We were watching the Ed Show, and they had a preview about Michele Bachmann’s plans to establish a Presidential campaign exploratory committee, and my wife said, “She’s about as bad as Sarah Palin!”
I replied, “That’s not fair to Sarah Palin.”
I cannot f%$#ing believe that I fucking just f%$#ing said that.
F%$# Me!
The state of Vermont is seeking a waiver to allow it to set up a single payer healthcare system:
On February 8, newly inaugurated Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin unveiled his plan for a publicly funded single-payer healthcare system, which was introduced into the state’s legislature. If enacted, which appears likely, it will be the first system of its kind in the United States and Vermont would become the first state to abolish most forms of private health insurance.
………
The state cannot “get this done,” however, unless it receives a waiver from the federal government to bypass the federal reform legislation. Shumlin thinks that won’t be a problem; Vermont’s entire congressional delegation—Sens. Bernie Sanders (I) and Patrick Leahy (D) and Rep. Peter Welch (D)—support the single-payer effort and introduced a measure to allow states to receive waivers from federal reform requirements as soon as 2014, as long as they cover as many uninsured people as federal law would. (They currently have to wait until 2017.) On February 28, President Barack Obama told state governors he would support the earlier date.
If anyone out there thinks that Barack Obama look at the nsurance industry, and take off the knee pads and put away his ChapStick in order to allow Vermont to render health insurers irrelevant, you are delusional.
This ad is positively brutal.
The thing is, assuming that the facts as stated are true, this is not rat f%$#ing.
If David Prosser, who is running for reelection as a Wisconsin state Supreme Court justice, colluded with the diocese when he was a prosecutor to cover up a priest child predator, and to have him shipped out of his district, this is a legitimate issue.
But the fact that it’s an important issue does not preclude it from being rag f%$#ing. What makes it not rat f%$#ing is the fact that it’s true, the Bishop’s archives confirm this removes this ad from the realm of rat f%$#ing, even if it is nasty.
So, we had a prosecutor in Indiana suggesting that Scott Walker stage a false attempt on his life in order to gain political advantage.
He’s admitted it, and has now resigned as deputy prosecutor..
Josh Marshall of TPM asks whether this is is normal Republican procedure.
The answer is Yes.
Whether it’s Nixon’s Dirty Trixters, where his operative Roger Stone coined the term “Rat F%$#ing”, or Karl Rove planting bugs in his own office to create a mock scandal, or James O’Keefe’s deliberately dishonest videos, or this instance, this sort of behavior is a part of Republican DNA.
I used to hang out with Tony Rudy, now best known as a Jack Abramhoff associate, as an SGA Senate member at UMass, I was technically a “right wing” member of the Senate as a Mondale Democrat.* and this was the sort of stuff that the College Republicans did all the time, and when they got together in regional and national meetings, they talked about it.
With me, a Democrat, people like Greg Rothman, Rudy’s partner in crime in the student senate, bragged about such things. They reveled in and bragged about their willingness to ratf%$# their opponents.
*The left wing was the “US out of North America” crowd.
Just when I think that the Republican party cannot get any more contemptible, they do something that makes me sit there with a stunned expression on my face that resembles nothing more than a cow that just stepped on its own udder.
Case in point, the Republicans are trying to pass a law that would take away food stamps from the children of strikers:
However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer:
I understand that Republicans hate labor unions, but taking it out on their children??
You have to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld with the f%$#ing white Persian cat on your lap in order to be that evil.
Of course, I’m sure that Barack Obama will find a way to compromise on it.
Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) has been under increasing pressures for its legal basis (it appears that they never registered loan transfers), it’s corporate structure (a few dozen employees, and tens of thousands of “Vice Presidents” who were actually employed its clients, so it functioned as principal and agent), and its shoddy record keeping.
Well, MERS is now done.
First, it instructed it clients not to foreclose in its name, then Essex County, MA and Guilford County NC both filed multimillion dollar lawsuits against the entity for illegally evading county recording fees, and now Freddie Mac has said that servicers of its loan portfolio will no longer be allowed to foreclose in MERS’s name.
So, the PTB have come to the conclusion that MERS is complete sh%$, both from a legal as well as a factual perspective.
Of course, they knew this 15 years ago, when MERS was founded, but now they realize that he courts are recognizing it as well.
One question though: Why is no one going to jail?
There has been a bit of discussion about whether or not economics is truly a science going around the economics blogs, and Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution makes what I think is the definitive comment on whether it is the dismal science, or just dismal:
I conclude that economics is not yet a science. Economics is more like a science when people do not care about the outcomes.
Understand that February is the shortest month of the year, and understand that new home sales are a lot more volatile than existing home sales, but the fact that sales fell almost 17% to an all time low, or at since records were first kept in 1963, 19,000 homes, giving an annual rate of just ¼ million home sales a year, is pretty stunning.
As the New York Times‘ Floyd Norris notes, this is not just the worst month ever, but it’s also the worst 12 month stretch ever.
We are not in recovery yet, and with the austerity crowd doing the best to trigger a double dip in order to appease the confidence fairy, and very little push back from the sane folks in public policy, it won’t get much better.
Seriously, I do analysis, I write explanations, and then Jon Stewart, and the rest of the staff of The Daily Show explain everything, in simpler terms, and more entertainingly, in 4 minutes and 29 seconds on air.
You can’t simultaneously fire teachers and Tomahawk missiles…
Tim Pawlenty has formally announced the formation of an exploratory committee for the 2012 Presidential campaign.
Let the games begin.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a consortium of groups including the ACLU have legal standing to sue over the expansion in wiretapping powers passed in 2008.
The Circuit Court had ruled that unless a plaintiff could prove that they had been secretly wiretapped, they had no standing to sue, and the court has said that they do have standing. It made no ruling on the merits:
A district judge in Manhattan had thrown out the lawsuit because he said that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate they were actually spied upon and did not have legal standing to sue. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, allowing the lawsuit on Monday to move forward.
It found that the groups challenging the wiretapping law, including lawyers and journalists communicating with people overseas who might fall under terrorism investigations, had a reasonable fear that their international calls and e-mails would be monitored by the government.
The district court set up a lovely “Catch-22”. You could not challenge the law unless you had proof that you were wiretapped, but the wiretaps are secret, so you couldn’t sue, and so could not use the courts to prove that you were wiretapped.
I expect the Obama administration to use everything but the kitchen sink to stop this suit, but sovereign immunity will be their first bite at the apple.
EADS will not challenge the award of the KC-X contract award to Boeing.
I’m kind of surprised. I expected the USAF to find a way to f%$# this up again, but I guess that they will have to do that during procurement, and I am confident that the good folks at the Pentagon and Boeing will manage to find many ways to do that.
Just go read Krugman, and read this by him too.
If there is a bright spot to the financial meltdown, it is that Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan has lived long enough to see his reputation collapse like those Ponzi schemes he thought were impossible in his magical free market.
The Supreme Court has declined to hear the Federal Reserve’s appeal of the court order directing them to turn over data on its discount window lending program:
The Federal Reserve will disclose details of emergency loans it made to banks in 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an industry appeal that aimed to shield the records from public view.
The justices today left intact a court order that gives the Fed five days to release the records, sought by Bloomberg News’s parent company, Bloomberg LP. The Clearing House Association LLC, a group of the nation’s largest commercial banks, had asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
“The board will fully comply with the court’s decision and is preparing to make the information available,” said David Skidmore, a spokesman for the Fed.
The order marks the first time a court has forced the Fed to reveal the names of banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program, the 98-year-old discount window. The disclosures, together with details of six bailout programs released by the central bank in December under a congressional mandate, would give taxpayers insight into the Fed’s unprecedented $3.5 trillion effort to stem the 2008 financial panic.
“I can’t recall that the Fed was ever sued and forced to release information” in its 98-year history, said Allan H. Meltzer, the author of three books on the U.S central bank and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Well, it’s about f%$#ing time for the Fed to be sued and forced to release information, Professor Meltzer.
I’m not sure that there will be much in the way of revelations in the documents, this has been proceeding for a well over a year, so by this point, the recipients are pretty well known, but this is an important precedent (or non-precedent, since the Supreme Court declined to rule).
My guess is that there is real law-breaking buried somewhere in these documents, both by the big banks and the Fed, but, we won’t see any prosecutions, because in Barack Obama’s Justice Department, prosecutions are just for whistle blowers.
When Peggy “Dolphins Saved Elian Gonzalez” Noonan says that she thinks that an American war is stupid:
The biggest takeaway, the biggest foreign-policy fact, of the past decade is this: America has to be very careful where it goes in the world, because the minute it’s there — the minute there are boots on the ground, the minute we leave a footprint — there will spring up, immediately, 15 reasons America cannot leave. The next day there will be 30 reasons, and the day after that 45. They are often serious and legitimate reasons.
So we wind up in long, drawn-out struggles when we didn’t mean to, when it wasn’t the plan, or the hope, or the expectation.
We have to keep this phenomenon in mind as we chart our path in the future. It’s easy to start a war but hard to end one. It’s as simple as that. It’s easy to get in but hard to get out. Even today, in Baghdad, you hear that America can’t leave Iraq because the government isn’t sturdy enough, the army and police aren’t strong enough to withstand the winds that will follow America’s full departure, that all that has been achieved — a fragile, incomplete, relative peace — will be lost. America cannot leave because Iraq will be vulnerable to civil war, not between Sunnis and Shiites, they tell you now, but between Arabs and Kurds, in the north, near the oil fields.
She is, of course, writing about the war du jour, Libya, and she is correct. It’s a bad idea.
What’s more, when this operation is well within the capabilities of other countries, either the UK or France could likely do this on their own, and certainly can do this together, so say nothing of the contributions of Italy and Canada (!?!?!?!), there is no need for any contribution to the kinetic portion of the war by the US, though satellite and signals intelligence could certainly make a difference.
A reader of Americablog nailed what is driving the American involvement in this:
The main reason the US seems to want to be involved seems to be to avoid being left out. If the UK and France could take out Libya on their own, people might start asking if the US really needs to have a military an order of magnitude larger than the UK and French forces combined.
Our bloated giant Pentagon cannot allow our allies to engage in a kinetic war (i.e. shooting) without a major involvement, because if they do, it casts doubt on the raison d’être for us to spend more on our defense than the rest of the world combined.
So, not only does the fact that we are a military behemoth make us stay in places that we have never gone, it makes us go places we should never go, because to stay home when others go would put its continued support at risk.
The FDIC is suing 3 former WAMU executives for $900 million, which I call a good start.
Felix Salmon, who I generally find to be pretty good on such things, calls it criminalizing failure:
If the risks they took paid off, they would have been hailed as heroes, and the FDIC would have no problem with their behavior. There certainly wouldn’t have been a lawsuit like this one, since the FDIC has to show that it suffered damages before it can bring it.
I don’t like the idea of criminalizing failure. Banks by their nature are leveraged institutions which are vulnerable to runs and to declines in their asset values. There’s always a natural tension between managers, who are looking to maximize profits, and regulators, who are looking to minimize risks. But in this case there’s no indication that WaMu’s regulators, including the FDIC, expressed any concern about Killinger’s strategy. If they were OK with it, at the time, it’s easy to see how the executives considered that a green light to go ahead and implement it with gusto.
But at the same time, it’s unconscionable that these guys should be able to get away with what they did just because they did it out in the open, in front of supine regulators. They knew that they were too big to fail; they knew that ultimately WaMu’s liabilities (or at least its deposits) were being backstopped by the US government; and they knew that if they wanted to get their total compensation up into the $100 million range they were just going to have to take enormous risks and gamble with the money they had essentially unlimited access to at the Fed’s discount window.
(emphasis mine)
Two points here, the first general, and second specific to this case.
The first is that a doctor who is sued for leaving a surgical instrument inside you, is not a victim of criminalizing failure. In fact, there is nothing criminal at all about the lawsuit. It’s not a criminal case, it is a civil tort as the result of negligence, and it is completely reasonable and justified.
The second point here, is that what these guys did, relying on a complacent regulator, the thoroughly captured Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a federal backstop of depositors, a complacent board, and an “I don’t give a sh%$ about anything but this year’s bonus” attitude to knowingly engage in reckless practices in pursuit of short term gain, should be a criminal matter.
If someone is speeding and driving recklessly, and runs down a crossing guard, they do get charged with a crime, negligent homicide, and these guys were speeding and driving WaMu recklessly, so perhaps, they should be charged with negligent bankicide, because, after all, in Citizens United, the Supreme Court said that that corporations were people.
On our part, just cruise missiles launched at air defense installations, with the British and the French taking the lead, apparently hitting tanks, and perhaps artillery installations, with aid from the Italians and the Canadians. (The Canadians?!?!?! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?)
On interesting thing is that the French may have initiated attacks before the rest of the allies had reached an agreement on plans:
The campaign began with French warplanes, which started their attacks even before the end of an emergency meeting among allied leaders in Paris. The officials, reacting to news that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces were attacking the rebel capital, Benghazi, despite international demands for a cease-fire, said they had no choice but to defend Libyan civilians and opposition forces.
But there were signs of disagreement among the allies in Paris. Some diplomats said that French insistence on the meeting had delayed military action against Colonel Qaddafi’s forces before they reached Benghazi, a charge that French officials denied.
This behavior makes me wonder if perhaps the French eagerness for military action may be an attempt by the tremendously unpopular Nicolas Sarkosy to boost his reelections chances, as Margaret Thatcher did in the early 1980s with the Falklands.
This all is further complicated by the fact that Libya is claiming that it is adhering to the UN mandated ceasefire.
No clue as to where the truth on all this is.
H/t The Mad Piper at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
*If you are wondering, “What is goatse, Do Not Google It. If you find out, you will never be the same, and I do not mean that in a good way.
The people who switched their votes on this once they thought that it was going to pass need to be targeted to ensure that they never hold elective office ever again.
I’m with Jonathan Capehart. This reveals the, “cowards and civil rights myopia in the statehouse.
Damn.
Former Michael Powell to become head of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which will make him chief lobbyist for the cable companies.
This is what we got when he was head of the FCC. What we are seeing now is the payment for services rendered.
