The status of a rescue plan for the nation’s financial system was in doubt on Thursday, at least for the moment, as lawmakers emerged from a meeting with President Bush to say that negotiations had a ways to go.
The Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke quickly returned to Capitol Hill to try to revive the proposal. One critical snag seems to be opposition to the $700 billion plan by conservative House Republicans.
“My hope is that we can get a deal,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, hours after House and Senate negotiators had announced that an accord was at hand. President Bush had hoped that an agreement could be announced after the late-afternoon meeting.
Mr. Dodd, looking tired and annoyed, complained that the late complications were making the episode sound more like “a rescue plan for John McCain,” the Republican presidential candidate, than one for the financial system. [...]
Democrats said that Senate and House Democrats and Senate Republicans and the White House were ready to hammer out a deal, but that House Republicans balked.
“We were ready to make a deal,” said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who attended the meeting and was standing next to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as Mr. Paulson Jr. asked for more time.
“The House Republicans now tell us we’re not for this, we have got something else,” Mr. Frank said.
He complained that the new House Republican counter-proposal included ideas about private mortgage insurance and a cut in the capital gains tax that Mr. Paulson had already testified would not work.
It’s time for the Democrats to call the GOP’s bluff. They have to hammer the SOBs and tell them that they had a deal all set before John McCain and his big fucking ego decided to ride in on his white horse and fuck everything up. They cannot allow themselves to be used as pawns to get John McCain elected.
Democrats, give them the finger and walk away until they meet your demands. And then go on television every day and loudly blame for the coming stock market crash. Crush them and don’t stop crushing them until you’ve won.
Yeah, yeah, yeah — Palin economy war blah blah blah. The important thing is, our asses are getting sued!
Yes, it’s true: famous law blogger Ann Althouse, who is not at all an unhinged drunk who sits around her cat-infested Wisconsin Lustron house sipping cut-rate Franzia inventing extravagant reasons to be offended, has long despised the practice of a certain blog of allowing people to post obviously satirical comments on her nonsensical ramblings under assumed names (such as, oh, I don’t know, “Ann Althouse’s Undiagnosed Hebephrenia”). And now, with the help of her rock ‘n’ roll boyfriend, Steven Tyler of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, she’s going to litigate us back to the Stone Age!
For you see, by allowing people to post as if they were Ann Althouse (who, we would like to emphasize for any future depositions, is not in any way a demented bottle blonde whose tragic career arc would drive her to despair if it were not for the existence of Charles Shaw merlot), we are, as were the ruffians who so dismayed the co-author of “Bone to Bone (Coney Island Fish Boy)”, making public disclosure of private facts, making false statements, and misappropriating her valuable likeness.
Unfortunately, as much as we would like to see this matter settled amicably out of court, Ms. Althouse — who is not the person once described by one of her law students as “that humorless, insufferable old pedant who used to live above the cut-rate until they threw her out for attracting the wrong kind of person” — would not return our phone calls. Oh, if only she would contact us in some way! Say, in the Comments section of this very post! I wonder what she would have to say…
Ann Althouse adds: I DID NOT WRITE THIS!!!!!
Clif adds: Ah, but Ms. Althouse, we are on to the silly game that you are playing. In fact, some, if not all, “Ann Althouse” commenters are actually you impersonating someone impersonating you. You are engaged in this transparent charade so that you could manufacture grounds for a lawsuit against us. But we’ve consulted our New York law firm and they’ve told us that because you are really behind the “Ann Althouse” comments that you dispute, your argument that we are harming your professional reputation is now a slander against us, which we will not take lightly, no-siree, we will not. Drink the expensive stuff now while you can still afford it. When our New York Law Firm has finished with you, you’ll be drinking Grape Kool-Aid and Everclear Sterno and pretending it’s Pinot Noir.
For those of you at work who can’t watch this, here is a transcript:
COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?
PALIN: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.
WHAT THE HOLY HELL IS SHE EVEN TALKING ABOUT??!?!!!?!!?
OK, people, I am scared to death. If any Canadian friends will take me in, I will be your official houseboy: I’ll clean up, take out the trash, wash dishes, cook meals, walk your pets, ANYTHING. Just GET ME OUTTA THIS MADHOUSE!!!!
House and Senate negotiators emerged from a closed-door meeting today and said they have reached basic agreement on a massive financial rescue plan that they hope to pass soon.
Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee said they came to an accord on many of the issues dividing them as they negotiated the specifics of a $700 billion package proposed by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. The package is aimed at buying up the bad debt that is clogging the financial system and threatening a meltdown, mainly because of risky mortgage loans promoted by Wall Street financiers.
Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said the negotiators reached “fundamental agreement” on a set of principles to guide the financial rescue plan and that Congress could pass a bill within days.
“I now expect we will indeed have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate and be signed by the president and bring a sense of certainty to this crisis,” Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), the top Republican on the panel, told reporters.
I guess it’s nice that the Democrats took Hank Paulson’s completely insane plan and have made it a mere three-quarters insane. But as good as it feels to have these institutions’ CEOs’ pay reined in, and as pleased as I am to see that Henry Paulson will not be made into America’s High Finance Czar, I think the fundamentals of this plan are still crappy. Does anyone know why, exactly, we need to pick up the tab for $700 billion of garbage assets at this particular moment? Couldn’t we work a try-out deal to buy, say, $100 billion over the next three months to see how things go? Christ, even the damn Treasury Department has no idea what they’re really going to do with the money:
[S]ome of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Well mission accomplished, genius.
Do I have any Canadian readers who would give me amnesty once American society completely disintegrates? I’m actually being serious. I’m clean, I pay bills on time and I’m a fine cook.
ABOVE: ‘Don’t panic, folks — that terrible odor is me’
In these dark and turbulent times, when it is hard to know the dark from the light, we grasp, yes, even the most faithless of us, for the eternal. In these days, when wars rage without end, when the savings of a lifetime can be wiped out in the twinkling of an eye, when all that we thought was true and real is shown to be as changing as the tides, we beg for certainty. We long for that one unchanging thing that will serve as our rock, our shelter, when everything else is transitory.
Hey, Jonah, don’t let Andrew distract you from your main point: FDR put the “Great” in the “Great Depression”. Lots of other places - from Britain to Australia - took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That’s why in other countries they refer to it as “the Depression”, but only in the US is it “Great”.
Well, I guess if you hang around with Jonah “Fascism Is, And Always Has Been, A Product Of Liberalism” Goldberg long enough, you can come around to thinking that black is white, up is down, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt caused the Great Depression rather than ended it. In fact, fact-checking Mark on this would be downright churlish, but we’re going to do it anyway. Say, the internet, were there any other countries other than the U.S. where the Great Depression lasted well into the 1930s?
Hmmm. Well, it looks like the Depression was over in Germany by 1936, but then again, they had a strong, dynamic leader to help them out of it, not some namby-pamby, elitist, liberal wuss like Roosevelt.
In France (where it was known as “The Great Depression“), it was still going strong in 1938, and had not fully abated the following year — 1939, known to some as “the end of the Thirties” — when the nation entered World War Two. But that’s the French for you.
In Latin America, where some called it “The World Wide Great Depression“, it lasted well into the early 1940s in some countries, particularly Brazil — but hey, you know how backward those people are.
The Netherlands were particularly hard hit by what they called “The Great Depression“; recovery didn’t begin until at least 1937, but even then, it wasn’t until after the war that things really got back to normal. But who even knows where the Netherlands are, am I right, folks?
Great Britain (which even today refers to the period as “The Great Depression“) was able to begin its economic recovery as early as 1936, which is barely even the late ’30s!
Okay, okay. So we’ve illustrated that Mark is a little fuzzy with the facts, by which we mean he has his head completely up his ass. But surely, he isn’t completely and totally ignorant of the history of his own country, right?
Wrong! In Canada, where it was known as “The Dirty Thirties” or “The Great Depression“, it took World War Two to get the country back on track; the economy recovered very slowly, and it was 1939 (the end of the Thirties) before the Canadian business cycle saw its first prosperity period since the Crash of ‘29.
The seas may boil and the heavens may fall, but Mark Steyn will always be a stupid lying shitface.
The estimable Max Blumenthal does the leg work on Crazy Sarah Palin and her crazy-assed church:
On September 20 and 21, I attended services at the church Sarah Palin belonged to since she was an adolescent, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Though Palin officially left the church in 2002, she is listed on its website as “a friend,” and spoke there as recently as June 8 of this year.
I went specifically to see a pastor visiting from Kiambu, Kenya named Thomas Muthee. Muthee gained fame within Pentecostal circles by claiming that he defeated a local witch, Mama Jane, in a great spiritual battle, thus liberating his town from sin and opening its people to the spirit of Jesus.
Muthee’s mounting stardom took him to Wasilla Assembly of God in May, 2005, where he prayed over Palin and called upon Jesus to propel her into the governor’s mansion — and beyond. Muthee also implored Jesus to protect Palin from “the spirit of witchcraft.” The video archive of that startling sermon was scrubbed from Wasilla Assembly of God’s website, but now it has reappeared.
And here it is:
For those unwilling to sit through the whole thing, I will provide highlights:
5:00: “We need God taking over our education system. If we have God in our schools, we will not have our kids being taught how to worship Buddha, how to worship Muhammad. We will not have in the curriculum witchcraft and sorcery.”
5:35: “The other area is the media. We need believers in the media. We need God taking over the media in our lives.”
7:00: Holy crap is this getting weird. Palin is now on stage and being fully blessed by Crazy Witchfighter Guy to be God’s instrument in government. He’s praying that she be used as a tool to combat witchcraft.
Oh lordy is this weird-ass shit. God, if you truly do love us, you will not let this woman anywhere near the levers of power in this country.
And if you don’t believe that Gerson’s actual article is as bad as my “shorter” makes it out to be, I give you this:
The financial crisis has resulted in a strange inversion of political reality. Each presidential campaign has proved less creative, interesting and bold than the administration they are both, in different ways, running against. Usually, just the opposite is the case. A sitting president normally must accept the boring constraints of real-world choices. Campaigns can inhabit the utopia of their own ambitions.
But it is President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, by proposing the massive government purchase of bad debt, who have assumed the mantle of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is John McCain and Barack Obama who are playing the role of Roosevelt’s more timid, forgotten foils, “Martin, Barton and Fish.”
Except that, like, FDR taxed the living shit out of rich people in order to start up job-creation programs and the modern welfare state. Bush is using taxpayer money to bail out a bunch of dumb fucking rich people who fucked up our economy.
And really, who can blame them? They’ve earned their rest. As Malkin put it:
The bloggers digging into the provenance of anti-Sarah Palin smears on the web got results last night/early this morning while most elite journalists were still in their pajamas sleeping.
Not technically true — it’s fairly well-known that the New York Times editorial staff sleep naked in a tangled pile of thrusting body parts, and I have it on good authority that Keith Olbermann was up all night Sunday crafting a bong out of the skull of an aborted fetus. But her point still stands, in the ‘fake-but-accurate’ sense.
So what will that crack team of kernistas do with themselves, now that Ethan Winner has been revealed as, well, ’some guy on YouTube’ … ?
Shackleford, for one, will try not to get downsized:
I’m busy again today — as I’m going to be for the next month, sorry, but the real job calls and I spent nearly a week full time working on the Winner story at the expense of my other commitments that will not longer wait — but the best response to Ambinder’s evaluation of the scandal is from Ray Robison here.
And who is this Ray Robison, who bravely soldiers on in this downward-spiralling witch hunt? What could he possibly have to subtract from our collective intelligence that hasn’t already been manhandled out of our craniums by Shackleford et. al.?
The investigation discovered that the Palin video had been distributed to left-wing fringe blogs by executives with the Winner PR firm. Ethan Winner, an executive at the firm later admitted it had originated with him and denied that anyone else had a hand. The question then became “was anybody else involved?”
Ethan Winner, PR firm, executive. Got it.
It was noted that the methodology involved in posting and distributing the ad was similar to a process called “astroturfing”. It was also noted that Obama media advisor David Axelrod is a recognized authority of this PR tactic. This raised the question of David Axelrod’s involvement in the matter.
‘Astroturfing’, you say? I was not familiar with this term, so I wiki’d it: ‘Astroturfing in American English is a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising which seek to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.’
Shocking! And you say that ‘Obama media advisor David Axelrod is a recognized authority of this PR tactic’? Who else would PR firm executive Ethan Winner, a noted executive at a PR-producing PR firm where he serves as a PR firm executive, turn to for expert advice on matters PR-related?
Game, set, match, if you ask me. But there’s more:
Yes, everyone with photo shop and a video editor application has million dollar contracts to churn out high quality political adds [sic], right? The truth is, it takes skill, time, money, and connections to make ads like this. …
Good point. Does Ethan Winner of ginormous modern PR firm Winner and Associates really expect us to believe he has the skills or the tools to make a short video spot? Even if we were to swallow the notion that this n00b knows how to blogwhore a YouTube link without Axelrod holding his hand every step of the way … how’d Ethan Winner get his hands on Barack Obama’s pirated Jakarta black market copy of Photoshop? Hmmm?
If like me, you suspect that this video was an Axelrod production, it leaves you with two reasonable theories. First, the ad was possibly produced by Axelrod before The New York Times retracted the claim carried in the video. Then Axelrod shelved it. At that point, Winner probably had the ad from Axelrod and was either told to sit on it and he disobeyed or told to release it as a viral video.
Well, grammatically speaking, that’s really only one theory that has two options at the end. So here’s another to make it two whole theories: After Axelrod produced the video, he had it sent by bike messenger to Winner. Later, that same bike messenger was physically unable to pedal a bicycle — because as per Winner, it would be inconceivable for someone to perform a skill for which they are actually paid money to do every day, absent the perfidious tutelage of David Axelrod.
Oh. My. Effing. Goodness. America’s Worst Advice Columnist™ has waded once again into the shit moat with another of her rants claiming that the real racists are the ones that won’t let her make wildly inaccurate and demeaning generalizations about black people because she is white. It starts with her harassing some poor guy in a Starbucks:
Yesterday, I debated a guy I started talking to in Starbucks about the big problem in the black community. He said it was poverty and unequal schools. I said it was daddylessness. I also think there’s a huge problem with victimhood.
Poor guy. Here he was checking his email and trying to enjoy his latte when this crazy chick, who looks for all the world like John Cusack in bad drag, starts ranting about the n****rs in LA. He probably should have dialed 911 on his mobile phone when he saw her coming but, like most Angelenos, he improvidently gave a potentially crazy person the benefit of the doubt.
“But, ma’am,” he probably said while trying to pack up his stuff and get the hell out, “what you’re complaining about is more a factor of socioeconomic status than skin color.”
“Nuh-uh,” retorts Amy, waving her finger at him:
I brought up the case of an ex-assistant of mine who was Korean and a first-generation American, who grew up poor and went to Santa Monica college to save money and earned a scholarship to Northwestern. She didn’t grow up privileged: She grew up Asian.
“So, why can’t more brown people be like yellow people?” Amy asks, as she follows her victim into the parking lot.
“Back off, lady, or I’m calling the cops and getting a restraining order!”
So, Amy goes back into the Starbucks, stands up on a table and starts shouting to the remaining customers.
What I don’t understand is why people who criticize people … for not being black enough to criticize black people don’t see how race-separatist … that is.
Another Starbucks customer starts muttering “racist” under his breath and heads for the door. “I’m not a racist,” Amy shouts, reaching into her oversized man-purse and pulling out a dog-eared paperback dictionary:
Also, I think people should think a little before tossing around the word “racist,” which is defined like so:
rac·ism /?re?s?z?m/ -noun
1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2. a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.
Well, I guess that settles that.
Before making that accusation, consider whether it’s reasonable to think a person making a criticism can really be thought to hate a group of people due to skin color or some other characteristic. Or…does the person making the criticism merely have antipathy toward a problem that seems somewhat common to a number of people who look a certain way or have something in common?
What bothers Amy about black people isn’t that they are black; what bothers her is that they’re so effing stupid. See, that’s not racist at all. The dictionary said so.
At this point a manager asked to get off the table and leave.
I know, it’s easiest to just dub everybody who disagrees with you a hater and be on your way.
“No, lady, you need to be on your way. Come back in this Starbucks again, and I’m calling the cops. You can finish your pumpkin spice half-soy half-skim decaf latte in the parking lot.”
Read the whole thing in all its demented glory, but pay special attention to her claim that because of Sadly, No! she couldn’t get a Bank of America grant for her program to tell black kids to stop fucking each other. Oh, and bonus points to Amy, who complains about how all blacks suffer from “victimhood,” for playing the victim card herself and comparing Sadly, No! to the folks who used to write “Dirty Jews” on her garage with shaving cream. Amy isn’t just comedy gold, she’s the comedy Hope diamond.
Dr. Mr. Rusty Shackleford, Esq., after what looks to be about 70 to 80 straight wingnut-hours of old-fashioned manual kerning, has successfully proven that a supporter of Barack Obama uploaded a video supporting Barack Obama on YouTube.
Later, Herr Doktor Shackleford’s kern-wallahing would cause the Palin-bashing perp to abscond with the evidence:
UPDATE: Within 1 hour of posting, “eswinner” has removed all videos from YouTube and began removing any traces of his activities. But we have the video and all relevant websites backed up.
If “eswinner” isn’t Ethan Winner of the Publicis Groupe, then why did “eswinner” yank the video so quickly? Or if this was just an innocent homemade ad, then what does he have to hide? You’d think he’d want more attention for it.
So what DOES Ethan Winner have to hide? What POSSIBLE reason could there be for him to remove his video from YouTube? Well, Ethan?
Some people have asked why I have pulled the video from the Internet. The reason is simple. Following the posting of personal information about me by the Jawa Report, my family began to receive threatening and abusive phone calls and emails.
ABOVE: Bob Owens wants to put you in a Monte Carlo!!
Just this morning used-car salesman Bob Owens, aka the “Confederate Yankee,” had a fleeting moment of clarity and admitted that he wasn’t “qualified to comment meaningfully on the [bailout] in any way, shape, or form.” Of course, if Owens restricted his commentary to things he knew something about, his blog would be confined to a discussion of the relative merits of the 1995 Chevrolet Monte Carlo versus the 1995 Dodge Neon. (”I wooden sayuh that one of them tiny Neons makes a whole lotta seyense foh fokes who is wearin’ lotsa fried chicken an’ eye-us cream ovuh the tops uh thay-ere britches, if you know what I mean.”)
[C]urrent [Wasilla] Police Chief Long’s statement of, “A review of files and case reports within the Wasilla Police Department has found no record of sexual assault victims being billed for forensic exams” would seem to stand on it’s own, would it not? … The entire “scandal” seems to have been manufactured around September 9, when stories began to run through the progressive blogosphere, seemingly out of nowhere.
Well, one might also want to speak to the person who was, you know, police chief during the time in question, before jumping to any conclusions, something which Owens admits for a moment and then just as quickly dismisses:
I’m attempting to clarify if that means that no rape victims were ever billed for rapes in Wasilla from 1996 to mid-1999 … despite the fact then Police Chief Charlie Fannon reserved the right to do so, but Fannon has declined multiple media requests for comment, and I doubt he’ll start with me.
Gee, I wonder how we could find out what Police Chief Fannon had to say about whether the city charged for rape kits or not?
And what do you have for us, Great Gazoogle? An article from 2000 in the Wasilla newspaper, you say? Why, how interesting is that?
While the Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies have covered the cost of exams, which cost between $300 to $1,200 apiece, the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests.
Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon does not agree with the new legislation, saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to cover the costs of the forensic exams.
In the past weve charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible. I just dont want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer, Fannon said.
According to Fannon, the new law will cost the Wasilla Police Department approximately $5,000 to $14,000 a year to collect evidence for sexual assault cases.
Up next, Owens examines Alaska state government employment records and determines that Sarah Palin didn’t fire Public Safety Chief Walt Monegan but instead showered him with bonuses and gave his daughter a Shetland pony.
UPDATE: Hmmm. I see that while I was writing this post, commenter Skylark was on Owens’s case about this in the comments to Jillian’s great post. Great minds, you know, and all that.
Another conundrum: Pammycakes cites an urtext of CY’s second post on this subject which now seems to have changed and not contain the language she cites. In the Pammycakes version, CY basically calls Fannon a liar and then apparently revises his post to eliminate that charge. What’s up with that, I wonder?
Dear conservatives, neoconservatives, Sensible Liberals, and other assorted self-interested bastards who are currently running this country into the ground to satisfy your bottomless avarice:
Aren’t you tired of liberals like Brad standing in your way, pissing and moaning every time you try to find a new way to gouge every last farthing out of the last pocket of the last starving orphan in this country? Wouldn’t your life be easier if all these people with their so-called “consciences”, whatever they are, would just stop raining on your parade? Just think - without guys like Brad around, assholes like you could build a monorail in every town in America, and no one would stop you! Why, you could reduce every single American over the age of ten to a permanent state of debt peonage, and turn the whole country into your own personal plantation! You wouldn’t have to bother with any of this annoying “voting” nonsense anymore; nothing would stand in your way of total financial domination of the country.
Here’s a really easy solution I’ve found for you guys to make your financial destruction of the charming little people in this country who think they have “rights” just a bit quicker for y’all. No need to thank me - and I won’t even claim the idea as intellectual property. Use it as you see fit.
Just buy us out! It’s as simple as that. When you think about the money you’re about to make on the bailout package that Comrade Paulson has arranged for you guys, I’m sure you’ll see that even after you’ve paid off each and every one of us, you’ll still be coming out way ahead.
Here’s the deal: Offer each of us four to five times our annual salary in a lump-sum, nontaxable payment. In exchange, we agree to move to Canada and never again set foot in your own private little preserve that the rest of the world used to call “America”. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know I’d take the offer in a heartbeat.
Once all of us have left the country, there will be nothing left to stop you, and you can roll over the “free market” in this country like the corpulent beached whales you are.
Who’s with me?
Above: Comrade Paulson imagines the joys awaiting him in an America with no Brads.
I just called my Congressman and urged him to give Big Hank Paulson the finger on his insane $700 billion to buy worthless assets. I strongly urge you to do the same. Some of the general points I made include:
The administration is essentially arguing that the treasury secretary should have unchecked power to buy up garbage assets without any congressional oversight. This is completely unacceptable.
The panicked way this administration is pushing Congress to enact this godawful rescue plan is akin to how it bullied Congress into voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Do not let yourselves be bullied.
Given the bang-up job this administration has done in rebuilding both Iraq and the Gulf Coast, do you really want to give them $700 billion to play with? Could you please step back and think before you vote?
If these Wall Street a-holes are going to be unloading their shitty debt onto us, I want them under an iron fist of regulatory power. In particular, I want the CEOs of all participating firms to have their salaries and benefits slashed as punishment for making us pay to keep their sorry asses out of the local homeless shelter.
This is a very big deal, peeps. While it may not have the immediacy of opposing the Iraq war, it will have very serious consequences to our financial futures if it passes as proposed. You can find your congressman by entering in your zip code here.
Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: Dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses — many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?
If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public — all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics — exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.
And that’s really what it comes down to.
If Obama agrees to this nonsense, I will not vote for him — it’s as simple as that. In fact, I will not support any Democrat who gets on board with this. They will have lost any goddamn credibility as even semi-responsible stewards of my tax dollars. Of all the shit sandwiches that Bush has force-fed us for the last eight years — from the Iraq war to the disastrous response to Katrina to deficits fueled by tax cuts to rich people — this may be the stinkiest and slimiest one yet. Bush is asking us to fork over $700 billion to purchase worthless assets just so his Wall Street friends won’t have to own up to the miserable decisions they’ve made over the past two decades.
Make no mistake, this massive bailout will slow economic growth for years to come and it will make financing much more important and worthwhile projects incredibly difficult. It will put us further in debt with China and will make us less competitive in the global economy. It will give the treasury secretary vast new powers with absolutely no checks and balances. Christ, even some of the dim bulbs at the National Review understand this:
I’m not an economist, and I wouldn’t pretend to be one, but just as an observer of Washington, and as someone who has worked on the Hill and at the White House, it is simply apparent from this draft that this program will get completely out of control very quickly. It gives the Secretary of the Treasury essentially unlimited power to use $700 billion to make purchases the scope of which is defined very loosely and vaguely.
If there was ever a time to stand athwart history and yell “EAT ME!!!” it’s now. Democrats, give Bush the finger on this bailout plan or you’ll completely lose my support. And then I’m going to start busting out the damn pitchforks and torches.
We agree with Investors’ Business Daily, which says that the reason for the current financial crisis is that the Community Reinvestment Act passed by the Democrats forced banks to lend money to a bunch of shiftless darkies who couldn’t repay their loans.
The government’s financial rescue plan continued to spur a immense Wall Street rally today as investors rushed back to the market.
After shooting up more than 400 points at the opening bell, The Dow Jones industrial average was up more than 370 points, a 3.4 percent gain, by 2:30 p.m. That is on top of a 400-point gain late yesterday after news of a government program began to emerge and could bring the market to break-even for the week. The technology-heavy Nasdaq was up 2.5 percent and Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 3.7 percent.
Global markets also traded up on the news. European markets rose on the order of 5 to 9 percent, while Asian markets overnight added anywhere from 4 to 9 percent.
In what amounts to a further restructuring of the financial market, the government said it would take on the bad debts of troubled financial firms, prop up money-market mutual funds and temporarily ban short selling of financial stocks. After watching the demise of Lehman Brothers, the quick sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America and a $85 billion loan to salvage American International Group, investors appeared more confident that the government intervention could have a lasting impact.
“It’s a massive relief rally on the back of the comprehensive plan,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist for Merk Investment. “If you have hundreds of millions of mortgage-backed securities on your books that you cannot value — much less sell — you can now unload them to the U.S. government.”
In other words: the stock market is rallying because stupid rich people won’t have to suffer any consequences for the shitty investments they’ve made over the past decade.
It’s times like these where I start getting pitchfork-and-torches angry. Make no mistake, this bailout plan will have a massive opportunity cost. National health care just became that much more difficult because we’re going to be spending $1 trillion to bail out a bunch of irresponsible Wall Street assholes. The sheer amount of shit that the American taxpayer is about to devour cannot be calculated. Our choice boil down to:
Borrowing a crapload more money from the Chinese and adding God knows how much to our national debt.
Paying significantly higher taxes and getting precisely nothing in return except for the knowledge that rich people won’t feel bad about themselves.
It’s time to bring back the pillory stocks, my friends. I want Bush, Paulson, Cox, Bernanke and the heads of AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Fannie and Freddie locked up for years on end so that we may hurl vegetables and feces at them to our hearts’ content. Because hey, if we’re going to be sacrificing our Social Security and our health insurance to save the Wizards of Wall Street, we might as well get *something* out of the deal.
UPDATE: It’s a cold day in hell when I agree with Larry Kudlow:
The decision by SEC Chairman Chris Cox to ban short selling is a terrible idea. It is an encroachment on free-market principles. In extreme, the absence of short sellers would inflate stock market upturns, probably into bubbles. Short sellers keep the market honest. I know many in the short-selling community and most of them really do their homework. They are skeptical about puff pieces on companies and they are properly cynical about corporate press releases.
If anything, we should be thanking the short sellers for calling bullshit on a lot of these financial institutions. Now the SOBs will feel free to invest billions more into shit sandwiches and tell us how awesome they taste.
Why do hurricanes that hit Texas get so much less attention than hurricanes that hit New Orleans?
Ike should be getting more attention. That it’s not, maybe has something to do with stuff like this:
Covering the hurricane’s aftermath brought additional challenges. Literally adding insult to injury, Galveston’s mayor, Lyda Ann Thomas, “on Monday ordered all city employees not to talk to news reporters. She did not say when that order would be lifted,” according to an article by the Daily News’s Rhiannon Meyers …
But don’t bother the Ol’ Perfesser with details. He’s more interested in the meta narrative:
UPDATE: Another reader emails: ‘If you want to discuss lack of coverage, wasn’t the hurricane that hit New Orleans the same hurricane that nearly wiped the Mississippi gulf coast off the map?” Yes. Why did New Orleans get so much more attention? Is it because the media wanted to paint the Bush Administration as racially insensitive, or is New Orleans just the only place they could find on a map?
As a native San Franciscan, this touches on a detail that’s always bothered me. Why did the media focus so much on the devastion to the city from the 1906 earthquake and fire, and not pay as much attention to damage in lightly populated outlying areas where orders of magnitude less people were killed or made homeless? Why, the press of the time didn’t even say much at all about the actual epicenter of the Great Quake! In the context of Katrina, is Muscle Shoals the Mussel Rock of modern media failure?
OK, so I just had a dream where Barack Obama said something along the lines of “We shouldn’t be feeding Coca-Cola to our kids for breakfast in our public schools” and the wingnutosphere went into a full freak-out mode. Confederate Yankee, Ace and Jules Crittenden each conducted scientific “studies” purporting to show that Coke was too the most healthy drink ever concocted (basically, they amounted to Mr. Yankee snorting a whole two-liter bottle of Coke through his nostrils and writing “I ain’t dead yet, Obammy! Whatcher fancy books say ’bout that!”). Michelle Malkin linked to them and added a “snort” and then said, “Hey Barry, stop telling our kids to drink your fancy arugula juice!” The Ole Perfesser “heh-indeeded” like crazy and said something like, “Well, I’m not sure whether Coke is healthy for you or not, but Obama will regret insulting the millions of Coke-drinking Americans. Heh!” And then by the next day, Howie Kurtz had devoted his entire Media Notes column to covering “Soda Gate.”
And you know what the goddamn saddest part about this dream was?
Right after waking up, I went online to see if it had actually happened.
Just think how much more awful this economic tailspin would be if social security had been privatized by Bush and McCain a couple years back. We’d have our retirement fund in the shitter along with Lehman Brothers right about now.
Luckily, Nancy Pelosi and the Dems led the Congressional charge in kiboshing that insanity back in 2005. Go ahead and make mention of that little fact on the campaign trail, Obama. You too, Biden.