He’s nothing like the father! He doesn’t share the epistemology of the father.
Awesome. Ron’s response is pretty excellent too:
Is Pam still blathering about me and my father? Oh, you are. You still haven’t met him, though, right? You still didn’t know him, so you’re just sort of making things up as you go along, right?
*happy sigh*
1 commentFebruary 12th, 2010 at 07:06amPosted by Eli
Turner triggered controversy in August when he first floated the transaction tax idea and criticized the size of the U.K. financial sector in an interview in Prospect, a British journal. At a black-tie gathering of financial executives in London on Sept. 22, Turner said banks should move away from products, such as complex derivatives, that don’t benefit society.
“Some financial activities which proliferated over the last 10 years were socially useless, and some parts of the system were swollen beyond their optimal size,” he told the gathering.
Turner’s remarks have been condemned by executives who say it’s ridiculous to introduce a moral dimension to regulation.
“Quite honestly, I am appalled, disgusted, ashamed and hugely embarrassed,” wrote Howard Wheeldon, a senior strategist at BGC Partners LP, in an August note. “How dare he?” Wheeldon now says. “Markets will decide if something is too big or too small. It’s not for an individual, however powerful, to slam and damn nearly 1 million people.”
Yes, how dare anyone suggest that something as petty and schoolmarmish as mere morality should every trump the wisdom of the almighty and all-knowing market which never makes mistakes!
[Harold Ford Jr.] blasted [Gillibrand's] support for the proposed health care overhaul, which is expected to cost New York an extra $1 billion a year, and for opposing the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry.
“It was a mistake,” he said, noting that most Wall Street firms had already paid back the money. “How can you be against ensuring that the lifeblood of your city and of your state survives?”
(…)
After Mr. Ford, a five-term Tennessee congressman, arrived in New York, he took a job as a vice chairman at Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America). But he kept a toe in politics, becoming a commentator on Fox and then NBC, which features him several days a week on programs like MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Speaking from a conference room at New York University, where he is a teacher, Mr. Ford, 39, expressed enthusiasm about his new hometown, though he described a life quite different than most New Yorkers. On many days, he is driven to an NBC television studio in a chauffeured car. He and his wife, Emily, a 29-year-old fashion executive, live a few blocks from the Lexington Avenue subway line in the Flatiron district. But Mr. Ford said he takes the subway only occasionally in the winter, to avoid the cold when he cannot hail a cab.
Asked whether he had visited all five boroughs, he mentioned taking a helicopter ride across the city with fellow executives, at the invitation of Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner. “The only place I have not spent considerable time is Staten Island,” he said, adding that “I landed there in the helicopter, so I can say yes.”
(…)
He has breakfast most mornings at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, and he receives regular pedicures. (He described them as treatment for a foot condition.)
Mr. Ford declined to discuss what he is paid by the bank, but publicly available data suggests that he earns at least $1 million a year. Asked what role outsize pay packages played in fueling the financial crisis, Mr. Ford said he objected to capping executive compensation on Wall Street. “I am a capitalist,” he said. “I believe that people take risk, and there are rewards if they do well; they should lose if they don’t.”
(…)
Offering a glimpse into a possible campaign strategy, Mr. Ford and his aides said he would run as an insurgent who is uncontrolled by the entrenched political class that he says has rallied around Ms. Gillibrand. His tentative slogan: “Harold Ford: nobody’s man but ours.”
(…)
Mr. Ford has officially been a resident of the state only since 2009, and did not vote in November’s mayoral election.
Oh yeah, New Yorkers are just going to loooove this anti-establishment man of the people. He really has that common touch.
Add commentJanuary 14th, 2010 at 07:23amPosted by Eli
“I’m utterly depressed about our current political situation,” Baker said. “The Republicans have been completely overtaken by the far right, and turned into one of the great, lunatic parties in American history. The Democrats are completely feckless. President Obama seems to have all but disappeared. And beyond ideology, many of our elected representatives in both parties seem to have simply been bought off.”
(…)
“We’re on the verge of making potentially catastrophic decisions, or continuing our equally catastrophic drift,” Baker said. “The basic element of American optimism — that we can and will adapt to meet any crisis — has been destroyed.”
Nailed it. Unfortunately.
Add commentNovember 24th, 2009 at 06:52amPosted by Eli
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) just gave a severe tongue-lashing to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner moments ago in the Joint Economic committee, concluding with a surprising call for Geithner to resign. For a change, Geithner didn’t just sit there and take it.
(…)
“Will you step down from your post?” Brady asked, concluding his statement.
Geithner shot back: “It is a great privilege for me to serve this president. I agree with almost nothing you said, almost nothing you said represents a fair and accurate picture of the economy today.” He told Brady, “You gave this president an economy falling off a cliff.”
(…)
Geithner then directed his criticism back to the Bush administration, accusing it of “either years of basic neglect of basic public goods in health care, in education…in how we use energy and fixing those problems is the central objective of this administration.”
Brady shot back: “Tell that to the millions of Americans who no longer have jobs because of your decisions.
Geithner would not take the criticism lying down: “They would have had more jobs and more confidence and more employment in this country if we had not let this crisis get to the point it did.” Geithner said the Bush administration should have spent “eight years of paying for our commitments instead of borrowing against them.”
Shorter Geithner: “My incompetence wouldn’t be such a big deal if you guys had been doing your jobs for the last eight years.” Burn!
2 commentsNovember 20th, 2009 at 07:23pmPosted by Eli
Senate Majority Leader Reid Tuesday said Democrats will try to move a climate and energy bill early next year as part of a larger effort to address the economy.
“We’re going to try to do that sometime in the spring,” Reid said about the climate bill.
(…)
Some senators are skeptical lawmakers will be ready to tackle another huge issue after finishing health care. “After you do one really, really big, really, really hard thing that makes everybody mad, I don’t think anybody’s excited about doing another really, really big thing that’s really, really hard that makes everybody mad,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said. “Climate fits that category.”
Yes, apparently Congress has an allotment of one Big Difficult Thing per year. That would certainly explain why they were so cautious and incrementalist during the Bush Era, right?
3 commentsNovember 19th, 2009 at 11:36amPosted by Eli
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told Fox’s Sean Hannity that she hoped all of his viewers would join her for a press conference outside the Capitol on Thursday and then walk with her “through Cannon, Longworth, Rayburn,” where they would go “up and down through the halls, find members of Congress, look at the whites of their eyes and say, ‘Don’t take away my health care.’”
So let’s see: Bachmann’s genius idea is to bring the town hall crazy right into the halls of Congress. One of the distinguishing features of the town hall crazy was teabaggers conspicuously packing heat. Which makes her usage of the phrase “whites of their eyes” – most commonly associated with “don’t fire until you see the” – more than a little alarming.
I guess I could be reading too much into it – it’s such an innocuous, commonly-used phrase, after all.
Oh, and it looks like I’m not the only one who thinks Bachmann is a nut:
The aide who helped turn Rep. Michele Bachmann into a controversial mainstay of cable news has informed colleagues that she’s quitting — just as the firebrand Republican congresswoman prepares for her biggest media moment yet.
Multiple sources have confirmed that Michelle Marston, a veteran Hill aide, is leaving Bachmann’s office.
In an e-mail exchange with POLITICO, Marston declined to say why she’s going.
“I’m just not talking about it, and frankly I don’t think there’s a story here,” Marston wrote….
(…)
A conservative Republican House member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, suggested that Bachmann’s views — and her willingness to state them — make it hard for her to keep staff.
“When your captain’s crazy, it’s time to find a new ship,” the lawmaker said.
Well, unless you’re crazy yourself…
Add commentNovember 4th, 2009 at 08:31pmPosted by Eli
Matalin said she could not imagine a Cheney firm engaging in lobbying, or being a strictly political shop. She said she thought the idea of Dick Cheney as a political consultant far-fetched. But Mary Cheney, according to Matalin, is politically savvy, has intimately worked on campaigns in the past and would be fully capable of providing political counsel.
(…)
Matalin saw the Cheney clientele in a more post-partisan light, saying, “People who would seek the kinds of advice Dick Cheney could provide are not given to ephemeral winds of politics.” She added: “The idea of it is an incredible thing.”
Wow. Just… wow.
Add commentOctober 8th, 2009 at 07:47pmPosted by Eli
For two years, the Democrats have charged that Republicans are the “party of no,” and that’s grated on many nerves. Republicans have been talking about their proposals so much their faces are nearly blue. They’ve offered ideas to address the challenge of improving health care in America, but because they don’t have the bully pulpit and can’t get a word in edgewise, their ideas get lost.
Ah yes, those poor, poor Republicans, always ignored by the media, completely unable to ever get any coverage or appear on any of the talking head shows.
Special Bonus Quote:
As a good friend from North Carolina used to tell me, “Nobody likes change except a baby.”
That explains why Obama was crushed in a landslide defeat last year. More than anything else, Americans want to maintain the status quo, because it’s TOTALLY AWESOME.
Add commentSeptember 28th, 2009 at 07:45pmPosted by Eli
And that is the other great theme of this book: the struggle of a president mostly interested in policy against an opposition party obsessed with regaining power. The Republican efforts to undermine Clinton were rarely substantive and often unscrupulous. The president was impeached not because he committed anything resembling a high crime, but because the effort would cripple him at a moment when he might have gotten something accomplished — his popularity was running at 60 percent or so, the economy was booming. During the Clinton presidency, the Republicans accelerated their slide from a party of responsible conservatives to a party of antigovernment talk-show nihilists. Leaders like Bob Dole were intimidated by bomb-throwers like Newt Gingrich.
I wonder what it will take to bring the GOP back to reality, for it to take some scant interest in governing rather than simply pursuing power for the sake of power. If anything, they seem to be infecting Democrats with the same disease.
Add commentSeptember 27th, 2009 at 01:40pmPosted by Eli
Now that the national Republican party is solely the province of meathead politicians and radio maniacs, there are “sensible” conservatives who are alarmed by what they see. It should be agreed upon in our politics that these people drift into the wilderness for a while and muse upon where their movement has led them. But the first thing they all should do is apologize to the nation for choosing to take a course 45 years ago in opposition to the transcendant moral issue of America. They prospered through bigotry, and then through a deft ability to package it, and they made the ensuing four decades immeasurably crueler as a result. There’s not enough sackcloth in the world for these clowns.
Perfect.
Add commentSeptember 25th, 2009 at 07:48pmPosted by Eli
“For the Catholics it was the nudity,” Mr. Boulay explained. “For the Communists it was the fact that he was a violent, unemployed aristocrat who ate bananas.”
Obviously both Catholics and Communists are crazy.
The Republicans have been so busy trying to paint President Obama as a socialist, as a radical, as a Marxist, as a Muslim, as the Devil, that they haven’t even noticed that he has become one of them.
Alas, sad but true. As Galloway says, Obama still talks a good game, but he’s not even trying to back it up. He’s playing the same words-and-perception-are-more-important-than-reality game that his predecessor did.
Add commentJune 21st, 2009 at 07:37pmPosted by Eli
It never ceases to amaze me, the things Michael Steele will admit to…
“These days branding is more of a marketing term,” said Steele. “It’s about persuading the public that we Republicans really believe in limited government, lower taxes, individual liberty and personal responsibility, regardless of our actual behavior in office.”
(…)
“In the real world,” said Steele, “It’s much more practical to hire consultants to craft new talking points, logos, slogans and advertising than it is to try to get a bunch of rogue Republican incumbents to actually stand together for our values, and walk the talk.”
Shorter Steele: “We suck, and it’s much easier to lie about it than to actually stop sucking.”
“We need fiscal sanity in government,” Huckabee writes. “Congress is truly spending like John Edwards in a beauty shop (sorry I couldn’t resist.)”
Hahaha! Edwards is a great big sissy!
I thought Huckabee was supposed to be branding himself as one of the few Republicans who’s actually a decent, likable guy who can appeal to people outside the mean-spirited conservative base. And yet here he is, trying to be Ann Coulter Lite, taking shots at a guy who’s pretty much completely irrelevant now. Stay classy, Huck!
Having devoted his life to the common dick practice of redefining words to mean something different and more convenient, Yoo, during the course of one business day, redefined “acceptable behavior for a civilized nation” to “pretty much anything up to the reenactment of an Eli Roth movie.”
And don’t tell me it’s not torture because the military does it to train our forces. A willingness to impose harsh conditions on ourselves voluntarily cannot justify imposing those conditions on an another involuntarily.
Further, the reason the military uses the techniques on our soldiers is to prepare them for torture by an enemy. Would we say use of those techniques on our own forces by the enemy is not torture?
And:
The debate about aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding now centers on their effectiveness.
It is frightening to think that we, a nation that has long believed that principle mattered and that human rights applied to all, would now be open to assuming that such values need not apply when we are frightened or at risk.
Has it all been a fiction? Are there no lines that we, as a nation, will not cross no matter the cost to us? If every value is negotiable depending upon circumstance, we have no true values.
And:
You quote the letter [by McCain, Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham] as saying, “Moving in such a direction would have a deeply chilling effect on the ability of lawyers in any administration to provide their client — the U.S. government — with their best legal advice.”
That seems counterintuitive. Would not such prosecutions ensure that in the future lawyers did give their best advice, not legal fictions that served the whims and wishes of their client, the United States government?
Joe the Plumber — real name Samuel Wurzelbacher — told a crowd of conservatives Thursday night that their love was getting him all hot and bothered.
“God, all this love and everything in the room — I’m horny,” declared Joe.
Wurzelbacher had taken the stage to a standing ovation at the annual “DisHonors” Awards, presented by the Media Research Center, to poke fun liberal media groups. But the “horny” declaration didn’t go over too well, according to the Washington Post.
Buzz immediately commenced.
“Did Joe the Plumber really just say he’s horny?” “Did you hear Joe say ‘horny’?” “Why is he horny and why is he telling us?”
Part of me wishes I had never read that, and part of me wants to Not-Joe to be the next entrant in the Face Of The GOP sweepstakes.
Yesterday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told America he sees the use of taxpayer money to pay AIG million-dollar bonuses as an unimportant distraction…. Now today, White House adviser David Axelrod insists nobody cares about AIG ripping off taxpayers. “People are not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG,” he told the Washington Post.
Because that’s not tone-deaf at all. No-one is even remotely offended by the notion that white-collar crooks are being paid millions of dollars of our money as a reward for their role in crashing the economy, except maybe a few peasants.
Which leads me once again to the leader of the GOP, once again showing us how he feels about the little people:
Further widening the rift on the issue between conservatives in the media, such as himself, and conservatives in Congress, Limbaugh went on to air Rep. Ed Royce’s (R-CA) rationale for voting yea on the House bill to tax AIG bonuses at 90 percent, and claimed that Obama voters will love a 90-percent tax rate “because Obama and the Democrat Party have been ginning up hatred and class envy for corporate executives and the achiever class in this country for years, for decades.”
Because everyone who isn’t a gazillionaire is a pathetic lazy slacker who’s never accomplished anything and has no value to society. Epic Populism Fail.
Add commentMarch 19th, 2009 at 08:58pmPosted by Eli
This guy is a comedic genius! He’s like the Andy Kaufman of the Republican Party or something.
Two weeks ago, amidst concern that Michael Steele’s media exposure was creating serious political damage, the RNC chairman decided to guest-host William Bennett’s national conservative radio program.
(…)
“I love this battle because what I see right now is leading to the ultimate political Armageddon between conservatism and liberalism,” Steele declared at one point. “And the idea that free enterprise, free markets, free people are going to battle an oppressive, repressive, domineering government. I love that. That’s what we are lining up for you folks. So you better get ready, strap it on, because it’s coming. And you better pick your sides, you better choose now.”
(…)
“I’m going to tell you something,” Steele replied. “You make such an important point, because I had a conversation earlier this week about the very point you just made about the Nixon administration. What you are seeing here, folks, unfold is nothing short of the Nixon administration played out in a different era and a different style. But the results and the effects are the same. You have H.R. Haldeman and Rahm Emanuel, these guys, the master manipulators, the master controllers in the background, moving and shaking the pieces, creating an enemies list, putting together the targets on our side. The whole strategy of demonizing Rush Limbaugh, which has been exposed now…”
(…)
“Education is key,” said the RNC Chair. “It is where it begins, for all of us… If we understand the difference between Marxism, socialism and capitalism; if we understand the difference between a Roberto Mussolini, an Adolf Hitler, and a Franklin Roosevelt, and his honor the honorable Winston Churchill, if we know those differences than we can appreciate what these times mean. And how history is a precursor of things to come.”
But this is my favorite, this is absolutely brilliant:
And when a listener scoffed at the notion of global warming, Steele eagerly ran with the baton.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.”
U.S. Sen. Richard Burr wouldn’t mind watching basketball with Barack Obama. The Winston-Salem Republican was recently on the Charlotte sports talk show “Primetime with the Packman.” Repeating a question from the Democratic primary last year, host Mark Packer asked whether Burr would rather have dinner with Hillary Clinton or Obama.
“Hillary Clinton in a heartbeat,” Burr said. “I’ve had an opportunity in the last week to have dinner with Barack Obama. I passed on that one.”
Obama held a bipartisan “timeout dinner” at the White House with about 180 guests from Congress and his Cabinet, as well as staffers and spouses. Burr said the president is a “straight-up guy,” a “tremendous athlete” and “a very disciplined individual,” but he disagrees with him on the issues.
Oh yeah, that’s subtle. Burr then went on to say that Obama was “very articulate” and “a credit to his race”…
2 commentsMarch 17th, 2009 at 11:51amPosted by Eli
‘The Last House on the Left’ is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Characters are raped, stabbed, shot, mangled and fed to labor-saving devices.
Oh, Technology – is there anything you can’t do?
Add commentMarch 13th, 2009 at 05:42pmPosted by Eli
From an NYT review of a GPS hiking app for cellphones:
For some people, a hike is a great excuse to get away from the cellphone. For others, that little device is a way to enhance your experience, by tapping into maps, tips and visual cues you might otherwise miss, and by giving users the chance to record and share their experience with others.
There’s a third group — those who like to chat loudly with colleagues while they ignore the natural beauty around them. For them, nature invented mountain lions.
Excellent.
Add commentMarch 12th, 2009 at 11:47amPosted by Eli
If Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of Texas’ highest criminal court, has ever doubted her judgment, she has not shown it.
In 1998, Judge Keller wrote the opinion rejecting a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA tests after his trial showed that it was not his semen in the victim.
“We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” she later told the television news program “Frontline.” “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important.”
Oh, God forbid we should give people new trials just because they might be innocent. What a horrible travesty of justice that would be.
Gov. George W. Bush eventually pardoned Mr. Criner.
Look, when even Dubya, the guy who mocked a condemned woman, is more merciful than you are, it’s time to take a good, long look at yourself.
But wait, there’s more:
Seventeen months ago, lawyers for a man facing execution sought extra time to file a last-minute appeal. Judge Keller refused to delay the closing of her clerk’s office past 5 p.m., even though late filings are common on the day of a scheduled execution. The man, Michael Richard, was put to death by lethal injection a few hours later.
From the founder of the perhaps-too-revealingly-named Hooters-like “breastaurant” Bone Daddy:
The girls that work here are drop-dead gorgeous and as friendly as you want them to be. If I had a 19-year-old daughter … this is the only placed I’d want her to work, because I know how committed we are to creating a great environment to work in.
Sounds like it’s a good thing this guy doesn’t have a 19-year-old daughter. Eww.
From former Bush/McCain adviser Nicole Wallace’s don’t-you-lecture-us-Obama post in The Daily Beast:
We did not abandon our belief that despite our imperfections, America is the solution—not the problem—to every challenge facing the people in this country and, in many cases, the world. Most of us did not come to the same conclusion Obama did that America behaved badly and now we are being punished. Most of us love this country for the opportunity she provides. We love her for the decency of her people. And we believe that our president’s job is to cheer her on not talk her down.
I’m pretty sure none of that actually means anything. And it sure as hell doesn’t point towards any kind of practical policy prescription.
In an interview set to air over the weekend on CNN’s D. L. Hughley Breaks the News, Ari Fleischer admits that the Bush administration was wrong to claim that Saddam Hussein had WMD in the lead up to the Iraq war, but still insists that Saddam was at fault for the war. “Saddam was the big liar here,” Fleischer concludes:
FLEISCHER: We were wrong about weapons of mass destruction being in Iraq. […]
HUGHLEY: When you found out that you were wrong, how did that make you feel?
FLEISCHER: You just scratch your head and say, “How could we be wrong?” It wasn’t just us that thought he had weapons of mass destruction. The Egyptians thought it, the French thought it, the Germans thought it the United Nations thought it, Bill Clinton’s CIA though it. We all thought it. Saddam was the big liar here.
Yeah, Saddam was a big fat liar who cunningly tricked the US into invading his country and executing him by saying that he didn’t have WMDs when, in reality… he didn’t have WMDs. Brilliant.
Add commentFebruary 22nd, 2009 at 03:23pmPosted by Eli
