Today's losers losing their homes are Republican districts. At least according to the Center for Responsible Lending, who has just issued a new report that shows nine of the top ten districts with the most [foreclosures] are Republican and most likely to receive the bulk of any homeowner bailout, and thus, at least according to one On Air editor of a major cable network, fit the definition of "losers" ...
...
In other words, "Since the Rick Santelli's of the world have been complaining about how the people who would be helped by this bill are so 'irresponsible' and are really just a bunch of 'losers.' .... Rick Santelli's 'losers' may turn out to be the people who are supposedly his ideological fellow travelers."
...
At least give credit to Cramer for facing his critics and addressing (and even acknowledging the validity of) the criticisms. By stark contrast, most of our major media stars simply ignore all criticisms of their corrupt behavior and literally suppress it (even if the criticisms appear as major, lengthy front-page exposés in The New York Times).
...
He must have been the first cowboy-folk-rap artist. He plays that Martin D-28 with a beat-jazz attitude. A true American original. -- Tom Russell on Jack Elliott
Ship loaded down with TNT
All out across the rollin' sea;
Stood on the deck, watched the fishes swim,
I'se a-prayin' them fish wasn't made out of tin.
...
Gonna blow them fascists all to hell!
Win some freedom, liberty, stuff like that.
...
I'm just one of the merchant crew,
I belong to the union called the N. M. U.
I'm a union man from head to toe,
I'm U. S. A. and C. I. O.
What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate? Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.
Once again, both the president and the country are following New Deal-era precedent. In the 1920s boom, the reigning moral crusade was Prohibition, and it packed so much political muscle that F.D.R. didn’t oppose it. The Anti-Saloon League was the Moral Majority of its day, the vanguard of a powerful fundamentalist movement that pushed anti-evolution legislation as vehemently as it did its war on booze. (The Scopes “monkey trial” was in 1925.) But the political standing of this crowd crashed along with the stock market. Roosevelt shrewdly came down on the side of “the wets” in his presidential campaign, leaving Hoover to drown with “the dries.”
Much as Obama repealed the Bush restrictions on abortion and stem-cell research shortly after pushing through his stimulus package, so F.D.R. jump-started the repeal of Prohibition by asking Congress to legalize beer and wine just days after his March 1933 inauguration and declaration of a bank holiday. As Michael A. Lerner writes in his fascinating 2007 book “Dry Manhattan,” Roosevelt’s stance reassured many Americans that they would have a president “who not only cared about their economic well-being” but who also understood their desire to be liberated from “the intrusion of the state into their private lives.” Having lost plenty in the Depression, the public did not want to surrender any more freedoms to the noisy minority that had shut down the nation’s saloons.
Frum was contrasting Obama to his own party’s star attraction, Rush Limbaugh, whose “history of drug dependency” and “tangled marital history” make him “a walking stereotype of self-indulgence.” Indeed, the two top candidates for leader of the post-Bush G.O.P, Rush and Newt, have six marriages between them. The party that once declared war on unmarried welfare moms, homosexual “recruiters” and Bill Clinton’s private life has been rebranded by Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter and the irrepressible Palins. Even before the economy tanked, Americans had more faith in medical researchers using discarded embryos to battle Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s than in Washington politicians making ad hoc medical decisions for Terri Schiavo.
Perkins is now praying that economic failure will be a stimulus for his family-values business. “As the economy goes downward,” he has theorized, “I think people are going to be driven to religion.” Wrong again. The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists). Another highly regarded poll, the General Social Survey, had an even more startling finding in its preliminary 2008 data released this month: Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion. How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.
History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return. But after the humiliations of the Scopes trial and the repeal of Prohibition, it did take a good four decades for the religious right to begin its comeback in the 1970s. In our tough times, when any happy news can be counted as a miracle, a 40-year exodus for these ayatollahs can pass for an answer to America’s prayers.
...
And yet, just about anybody who actually took the time to kick the tires of Mr. Madoff’s operation tended to run in the other direction. James R. Hedges IV, who runs an advisory firm called LJH Global Investments, says that in 1997 he spent two hours asking Mr. Madoff basic questions about his operation. "The explanation of his strategy, the consistency of his returns, the way he withheld information — it was a very clear set of warning signs," said Mr. Hedges. When you look at the list of Madoff victims, it contains a lot of high-profile names — but almost no serious institutional investors or endowments. They insist on knowing the kind of information Mr. Madoff refused to supply.
...
...
I suppose you could argue that most of Mr. Madoff's direct investors lacked the ability or the financial sophistication of someone like Mr. Hedges. But it shouldn't have mattered. Isn’t the first lesson of personal finance that you should never put all your money with one person or one fund? Even if you think your money manager is "God"? Diversification has many virtues; one of them is that you won't lose everything if one of your money managers turns out to be a crook.
...
...
And that’s the point. People did abdicate responsibility — and now, rather than face that fact, many of them are blaming the government for not, in effect, saving them from themselves. Indeed, what you discover when you talk to victims is that they harbor an anger toward the S.E.C. that is as deep or deeper than the anger they feel toward Mr. Madoff. There is a powerful sense that because the agency was asleep at the switch, they have been doubly victimized. And they want the government to do something about it.
...
...
But why? What happened to the victims of Bernard Madoff is terrible. But every day in this country, people lose money due to financial fraud or negligence. Innocent investors who bought stock in Enron lost millions when that company turned out to be a fraud; nobody made them whole. Half a dozen Ponzi schemes have been discovered since Mr. Madoff was arrested in December. People lose it all because they start a company that turns out to be misguided, or because they do something that is risky, hoping to hit the jackpot. Taxpayers don’t bail them out, and they shouldn’t start now. Did the S.E.C. foul up? You bet. But that doesn’t mean the investors themselves are off the hook. Investors blaming the S.E.C. for their decision to give every last penny to Bernie Madoff is like a child blaming his mother for letting him start a fight while she wasn’t looking.
...
Solomon and Emmylou on the old George Jones / Tammy Wynette hit
Nanci, Emmylou and Iris on a song they recorded together for Nanci's Other Voices / Other Rooms Cd
The crowd at Comedy Central's studio cheered because it was good populism, well aimed and well delivered. And Cramer, the usually peripatetic host of CNBC's "Mad Money," sat and took it, mostly, like a schoolboy willing to let the teacher go on in hopes of still being allowed to graduate.
Stewart creamed him, if anything almost to a fault. [...]
He called it "this weird Wall Street side bet" happening on top of, and dwarfing, the public game of whether stock A or B is headed up or down. He kept the focus, almost unrelentingly, on the Wall Street gamesmen and women who turned bad mortgages into epic disaster and, to his credit, tried to indict Cramer and his colleagues en masse, and for failing a broader civic duty.
"I hope that was as uncomfortable to watch as it was to do," Stewart said when it was over.
Last night, CNBC’s Jim Cramer had a brutal face-off with The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. “I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a f*cking game,” Stewart told Cramer. Cramer also agreed to do one show with more serious, level-headed commentary.
There has been almost universal acknowledgment that Stewart humiliated Cramer. Jim Fallows called it a “slaughter,” and the Huffington Post has a gigantic headline reading, “Jon Stewart eviscerates Jim Cramer and CNBC.” [...]
As Michael Calderone notes, yesterday on Twitter, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote that he would have the “exclusive Jim Cramer interview tomorrow morning to discuss tonight’s war with Jon Stewart.” But after the rough night, Scarborough wrote this morning that Cramer was a no-show:
[...] I'm a conservative Republican, have been all my adult life. I volunteered for the Reagan campaign in 1980. I've attended every Republican convention since 1988. I was president of the Federalist Society chapter at my law school, worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and wrote speeches for President Bush—not the "Read My Lips" Bush, the "Axis of Evil" Bush. I served on the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain in November. I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I could go on, but you get the idea.
In the days since I stumbled into this controversy, I've received a great deal of e-mail. (Most of it on days when Levin or Hannity or Hugh Hewitt or Limbaugh himself has had something especially disobliging to say about me.) Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don't agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There's the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don't care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That's not the language of politics. It's the language of a cult.
I'm a pretty conservative guy. On most issues, I doubt Limbaugh and I even disagree very much. But the issues on which we do disagree are maybe the most important to the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party: Should conservatives be trying to provoke or persuade? To narrow our coalition or enlarge it? To enflame or govern? And finally (and above all): to profit—or to serve?
As a dangerous chunk of debris bore down on the International Space Station on Thursday, the crew took refuge in the Russian Soyuz lifeboat in case they had to flee to Earth.
NASA said a 5-inch piece of a spent rocket motor came within striking distance of the $100-billion station. If it had hit the station, damage could have been catastrophic.
...
You monumental dick. You still think this is about you, about who loves who more, about who has the most successful show. You still think that this is all just a big ironic joke, that this isn't actually real. You still think the money you talk about is what, like Monopoly money, just paper, just numbers, just stuff you can spout and not have to deal with any actual consequences. That's not Grandma's retirement or your dad's pension, it's just Jim Cramer having a wacky good time! Money's just like basketball or Britney, it doesn't really exist except in the magic box called the TV.
...
And while we're at it, why the fuck is it I spend all day listening to print journos beefing about the lack of standards for opinionating on the Internet and garnering an audience while clowns like this choad and Glenn Beck pollute the airwaves with barely justifiable bullshit every day for the last decade? Have we just basically given up on TV "news?" Are we still pretending it doesn't exist? Is it beneath us to notice that while bloggers lack standards and a stylebook of their own, you can say completely fucking anything on TV and nobody will ever call you on it, ever?
...
If you are seeking a tiny bit of good news, if you wish to uplift your sagging spirits or inject a hint of vibrational goodness into your tormented bloodstream and perhaps reassure yourself that things will work out just fine because the world economy is merely going through the fiscal equivalent of an epic liposuction combined with a global colon cleanse, then here is what you must not do.
Do not go shopping. Do not, in particular, visit any of those massive, gleaming 10-acre megastores, the kind with the football-field parking lots and the 40-foot ceilings and wall-to-roof mountains of goods that threaten to topple on your head when you crane your neck to examine just how the hell they managed to stack those lawnmowers that high.
Too depressing, is why. Also, too surreal.
But that leads to the larger theory at play here, a deeper -- and perhaps slightly more frightening and intriguing -- possibility. It is this: the old kingdom must fully crumble and die before the new can arise. The American empire, like every gleaming, overreaching empire of note before it, is near its end.
This is the long view, now coming into abrupt focus: Only from the death of all those once-definitive American mainstays: cars, newspapers, Wall Street, banking, home ownership, God -- can something truly innovative and revolutionary be born. You think? I can't be quite sure. Someone get me some porn and drugs.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
...
Hersh replied, "After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet."
Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. "It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," he explained. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."
...
...
That's the most important truth of American political life: journalists like Fineman (and Ignatius, Marcus, etc. etc.) endlessly pretend to be watchdogs over the political establishment when, in fact, they are nothing more than subservient appendages to it, loyal spokespeople for it, completely merged into it. It's not that we have a press that fails to perform its function. They perform it perfectly. The point is that their function is to amplify and glorify establishment power -- the exact opposite of what Thomas Jefferson thought they would be doing when he advocated for a free press as the supreme safeguard against abuses of power.
I just want to say that I'm really sick of getting constant announcements that I can now buy an Obama trinket of some kind, a T-shirt or a coffee mug or god-all-knows-what ...
Sarah Palin's 18-year-old daughter Bristol has reportedly broken off her engagement with Levi Johnston, the father of her 2-month-old son Tripp ...
