooden dialogue with Mickey Mouse on the Wonderful World of Disney. For that kind of money, the mouse should have been able to do him like Marlon Brando did Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris.
Righteous Takedown
Matthew Yglesias, who goes through the archives, and discovers that Niall Ferguson said in 2003 exactly what he is condemning today in terms of stimulus and spending.
Young Matthew interleaves his 2003 with his 2010 writings in what one of his commenters calls, “The Daily Show method of deconstructing conservative shills,” and it is a beautiful thing to see.
Go read.
People Who Should Have Been Drowned at Birth
Jeffrey Lord, writing, rather unsurprisingly, for The American Spectator, who claims that the lynching of her relative, Bobby Hall, because they beat him to death instead of hanging him.
So, according to the “white cracker inbred former Reagan White House political director” morons out there, it’s only a lynching if it involves rope.
At least ⅓ of lynchings did not involve hangings. They involved burning, shooting, and (Yes, Virginia) beating, among other methods.
Needless to say, as a result of his contemptible and brain dead rants, he is sure to be invited onto the Sunday political talk shows.