Opera Glasses and Popcorn
Blue tailed damselfly [Eddie Nurcombe/BARCROFT]
This damselfly just made me laugh – she comes with her own attached opera glasses…
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An Opera Glasses and Popcorn view of Politics and the Assembled Multitude...
Marisacat -
- Real independent observations on current events with a particular fondness for the follies of the Big Box Blahgers.
Deflates bloated egos like a champion fencer in a balloon warehouse.
- Alan Smithee
Marisacat -
"...polish on a mud wallow"
- Meteor Blades [May 24 at Mcat]
Marisacat -
"... doyenne of donkle deconstruction"
- Who is IOZ [January 2 2007]
Marisacat -
"... hardened professionals and their primary strength lies in their being completely unconflicted."
"... the primary difference is that on the level of criticizing other blogs and bloggers, they can actually do some damage."
"... Not what I look for in a liberal blog product."
- peeder - MLW, Daily Rant [3.24.07]
Democracy NOW! / Amy Goodman Electronic Intifada / General Content Press TV / Middle East News Press TV McClatchy Headlines The Real News Reuters / Politics
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on one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.
If you click on La Louche the picture or the words, it leads to the Amazon PayPage, a way to ... oh let's say help with the cat can deliveries.
Thanks to all who made the very kind suggestion.
My state senator, a anti-woman “moderate” donk deep in the pocket of corporate interests went down to a challenge by a younger liberal currently serving on the county board.
that is good news!
I’ll take what I can get.
I think there ARE interesting, even good, people at the state level… no question about it.
he’s strong on mass transit, advocates against the school voucher program and for fixing the screwed up system here in WI that chronically under-funds Milwaukee public schools and says, straight out when asked, that he’s pro choice. No hemming or hawing or BS about how we all think abortion is a tragedy etc.
if anything good is going to happen for a while, it’s going to be local.
I agree on the local…
I read some reporting on Sharpton, speaking of the voucher system…. it seems he may be accepting funding from the pro voucher forces.
So Sharpton.
They, those infernal ptb, so want to annex Israel.
A little hard for Rendell to showily declare he is a “Gay American” and thus throw attention from this version of Cipel, the McGreevey NJ honey pot.
I suppose Rendell could say,
“I am a bizarre old trollope and we do this sort of thing all the time. And, fuck off. Like we so care nananananaa.”
It’s what he is thinking under ll that “apology” slop
Quite a few embedded links at the Rozen post….
Maybe it is WE who should just agree to be annexed by Israel.
Geesh.
Several hours last night on our local talk radio were basically pushing invading Mexico, saving Mexico from itself. Not the first it has been pushed either…
Lovely, a war, a walled border, a border war… an imprisoned people, etc.
They’ve gone insane.
So maybe what we have is:
the Military Industrial Israeli US Congressional Complex.
I wonder if I look fat in my pic. LOL.
Fuck em. Rendell went right down the list hooking up the connected Jewish law firms and bond brokers and they PILLAGED PA. They were his base going back to when he was quashing shit as an ADA in Philly. Then DA. Then Mayor. DNC Chair, Gov.
Not that it matters much as he heads to the boardrooms ,big fat media head-land, or an Obby appointment ( While they last!) but it is nice to know he’ll never be elected to anything in PA or prolly anywhere else, ever again.
He left
a fucking wreck.
HA!HA! Fenty, ObWannaBe …
You couldn’t drive to the grocery store in the MidAtlantic in 2008 without Fenty doing roadwork for Ob. How’d THAT work out? LOL.
I got a big kick out of reading how he lost the black vote… but kept the white vote.
GOOD LUCK!
He’ll go off to some corporate job. Joblet.
Happy Lehman Day
The reason, of course, is that Lehman didn’t make a whit of difference. Much like the 29 crash, which happened four months after economic activity had been contracting, Lehman occurred several months after the economy had already begun an inexorable decline. If we had saved it, perhaps the stock market would not have gotten as low as it did (it rallied later, anyway), and perhaps the Treasury would have to have paid another $200 billion in loan guarantees to a buyer. Otherwise, not a damn thing would have changed.
As Mark Whitney notes today, Lehman was allowed to fail because they wanted to push TARP through.
Even before Lehman had failed, Bernanke started slashing rates and setting up lending facilities to provide assistance to ailing financial institutions. But now, the Fed chairman began to drain billions of dollars of liquidity from the system to increase the stress in interbank lending and push Libor higher. Bernanke and Paulson were deliberately exacerbating the crisis to force congress into passing Paulson’s $700 billion bailout package, the Troubled Asset Rescue Plan, aka–TARP. Economist Dean Baker sums up Bernanke’s role like this in an article titled “Ben Bernanke; Wall Street’s Servant”:
“This is not the first time that Bernanke has done Wall Street’s bidding. When Goldman, Citigroup and the rest were on the edge of bankruptcy, Bernanke deliberately misled Congress to help pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). He told them that the commercial paper market was shutting down, raising the prospect that most of corporate America would be unable to get the short-term credit needed to meet its payroll and pay other bills. Bernanke neglected to mention that he could singlehandedly keep the commercial paper market operating by setting up a special Fed lending facility for this purpose. He announced the establishment of a lending facility to buy commercial paper the weekend after Congress approved TARP. Of course, the whole crisis stems directly from the Fed and Bernanke’s fealty to Wall Street.” (“Ben Bernanke; Wall Street’s Servant”, Dean Baker, Industry News.org)
While it’s clear that Bernanke allowed credit conditions to deteriorate, the larger question remains: Did Lehman jump or was it pushed? Keep in mind, that Bear Stearns was stripped of its toxic assets and bundled off to JP Morgan with a clean bill of health. That same precedent should have applied to Lehman as well. So, when the bankruptcy was announced on the morning of the 15th–and the Fed did not intervene–all hell broke loose. But, then, Bernanke and Paulson really had no other choice. Either they take advantage of the crisis to wrangle the $700 billion out of congress or they walk away empty-handed. And, if they walked away empty-handed, the rest of the big 5 investment banks–including Paulson’s former employer, Goldman Sachs–would have folded overnight. It was “do or die”.
TARP itself was unnecessary. The Fed had guaranteed about $17.1 TRILLION of obligations, guaranteeing the debtors that if they could not find the cash or credit to pay, they could borrow for free from the Fed through one of their many emergency facilities.
The Fed could have funded $700 billion for TARP with chump change. The point is that the big financial companies own Geithner and wanted a direct pipeline to push off bad assets onto the treasury. TARP simply gave them a vehicle to use as subterfuge – TARP funds would in theory be paid back, and TARP funds in theory gave the Treasury “ownership” of borrowers.
However, that wasn’t the point. Giving Treasury this “authority” also gives them the “authority” to pay $21 billion to AIG’s creditors in exchange for now worthless credit default swaps (ironically, Geithner has claimed LACK of authority to do anything different). It also allows Treasury to take over Fannie and Freddie and authorize them to buy back worthless mortgage back securities from private firms for full value. After the securities are declared worthless, Uncle Sam pitches in with yet another $50 billion “capital injection” to cover the losses.
Even embezzling $1 trillon from the Treasury is not enough.
The Fed and Treasury (Ed: ha-ha!) have done an impressive job of bandaging the financial system together (Ed: by shoving as much as they can on the taxpayer), but stability is still largely an illusion created by zero rates, a massively expanded Fed balance sheet, and Enron-style accounting at the banks. True, the panic phase of the crisis may be over, but the Depression is ongoing. Credit remains constrained, economic activity is weak, and unemployment is much too high. Most sectors of the economy are still in deep distress. The Fed’s emergency programs have done nothing to reduce foreclosures or lower unemployment.
I misread this as “twitbate”: [Calgary] Mayor hopefuls burn up their keyboards in first ever “twibate”
Even more harsh truths: The soft bigotry of low expectations
In a country with almost 15 million people out of work, it is amazing that any economists still have jobs. This one is their fault first and foremost. Economists are supposed to know about the economy and provide advice on how to avoid disasters before they happen and help us recover from the bad things that happen in spite of good advice.
The economics profession has not done well on this simple scorecard. Remarkably, rather than improve their game, economists are now busy dampening down expectations so that the public will not hold them responsible for the state of the economy.
Towards this end, a group of Fed economists recently put out a new study claiming that it was impossible for economists to recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble before it wrecked the economy. In effect, they argued that economists should not be blamed for this failure because:
“The state-of-the-art tools of economic science were not capable of predicting with any degree of certainty the collapse of U.S. house prices that started in 2006.”
This raises the obvious question: If economists can’t see an $8 trillion housing bubble, what can they see? This is a bit like the firehouse where everyone sits around calmly sipping their coffee as the school across the street burns down. Completely missing the largest financial bubble in the history of the world is pretty inexcusable, even if economists continue to make excuses.
Having failed to prevent disaster, economists are now anxious to tell us that there is nothing that they can do to remedy the situation. The story they are pushing is the unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This means that people are not unemployed because of a lack of demand in the economy, but rather they are unemployed because there is a mismatch between the available jobs and the skills and location of the available workers.
He is right that there is a problem of insufficient demand, though no amount of demand is going to get the mortgage broker their job back.
The Fed and Congress could restore the economy right away but they won’t do it.
The Fed could simply bail out every underwater homeowner, by creating reserves and using these to pay off the difference between the value of the home and the value of the mortgage debt. The homeowners could then refinance the remaining debt as a single 30-year fixed rate. This would reduce household expenses by $500 billion to $1 trillion and free up money to either de-leverage or spend.
Then Congress could allow the Bush tax cuts to expire and take all the revenue this generates and put it into patching state and local finances and padding unemployment insurance so that it’s, a) permanent (no 99 week cutoff as long as you’re looking for work) b), for everyone, not just those laid off, but also the quit and fired, and c), a $100 or $200 federal subsidy in addition to the state payment. All this money is guaranteed to be spent right away and an instant stimulus.
The combination of these two will add 5-7% to GDP growth and generate about three million jobs, and once you get job growth and output growth rolling, no further stimulus is needed. The unemployment rules can revert to how they are now once the unemployment rate drops below 6%.
This is doable now, but it won’t be done. It’s not that it will result in inflation or other negative consequences (it won’t). It’s just not palatable to the bigotry of our ruling class.
They could re-establish the COLA for Soc Sec and disabled on SS, which is 13 billion into the economy….
It is not even discussed, and he removed it for two years runnng, this and next.
they have no intention of doing even the easy things to ease the cash flow in the country.
Someobody tie his apron strings tighter. Cut off his air.
And the food stamps, $25 billion taken out of that to pass some bill or other. 44 million Americans on food stamps right now – a record – and they remove $25 billion, about 0.1% of GDP and less than 1% of the budget. Chump change. But you know all those unemployed poor people are lazy and useless.
Yes Boxer was very happy to tour the political shows here and trumpet how money fro schools and teachers was “paid for” … by whacking away at future allotmented money for Food Stamps… and Head Start too as it happens.
then, at least out here, it was reported the state and schools immediately used the money for all kinds of things, not what it was intended for.
Not that I care… and not that by now it matters.
And just as a blast from the past: here’s a WaPo article from May 10, 2005.
Bane amid the housing boom: Rising foreclosures
The bubble was evident for all to see. The only way to keep the bubble going was to push marginal people into loans they couldn’t afford.
And just check out when personal bankrupcies started to accelerate 1980-freakin-six
Economists are wedded to a 150-year-old theory that hasn’t worked in 150 years. It really disgusts me to see a discipline that actually can be useful, reduced to jingoism and blind faith.
it was a long bubble… sad to say, and promoted from the heights.
LOL in 2004 Gingrich said one of the things that makes San Francisco un-American and less than patriotic is that home ownership here was only running at less than 35%.
And it was many many years ago that the whole system of buying a house, mortgaging and so on, began to carry such enormous costs that it was really a very tricky proposition. You imo had to inherit, manage to buy severely under the local market, somehow, turn it over relatively fast for profit… etc.
Anything else was a bit chancey. I htink by 2005 a lot of house flippers were extremely wary of the whole thing, it was turned over to the rubes and the new comers…
And that was before all this exotic financial instruments built from RE and the scams that go along with it…
It really shows how expectations change gradually, incrementally. No single change indicates a problem, but flash forward a few years and compare what was expected then versus what was expected way back when.
In 1996, economists believed that “full employment” was an unemployment rate at 6%, maybe 5.5%. Anything lower was a signal to the Fed to start raising interest rates to stop an inflationary spiral.
Then came the late Clinton years and unemployment at 3.5% – no inflation. Of course, the stock market was inflating pretty bad, housing was just gaining steam, and people were paid in stock options instead of cash, but if you overlooked that, maybe we were in a new paradigm. The dot.com bust returned us to reality.
But the 2000-2001 recession wasn’t bad, as far as recessions go, and housing didn’t even slow down to catch its breath.
Pretty soon, unemployment was back down before 4%, the Dow was back at 14,000 and everything was “back to normal”.
If you overlooked the zero savings rate, the real wage, which was below 1970s levels even at the top of the boom, and household debt to income ratio of 200% (in 1945 it was virtually nonexistent). Yeah, it looked normal, but what was normal? The bottom 90% was sprinting to stay in place, but you wouldn’t know it by watching CNBC.
I remember seeing Robert Schiller, Nouriel Roubini, and a number of other forgotten economists noting that the normal was clearly not so. They were practically laughed out of the studio in 2005 for even suggesting that housing prices could possibly decline.
It is of the utmost importance to realize this: given the actual facts which it was then possible for either businessman or economists to observe, those diagnoses — or even the prognosis that, with the existing structure of debt, those facts plus a drastic fall in price level would cause major trouble but that nothing else would — were not simply wrong. What nobody saw, though some people may have felt it, was that those fundamental data from which diagnoses and prognoses were made, were themselves in a state of flux and that they would be swamped by the torrents of a process of readjustment corresponding in magnitude to the extent of the industrial revolution of the preceding 30 years. People, for the most part, stood their ground firmly. But that ground itself was about to give way. – Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles, 1939
But the 2000-2001 recession wasn’t bad, as far as recessions go, and housing didn’t even slow down to catch its breath.
it was a lot harsher here than elsewhere…. and RE barely came back, in reality, only the frantic bubble and it was tempered by how rough the ‘dot com dot died’ had been – even charts, whcih I am skeptical of, bear this out, our RE never bubbled up as much as it did in other areas, due ot the earlier bubble (count the bubbles)… and because of how harsh the global recession of the late 80s and early 90s was. It hit business in SF from law firms to financial firms very hard, I used to get out the opera glasses, for real, and take a look at all the empty floors in the buildings around me… floor after floor after floor after floor…
A friend of mine died in 1996 and among other things left a small sort of pied a terre on Telegraph Hill and 3 properties up in Yountville in the middle of the most desirable part of the wine region. It took fucking forever to sell those properties… all were in good condition, one undeveloped parcel in Yountville was zoned for “mixed use” and one was a residence with detached rental home…
Forever. And her executor was a RE agent, a good one…
I think the past 20 years have been a very mixed bag, with a lot of bust hidden or ignored, a lot of hype used and sold to cover the long slow drain…
As Alan Abelson used to say of the stock market, too many people think it is a tree that grows forever…
TS – many parts of the country have never recovered from the 2000-2001 recession. In my opinion, not as an economist, it was the beginning of the end.
I’m not saying that the loosening of credit to unprecedented levels that happened in that recession was a bad thing. It benefited a lot of small businesses and regular people – very briefly. Briefly, because it manufactured the pain within 5-10 years. There was nothing sustainable about it. In any sector of the economy. Some used it wisely, most got burnt. [I was of the latter...]
As for the issue of economists, I’m of the opinion that it is a religion rather than social science. While macro-historical trends can be plotted and analyzed, [and by who's analysis?] the rest is akin to slaughtering goats in hopes next year’s crop don’t fail.
Marisacat – the epicenter of the dot.com bust was SF. My uncle worked as a consultant for Sun. Lost his job and his life savings (Sun stock went down 95%). His office was in the South of Market area down by the stadium. My family dropped by when we were in town. His was the only occupied office in the building – and possibly the entire block. It was a complete ghost town.
Lucid – Oh, I agree with that. The WSJ did an article a year or two ago on about a dozen 40 and 50-something engineers that worked together for Grumman or McDonnell Douglas or some such place. Defense jobs. Supposedly secure. They all got laid off in the 2000 recession and even in 2009, at the time the article was written, only one had found a job paying near what they made in the 90s. Most had bounced between Starbucks jobs. A few had gotten hired back as part-time contractors with no benefits, but they were the first to go when things slowed down again. They hadn’t had anything like job or life stability for a decade. Most had burned through their 401k’s and other assets just to keep going. They were in their 60s. Little hope. Just discarded.
While the recession statistically was mild – it officially lasted only two quarters and the unemployment rate never got above 7% – the Bush II-era recovery was the weakest ever. At least until this one. I think if output was adjusted for true inflation, rather than from the artificially manipulated official versions, in real terms it probably never did break the downward trend.
For mainstream economists, you’re absolutely right it’s religion. I’d go so far to say it’s a cult – walled off in a compound somewhere and uninterested in interacting with reality.
It was the center, but it was engineered by Wall St and VC. Aside from every idiot thinking they could make billions from a humble start up to having the check-out person at the supermarket lecture on buying stocks* (which happened to me) on top of all of that, small companies were pushed to go public, when they should have been allowed to grow, if indeed they could.
And I maintain that dot com dot died bubble was ”needed” (not in any good way) to jolt this area out of the lingering effects of the earlier recession.
*certainly people making small wages can make smart investments and purchases, but it gets questionable when so eager to lecture.
oh I should add, it was August 2000 when the check out fellow lectured me (unbiden) on buying stocks… the same week a cab driver ticked off his holdings to me. I came home from the cab ride and cashed out what was in my 401K, to money market.
I am sure I cashed out early, but I feel so lucky that I did…
Also
The real unemployment rate under Bush never went down. It went logarithmically up. People who lost their jobs and never got new ones. The millions who came into the labor pool over those 8 years never found jobs. The ‘unemployed’ are only those who have held a job previously and are currently eligible for ‘unemployment benefits’. Really, we’re going on over a decade of ‘no vacancy’ signs.
Them ‘conomists ‘jes like to spin it reel good.
This is frightening: Queen Elizabeth in 3D on the teevee. Could be worse though – could be His Popeyness.
Ugh, I was thinking of him crawling out of the tv like Samara in The Ring.
Oh, and whaddyaknow?
A shock?
Meanwhile: Pope visit: Cardinal Walter Kasper won’t apologise for ‘Third World’ comment
Winning hearts and minds everywhere they go.
About bloody time.
in a pinch they do genitals!
Thank god he has already come to America. And S America.
Online documentary series about the crash: Meltdown
Haha…the opening auction bid to meet David Waldman (KagroX) of dkos at NN11 or in DC is $67.00. $67.00. Any takers??
They’re also auctioning off a collection of Greg Palast dvds. Interesting, since he was labeled as being “dangerous” on dkos in 2007 – fully backed by Meteor Blades.
oooooo….ahhhhhh……Own Governor Schweitzer’s Bolo
(I know you want THAT one, BHHM!)
All I could htink is will we get a speech… geared to play to ……whomever.
For a single adult in 2009, the poverty line was $10,830 in pretax cash income; for a family of four, $22,050.
That’s an extremely low bar, and yet one in seven is below it. In any major city, you’re functionally in poverty at 2-3 times that level.
oh the poverty bar is ridiculous. It has no bearing on rl.
Brrrreaking: Doctor critical after Hopkins shooting; suspect barricaded at hospital
but if his mother was treated there, he probably knew ways in… last reported here, he is barricaded in a patient’s room..
CNN just reported that he’s been “captured”.
Good idea…
Their headline: Shooting [sic] in custody at Johns Hopkins Hospital
Now CNN is saying the shooter isn’t in custody.
One news report said he was shot…
Bizarre. From the presser: they’re saying the situation is “contained” to one floor and that emerg is still open and anyone with business at the hospital should still go there.
He is “contained” to the 8th floor. Nothing more. Local TV here running live film from WBAL and it looks chaotic. Not the best police spokesperson.
I wouldn’t be going anywhere near a building where there’s just been a shooting and the suspect hasn’t been caught. It’s not like there aren’t other emerg depts in the city.
BaltimorePolice Twitter page
think they evacuated the bldg, they can’t keep running the ER, in terms of accepting patients. The thing is completely unstable, whatever they say about “contained”.
School evacuation………… gas smell… right near where the pipeline exploded.
Busy day….
CNN reporting that the cops shot the suspect. He’s dead.
LOL News here is saying he shot himself and “a relative”.
Maybe they can sort this out. …………………………
Jeebus. Now MSNBC is saying he committed suicide after shooting the relative with him. Can these guys get their stories straight?
amazing isn’t it?
Apparently from one report I caught, she walked in, on her own 2 days ago, and now is incapacitated… hence the major stress. And whatever else.
What a fucked up confused mess.
I’m sure that is doing wonders for his mother’s health….
What a fucked up mess of a country we live in.
Well, I guess if she’s dead, then her health is a moot point…
hi brinn!
Hi Mcat! How’s things? I am in serious need of gills….yesterday it was a high of 96 and over 80% humidity most of the day.
I absolutely HATE “fall” in Austin….UGH.
Snow here tonite. Yes, really.
*sigh*
I miss snow. We had some last year for about 3 hours (that’s how long it lasted, not how long it actually snowed).
My GODDES, he is a fucking idiot!!
Obama Prepares to Sort of Appoint Elizabeth Warren to Something
But in case anyone thought Obama was starting to “get” that America wants a president who will stand up to the economic royalists and do the right thing, White House insiders indicated Wednesday night that he has decided against appointing Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Instead, Obama is expected to appoint the hero of reformers to an advisory post where she will report to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
If I were Warren I would tell him to shove his “advising” job — reporting to Geithner?!? Obama is a fool.
Indeed, if Obama were serious about tipping the balance away from Wall Street and toward Main Street, he would replace Geithner with Warren.
That’s too much to ask of this administration.
But it should not be too much to ask that Warren be given the job she conceived and campaigned to create.
Shoulda woulda coulda — dream on. He’ll never appoint her to anything — she is one economist who actually
a) knows what the fuck she’s talking about
b) talks about it in ways the public can understand
c) wants to CHANGE shit!
I was reading the reactions at the Big Orange Excuse Factory: Yay! He appointed her to…well, we don’t know wtf she’ll be doing…but he appointed her! Send Money Now!!
oooppppssss…forgot to close the link…
Thanks, Mcat — here’s the link…
Obama Prepares to Sort of Appoint Elizabeth Warren to Something
thanks for that…
I read earlier that Dodd was saying to Ob that the whole thing is so ”fragile”.
I hope she refuses it. Why work for Geithner. No point.
“Fragile” — how precious.
My worry is that she WON’T refuse it and then trash her own credibility by getting sucked into the black hole of obliviousness that is the Obama admin….
so screeeewed. Someone remind my why I am raising kids in the midst of this madness, again? Please?
We’re always in the midst of madness. I don’t think there’s any good time to have kids.
I think I said it before…I’d rather pound nails into my skull.
Than raise kids, ts? They are actually the only thing that keep me sane, all told!
Oh! Maybe you meant working for Geithner?
lol!
Obamalama’s giving another presser today: on edumacation this time.
They sure like their slogans, this bunch: “Educate to Innovate”.
How about “Speechify to Stupefy”?
From Speech to sleep. He really is a soporific. Better than a pill.
The era of sonambulism.
Oops. Rick Sanchez cut him off and MSNBC isn’t showing it. Blasphemy!
Today’s Moment of Democratic Infighting – brought to you by Orville Redenbacher™ and Tums™:
Jimmy Carter Slams Ted Kennedy On Health Care -
Tells “60 Minutes” Comprehensive Care Would Be In Place Had The Late Senator Not Killed His Bill
hmm Jimmy must be interested in cutting what ties are left… the Dems regard Teddy and the myth of his greatness and liberal lion bullshit and how he loved the little black people and how he was a fighter for health care………..
Be interesting to watch the blowback.
I wonder if the Kennedys were chagrined that, from what I read, there was scant interest in the Teddy undertaking, on screen memorials and whatever. Very low viewership… to say nothing of Camelotta… and her spectacular, short and failed bid for NY senate.
International food fight! White House denies Mrs. Obama made ‘hell’ comment
Oh, who the hell cares? I hope it IS hell for poor poor Michelle.
hi brinn! Hope you and the kids are hanging in there!
Hi madman — yeah, we’re hanging in/on! Thanks for asking! You?
I’m just peachy, and more than ready for the weekend.
hmm Someone has departed FDL due to censorship, with a post at corrente. More interesting than I had expected it to be…
He attributes the imagery of liberals in veal pens to Hamsher… but it was Dennis Perrin, from whom she took it.
Tho I doubt that (DP) is the first use of the veal pen image compared to various groups herded physically or ideologically…
these are cool
Gogol Bordello: “Immigraniada (We Comin’ Rougher)”
I’m sure the $125K Rendall/Tomb Ridge(Hershey’s ….or is it Mar’s Bar …or are they one and the same?), et al ….. Philadelphia/Israeli …admittal, was a dust mote on an iceberg …
Some fairly serious shit goin on ..
apropos of it all …(in my wee thoughts), I almost look forward to that Solar Storm that’s being tossed and tested about ….(if it weren’t for the hospitals and those facing the normal, AND, bewildering Freeze spots (can we say India about 6 months ago?) encompassed in the scheme of things).
oopsy ………………..
best to know How To Read A Map without WIFI or electricity.
I rather like this, which, I will attribute to Nicholas Carr (not to be confused with female DA in Santa Clara County, California) :
…..breadth of knowledge, does not equal depth of knowledge ….
(speaking of maps, isn’t it quaint that it’s likely that the Google maps printed out daily in Sly Con Valley were/still are, pre GPS? more horrendously tree killing than actually buying a Paper Map ………my heart, and liver, go out to all those in the unemployed in the ancient map industry …talk about babies and bathwater……)
or as I say, soooo many people confuse information with knowledge.
tho I am very fond of information…
love you honey…and on a serious note …about that 1955 wiring….please ask someone you can trust to make sure any aging, heat dilipitaed insulations are tended to with loving and ancient care…the wiring was wonderful when installed ..maintenance must be everlasting ……
oh it’s all ok: it was checked 20 years ago and again about 9 years ago
glad to know that honey…sorry about pulling you onto FRONT STREET ……….in that regard …….
and huge hugs out …apropos of …cuz that is very simply …how I have felt, ….and still feel, ….to ….oculus ….and Anne ….‘registered’ (not to necessarily clown ….but…….jes sayin)……at ….Talkleft
I know it is at the point when I usually get a new post (thread) up… I just got a Safeway order delivered… so if this thread doesn’t go screwy (which sometimes they do)
Will leave it up for a few hours…
>^..^<
Holy crap.
The second picture is utterly horrifying.. I saw smaller masses of thousands of fish, weeks ago.. but nothing like that second picture. Somebody has GOT to photograph a whale… and autopsy it… somehow.
Line up the Guillotines. Set the baskets for the heads in place……………
Saw that earlier this week and just had a huge Soylent Green/Make Room, Make Room moment — when we kill enough of the oceans, Gaia strikes back — she will survive, we will not.
Like Smith says in The Matrix, we are a virus.
Those pictures are just so sickening, in every sense of the word.
I’d like to say I’d love to see the day that you admit that the majority of technicians and scientists of This Day,…were no better than the “RELIGIONISTS” were, …but …that would be hindsight.
you can’t resist attacking $Religiousity (dead fish which have nothing to do with anyone believing in a benevolent power)…yet fall dead silent as to elite individual white males (can we say Brin and Page here?), $technology, being proclaimed GODS?
What the hell are you talking about?
…lest I remind, tons of SCIENTISTS ..hand in hand, with RELIGIONISTS, invented the toxins, killing the GULF.
Again, I simply must ask what you are talking about and who you are talking to?
Also, am I correct in interpreting what you wrote as calling me (“Brin”) an elite individual white male?
Please say I’m wrong!
Was referring to the cofounder of Google, presumeably not you, which is why I didn’t spell it brinn …
Oh, good! I really did not get who the “you” was supposed to be and how it fit in to what was above it, or the fish kill, or anything, actually….
Thread too big, maybe?
*shrug*
all’s well, then.
Oh Sergei.. are you hiding out here?
..and yet to be seen,….REALLY, …what all those WIFI waves will do/have done to us (just because we can’t see it, does not mean it isn’t there …any physicist worth their salt , will tell you that.)
the orbit around earth is so filled with WIFI, et al, junk … “we” are asceered to launch shit ….
the pendulum, swings so wildy …………………
diane
I don’t htink anybody here worships any particular discipline… however the practitioners cloak themselves.
oopsy
to clarify dead fish along with holy crap
and , well no,…that is actually not a stretch …about your anger over RELIGION ….
I don’t blame ya, but I’ve gotten very suspicious aboput your absence of commentary about our PALE MALE, TECHY GODS OF THE UNIVERSE?
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there was no “reply” button above so this is in response to MCats taxi story from above.
I forget who it was but there is a story (or urban myth) about some big business titan. He was going to some meeting and he heard the elevator boy discussing his portfolio with a secretary. That was an AHA moment for our corporate kingpin and he got out of the market that day. It of course crashed soon after.
As far as the tech boom bust, I mean who couldnt have seen that coming. Like who in their right minds thought brokenwidgets.com was worth 6 billion dollars. so many of the IPOs were outlandindish. vaporware was the word de jour. Still to this day I dont know how Yahoo could be worth 4 billion.
i followed fuckedcompany religously at the time. i think it chronicles that entire period as nothing else did. i mean it was better brent easton ellis than brent easton ellis. funny that in todays connected twitter blog culture there really isnt a fuckedcompany. like posting an internal memo would get you branded a wikileaks troublemaker in violation of your employment contract.
yeah it was an utterly looney time… The New Gold Rush, I called it. People just drunk on their own hype…
I googled that topic, because I’d heard it too. So far, the finger points at the ol bootlegger Joe Kennedy, who said, “When the shoe-shine boy starts giving you stock tips, it’s time to get out.”
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