Wednesday, June 8, 2011

SAR #11159

Theft is a form of income redistribution, as are lawsuits and interest.

Brazen: The Wisconsin GOP admits, nay brags, that they plan to run Republican candidates as Democrats in this summer's recall elections. Their own senators are too busy crushing unions and dismantling the states social support network to try to save their own necks, the party claims.

Here, Let Me... Greece, because of its membership in the euro union, cannot get out of its current debt problems by inflating its currency. Obama, having no such constraints, has offered to print additional dollars to help bail out the Greeks.

On Living to Fight Another Day: Who is going to survive, Wiener – who apologized - or Palin – who simply asserts that she was in the right, with no excuses, no making amends, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Being on the right is as good as being right. Or maybe it is just the difference between being stupid and being ignorant.

Decline & Fall: House prices have now fallen 33% from the peak – that's more than they fell during the Great Depression. Upwards of 25 million Americans are unemployed or under-employed. One in six Americans depends on food stamps. The US debt percentages rival the Greeks. The US Army has been bogged down in two land wars for nearly a decade. The empire may not be collapsing, but the foundation has some serious cracks.

Ante Up: The Big Boys – Citi, BofA, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase – are expected to pay upwards of $20 billion each for their foreclosure misdeeds – without admitting there were any.

Against All Odds: The French and Germans do not see the Greeks as fellow citizens, nor the Portuguese or the Spanish. Until they do, the euro is doomed. The IMF and ECB continue to insist that Greece (and Portugal and Spain) adopt financial austerity and rampant privatization, which will only deepen the debt and intensify their recessions and increase unemployment. Neoclassical economics is once again proving to be economic and political suicide. The ECB strategy is for these nations to engage in a “race to the bottom” of wages to “restore competitiveness” via Bangladeshi salaries. This will produce riots, mass protests, and the rise of anarchy in many parts of Europe.

Start Here: On the 10th anniversary of “one of the worst decisions that both parties have made in the last 50 years,” a group of Patriotic Millionaires again ask for their taxes to be raised.

Serious People: The Republican meme that suffering is good for the lower classes is being embraced not only here, but in Europe and by central bankers around the world. This will not turn out well, but the Republicans want the economy to flounder until the 2012 elections.

Second Hand Smoke: Not only do the children of the unemployed do worse academically, so do the neighbors' kids – even if their parents still have jobs. Seems it takes a village....

Been Down So Long... Uncle Ben's platitudinous version of “status quo, here we go”: US economic growth looks somewhat slower than expected. Indicators suggest a loss of momentum in the labor market. Growth seems likely to pick up somewhat in the second half of the year, if the price of gasoline comes down. The economic recovery is frustratingly slow. There is not much evidence that inflation is yet a problem. Accommodative monetary policies (free money for the banksters) are still needed and we will find a way to provide the money secretly.

The President In The Oval Office: Gov. Haley Barbour, another Republican wanna be, says that our high gasoline prices are the result of a deliberate plan by the president to drive up prices in order to cut down on pollution and promote alternative energy. See that sign up ahead? We're entering the Twilight Zone...

Smile: House Republicans insist that trillions of dollars of spending cuts must accompany any rise in the debt limit, but no tax increases – ever again. That dog won't hunt. Republicans say it is unnecessary to raise revenues because they are already projected to rise substantially in 2013 when the Bush tax cuts expire. Sorry, that dog don't hunt neither.

Rational Rationing: There is no health plan – Republican or Democratic, liberal or conservative - that proposes the government deny you the right to have any medical care you wish – at your own expense. The question is what the limits will be for government paid medical care. A second good question is what limits the government should place on profiting from the sick.

Porn O'Graph: Getting better and better... slowly.

9 comments:

rjs said...

re: GOP running fake Democrats in Wisconsin recall election...

does that explain how we got obama?

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

rjs gets the drum roll and points!

ckm

Anonymous said...

rjs wins the intertubes for the day! well done....

Anonymous said...

Wisconsin, where one good turn deserves another. The recall elections won't change anything; they are nothing more than a distraction.

CKM, I'm apparently too dense to understand the Weiner/Palin comparison. Perhaps you could help me out and elaborate. I hope you're not so blinded by ideology to think a rambling apology absolves Weiner. I agree with Jack Shafer's column at Slate, that the endless apologies after the endless lies only make the whole thing more bizarre.

He called his behavior, including his many lies about claiming he’d been hacked, “a terrible mistake.” He said he was sorry so many times that his utterances reached the point of semantic satiation—completely bled of meaning and heard only as strange repetitive sounds…

Weiner owes me no apology for his serial lies because I understand that that’s what politicians do when they’re cornered by their fibs or unseemly behavior. I’m not even sore with him for scapegoating the press over a problem of his own making. That, too, goes with the territory. Nor am I outraged that he went onto national television to attempt to cover up his lies, telling Rachel Maddow that he wasn’t “trying to be evasive” and he just didn’t “know” whether the Tweeted drawers photo was of him. For me, when the mass of lies equals the mass of apologies, the whole package congeals into some new sociopathic form for which there is yet no name. (Weinerite, perhaps?) That he was caught lying about his personal life, and not about public policy, doesn’t really matter to me. By demonstrating that he’s as good a liar as he is an apologizer, Weiner tells us everything we need to know about him.


Ante Up: So what? It's called a settlement.

Start Here: Since when do words alone make anyone patriotic? When they lead by example and voluntarily write checks to the IRS, I will take them seriously. Until then, it's BS.

Smile: I completely agree. Does that make me patriotic?

Bill

kwark said...

Anonymous 1:43 - One Weiner/Palin comparison is obvious. They're both idiots. Hopefully Weiner will move on to a more suitable job, maybe a Walmart greeter or the fryolator operator at McDonalds. It doesn't seem to matter how many times Palin hits herself with the stupid stick or demonstrates her ranking as a first-class idiot. . . so these days that probably makes her presidential material.

Unknown said...

A sex scandal that doesn't actually involve any sex. It's not like we're in 3... or is it 4 now with Yemen.. wars. We're going for that double dip on the recession cone. Jobs are still retracting....and we're worried about a dick shot on the internet.

He panicked. He has a wife that he married recently and he's a politician. He lied about sending some dirty pictures. Everyone has lies about sex at some point in their lives. It's not like he "forgot" about $800,000 on his financial disclosure forms.

I don't care about what Rep. Wiener does with his wiener because he has never said anything, done anything, legislated anything, about what I can do with mine. He can be living in a polygamous commune for all I care as long as he's not a "Family Values" candidate trying to force everyone into the "Leave it to Beaver" mold.

What I like about him is that he seems fair, he's smart (except about twitter.. or sex), and he's not afraid to call out Republicans when they are pulling their usual antics.

Clinton didn't resign. David Vitter (who used prostitutes to dress him up in diapers.. and there was actual sex involved) is still in the Senate and he's a "Family Values" politician.

Newt had no problems trying to get Clinton impeached over a blowjob while he himself was cheating on his cancer stricken wife.

Can we all just get over the sex thing please? He got horny.. big deal.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Drewbert - "because he has never said anything, done anything, legislated anything, about what I can do with mine"
Amen.

Anonymous said...

Vitter is another POS with poor judgment. Drewbert, can't we hold our so-called leaders to any standards? You're actually okay with Congressmen sending photos of their weiner to girls they have never met? CKM, too? Sheesh, then you get what you deserve.. a screwed up government.

Bill

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Bill - I don't understand the need to be involved in other people's sex lives. No laws were broken, no sermons given, no "do as I say not as I do" mendacities. So the Representative made some poor choices in his private(s) life - far better there than when formulating health care legislation or tax law.

Step back, take a deep breath and tell me how what Bill and the Intern were up to affected your life. Sure it was sleazy, but so what? What impact did it have on national policy, on tax law, on the deficit?

Ditto Mr. Weiner. So he's a tad infatuated with himself - he's a politician. But so what?

ckm