Palin and Breitbart Reach Out to Enthusiastic Listeners

Andrew Breitbart and Sarah Palin get the robust reception their distortions deserve, while standing behind a banner for the billionaire David Koch's Americans for Prosperity. People can be so rude, can't they? Yes they can!








(*Note: We don't want to leave the impression that we support interrupting free speech. But there does come a moment when people speak untruths so often that listeners stop listening and begin to get angry. This type of reaction to Mitt Romney would be roundly criticized, given his generally serious background and approach to campaigning. Palin and Breitbart are notorious for distorting reality and speaking harshly about others, so they are receiving the just rewards for their efforts.)

Retro Look Back: Fox's Jo Piazza Knocks Trump's Business Acumen

Trump & Penile Extension

Let's go back to September of last year where Fox's Jo Piazza wrote a snippy little piece about Trump's ability (as in, inability) to choose business leaders. We agree with her assessment on Trump, but find her reference to the Apprentice winners as "chumps" to be a bit much. After all, Jo herself is just a writer, and those she refers to as chumps have solid educations and are making decent livings. They are just not working for Trump.

The fact that few of his hand chosen future business leaders actually make it in the business he dangles in front of them says more about Trump than the show's candidates. Trump is a dangler of imagery and feels no compunction to live up to his promises. Frankly, he did not trust Kendra Todd (season three winner), or Randal Pinkett (the brilliant season four winner), and he does not now trust anyone, except himself. Or penile extensions of himself in the form of his kids. Which is how he can come to the delusion that someone like Obama is as deceitful and dishonest as he is.

We hope major media will take us on deep excursions into Trump's floral, funky business history.

(Side note: Remember when Randal won, and for the first time in the show's history Trump seemed to suggest that the winner, the black winner, should share the title with the second place winner? Odd moment that.)

Finding some Barack (Blessings and Thunder) Amidst Gloom and Doom

Rep. Seel: Dumb&Dumber Unified

Every so often it's nice to come across something positive in the news. The bias is toward the negative, usually deliberately (it sells) or accidentally (it's human nature). One is not inclined to thank the heavens or luck for waking up alive, when in fact there was traffic on the road, work was long and dull, and taxes remain undone on the day of dunning.

(Incidentally, if you are one of the anachronistic few rushing out to the post office to meet some artificial midnight deadline, relax. Turn around, hit up Chick Fil A, and go home. The twelve or so hours between sending it now and waiting till morning will not have a meaningful impact on your economic life, whether you are expecting a return, or owing. A fifth horseman will not ride in and steal your soul or money, nor will your vehicle turn into a pumpkin. So chill.)

We begin with the pleasant observation that President Barack Obama and wife managed to contribute 14% or so of their income to charity. Granted it's a write-off, and not the secret giving that Jesus and superfriends would encourage, but it's nice to see money given. Critics will still find room to complain, like the myriad of birthers and others who consistently find it impossible to determine where the President's income comes from. But those of right mind and attitude can feel reasonably satisfied at the first family's generosity.

The recepients of some of that largesse include veteran's organizations, and if anyone should have soldiers on their mind it's the commander and chief.

Fox Latino reports (wow, didn't know they had that division):

The biggest donation, $131,075, went to the Fisher House Foundation, which offers lodging free or at a minimal cost to veterans and military families receiving treatment at military hospitals.

The president also donated the after-tax profits from his children's book, "Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters," to a Fisher House scholarship fund that aids the children of soldiers who died or were disabled in combat.

(Fox Latino)

Another marginally related positive event in the news? The governor of Arizona, Madame Brewer, (Lil Jan if you are nasty), vetoed the birther law (HB 2177) that was put forward by an Arizona Legislature that took a break from scorching the earth to pass the most ridiculous of ridiculousnesses. The bill was designed to make you prove your authenticity as an American presidential candidate by providing a long form birth certificate. But in a kind of legislative internal regression to the stupid, you could instead provide other documents like your baptismal papers if you lacked the document the legislation was designed to make you prove you had.

According to Fox (the non-Hispanic version), "If candidates don't have a copy of their birth certificates, they could meet the requirement by providing baptismal or circumcision certificates, hospital birth records and other documents."


What was truly funtastic about the legislation was the responsibility given to the secretary of state to create a review committee, should those alternative documents prove sufficiently vague. We've no doubt that such a committee, in such a state as Arizona, would come to the ultimate right, or hard right decision, while violating the Constitution in ways creatively un-American.


Governor Brewer can be applauded (briefly) for imposing some wisdom on the fartist efforts coming out of the Republican controlled Legislature, who also found their law to enable armed citizens on campuses vetoed.

Senate Hopes to Nail Goldman to Cross of Greed

Well here we go. Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, is making noises about prosecuting leading executives at Goldman, Sachs, and there are probably enough people who know little about the business of Wall Street to get behind such accusations.

Unfortunately it's the type of witch hunt that will lead to exoneration in an actual court of law where innuendo actually has to be proven.  It would be nice if legislators spent more time on improving or tightening laws instead of retroactively trying to criminalize what was then (and still is) legal behavior.

Huffington Post "reports":

More than any: other government report produced in the wake of the crisis, this account names names, blaming specific people and institutions: Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual, Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's, the Office of Thrift Supervision and others. It targets four types of institutions, all of which it says played key roles in causing the crisis: mortgage lenders that offered prospective homeowners booby-trapped loans; regulators that were paid by the institutions they were regulating and cooperated in widespread deception; rating agencies that gave seals of approval to products they knew to be especially risky, all in the pursuit of market share; and Wall Street banks that duped investors into buying securities that only the insiders knew were destined to go bad.

(HuffPo)

The fact remains that Goldman took a wise counter position to sophisticated investors who wanted what they had to sell. Going short is not criminal, nor should Goldman have to hold the hands of clients who are intent on getting in on what was then a still hot (if shaky) market. We've a hard time seeing how this results in prosecutions that stick, and if you are going to go after Goldman, you will for consistency have to go after every firm, large and small, that engaged in similar activities. Good luck with that.

Minimum Wage Slacking Off On Duties, Policy Group Discovers

We like this story in the N.Y. Times. It's a discussion about low wage employment. But better than just producing another profile of people down on their luck, it highlights the public policy work of a group called Wider Opportunities for Women. Through their work they are attempting to redefine how we calculate poverty.

What the group does is extend the marker of sustainable income in a manner that takes into account the societal (and capitalistic) goal of people being able to improve their lives via work. Where the tendency is to set some government level "rate of poverty," or "minimum wage," the BEST index developed by WOW takes into account the little things that would raise a family into the middle class and keep them there: having emergency funds, money for retirement, money for the kid's education.

The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.

(N.Y. Times)

One might imagine that changes like this would be the type of thing that anyone could get behind  regardless of political persuasion (save for Libertarians who follow "clock winds itself policy theory"). Then again, if you are being demagogued into not reading supposed left leaning rags like the Times and other main stream media, you are unlikely to really give the ideas presented here a good mental rendering. It's too bad.

Arizona Not Taxing For Those Who Live Here

It's the weekend here in Phoenix and the weather is tiptoeing in unpleasant, with a sudden spike in temperature. I'm over at a friends house, and see families--mostly mom's and their kids--frolicking near the pool and getting an early start on the season. I give it the blah-face, eyebrow raised. Not ready for Arizona to do what it does best, which is be a desert. (Second best thing it does? Be a desert).

Yesterday ended a week of interesting speculation at another friend's job. He works in public eduction for a district office, and the district had finally decided on what cuts to make, given three possible scenarios. And they decided on cuts because the state legislature won't do some obvious things like temporarily raise taxes by a few percentage points. Better to cause havoc in the education system with people fired, people temporarily fired and rehired, teachers rotated and reorganized, and other such turmoil. Then again, the ultimate Republican goal is to shrink government, not necessarily keep people employed or maintain the public education system. School systems are thus left to scramble and hustle, layoff and fire, and cobble departments together to do the work that could barely get done before with more people.

This particular district decided to make most of the cuts at their district office, given previous hardships already visited upon the schools. So of six directors heading departments, two lost their jobs. Print shops were merged with supply offices and so on. All of this while raises are non-existent, benefits are cut back over time, and a highly animated conservative movement pushes the idea that government is inherently inefficient and lazy. There is no joy in working for the public. Servant indeed.

Which is funny, because the average teacher probably has more education than some of the Limbaughs and Becks out there peddling outrage.

Illinois took a particularly gutsy move, raising personal income taxes by 66% and corporate rates by 45%. When talking percentage it sounds like a huge increase, but in actuality the rate went from 3% to 5%. In an article back in January Fox News puts it this way, "The increase means an Illinois resident who now owes $1,000 in state income taxes will pay $1,666 at the new rate." Of course that new higher "crazy" rate that no Republican was willing to support in order to raise $6 billion toward balancing the budget, is a rate lower than many other states.

If we were to carry the same thing over to Arizona, one wonders if it would be worth an extra $50 a month to the average worker in order to assure a more than balanced budget for a year or two until the economy picks up. That is the question really. Do you spread the pain across the population with tax increases that are about the amount people waste in a given month on a trip to the movies or a pair of sneakers, or do you throw a smaller group out of work, who will then go on to have a massive ripple impact as they default on their homes, stop giving to charity, and completely stop spending while utilizing public services more?

Ideally, as is being done in Illinois to still experimental effect, you want to raise a tax long enough to build a rainy day surplus (with major strings), and freeze or cut spending at reasonable levels.

But nothing is reasonable in Arizona. Not the weather, not the politicians. It's always all or nothing, with no shade, reasoning scantily clad under a hard, brutal oblivious sun.

Irish Banks: To TARP or Not To TARP is Not the Question

This will bring the total cost to the taxpayer of fixing the banking system to a massive €70bn. If that sounds like an awful lot of money it's because it is.

For that kind of money we could fund the health service for almost five years or pay all social welfare benefits for next three-and-a-half years.

Unfortunately there was no alternative.

The banking system, the lifeblood of any advanced economy, has completely seized up. With new loans virtually impossible to obtain and existing lines of credit being pulled as soon as they fall due for renewal, the Irish economy is being slowly asphyxiated.

(Irish Independent)

When you read stuff like this happening elsewhere, you marvel at the local (in the U.S.) animosity for our own TARP bank bailout. People imagine, in populist fashion, that you can let large institutions fail without experiencing the type of blow-back that would far outstrip any concerns about moral hazard or the worthiness of banks.

Woman on the train track. When saving you won't necessarily stop to ask her if she is tied to the track because she might be a whore, or a thief, or in middle of some vaguely disreputable caper. Yes women everywhere might get the impression that when tied to the tracks, they will automatically get rescued by swarthy bearded noblemen, but that hope of theoretically implied rescue does not undue the necessity of rescue.