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Oxymorons for Our Time: Progressive Conservatism
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And we thought the Republicans were the kinky ones:
Financiers, lawyers, traders and accountants gathered this week at the annual International Swaps and Derivatives Association conference here to discuss "Collateralization and Netting — the Impact" and "Systemic Risk: Advances and Challenges in the Wake of the Crisis."
By Thursday night they needed to put out of their minds the specter of sweeping legislation to regulate the derivatives.
They escaped to Supperclub, a bar and restaurant, where some plopped on the beds that covered the floor while a waiter in denim short shorts, suspenders and a scarf delivered drinks. The truly relaxed turned over on their tummies and received back massages from a dreadlocked member of the Supperclub staff.
By midnight, others ended up in the S & M chamber with a bed-to-ceiling stripper pole and videos of dominatrixes playing in the background.
"They don't seem nervous," said Iam Crowley, who also happened to be at the establishment because his girlfriend puts on a burlesque show for the guests.
I'm waiting to hear about overdoses by laudanum.
Fuckers.
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Rape a child and the punishment is resignation?
Another high-ranking Catholic priest has resigned in the wake of the child abuse scandal. In Belgium, the highest-ranking bishop Roger Vangheluwe, 73, the Bishop of Bruges, has resigned after admitting that he also engaged in child abuse.
Vangheluwe issued a statement that admitted that "When I was still just a priest, and for a certain period at the beginning of my episcopate, I sexually abused a minor from my immediate environment . . . The victim is still marked by what happened. Over the course of these decades I have repeatedly recognized my guilt toward him and his family, and I have asked forgiveness. But this did not pacify him, as it did not pacify me."
Pope Benedict XVI has accepted his resignation.
For the full story, click here.
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Marc Ambinder asks a poignant question I've often asked myself.
Serious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that's plaguing the conservative movement. The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn't study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?
This matters to journalists, because I really do want to take Republicans seriously. Mainstream conservative voices are embracing theories that are, to use Julian Sanchez's phrase, "untethered" to the real world.
Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but from the left? Rachel Maddow's grilling of administration economic officials. Keith Olbermann's hectoring of Democratic leaders on the public option. Glenn Greenwald's criticisms of Elena Kagan. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn's keepin'-them-honest perspectives on health care. The civil libertarian left on detainees and Gitmo. The Huffington Post on derivatives.
I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don't exist — serious Republicans — but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.
[...]
With the advent of Fox News and the power of that echo-chamber, complaints about liberal media bias are quite irrelevant — the reaction to it being like lupus's reaction to the body, as Jon Stewart correctly noted.
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Bill Maher becomes a teabagger.
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The Vampire Squid made money shorting the housing bubble, which they had a major part in inflating ...what a shock
In late 2007 as the mortgage crisis gained momentum and many banks were suffering losses, Goldman Sachs executives traded e-mail messages saying that they were making "some serious money" betting against the housing markets.Goldman Sachs created a risky set of mortgaged-based securities. They then got Moody's to give those garbage securities a triple-A rating, sold them to other investors, and then shorted their own products.
The e-mails, released Saturday morning by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, appear to contradict previous statements by Goldman that left the impression that the firm lost money on mortgage-related investments.
In the e-mails, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the bank's chief executive, acknowledged in November of 2007 that the firm had lost money initially. But it later recovered by making negative bets, known as short positions, enabling it to profit as housing prices plummeted. "Of course we didn't dodge the mortgage mess," he wrote. "We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts."
In another message, dated July 25, 2007, David A. Viniar, Goldman's chief financial officer, reacted to figures that said the company had made a $51 million profit from bets that the value of mortgage -related securities would drop. "Tells you what might be happening to people who don't have the big short," he wrote in an email to Gary D. Cohn, now Goldman's president.
But do you see the Teabaggers out calling for the heads of the banksters? Do you see the Teabaggers demanding that the Wall Street goons who knowingly created those CDOs and then sold them off pay the price for their misdeeds?
No, you don't.
Did you see the Teabaggers out in the streets while the Bush Administration was trampling all over the Bill of Rights?
No, you didn't.
Did you see the Teabaggers protesting when Bush pushed through tax cuts which were designed to take the Federal yearly budget from running surpluses to running deficits?
No, you sure didn't.
Did you see the Teabaggers screaming about the deficit when the Bush Administration put the entire cost of two wars on the national credit card, or when they rammed through an expansion of Medicare without providing a penny of additional revenue to pay for it?
No, they were as quiet as a pack of sleeping church mice.
The Teabaggers are only concerned about two things: They hate the idea of making health care universal and they hate the idea that a Democrat, let alone one who is not a white man, is sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office.
Kenyan citizen and Manchurian Islamocommiemarxistnazijihadadist President Obama is considered most popular leader in the world.
Teabagger and Rushthuglibot heads on brink of implosion while incoherently arguing that that this bad for Amerika.
The Northern Lights are visible above the ash plume of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano in the evening April 22, 2010. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson.
Tell the Senate to reject the Pesticide Pusher.
While many applauded President Obama's long-awaited recess appointments on March 27, agricultural activists slammed his decision to appoint "pesticide pusher" Islam Siddiqui as the chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the US trade representative. Siddiqui is currently vice president for science and regulatory affairs for CropLife America, a global agribusiness lobbying group representing Monsanto, DuPont, Dow and other pesticide corporations.In March 2009 these companies urged first lady Michelle Obama to reconsider her decision banning the use of pesticides in her organic White House garden. In August 2005 they petitioned the EPA to use children in pesticide experiments--a move that prompted environmental groups to sue the EPA for failing to protect children. As an official at the USDA, Siddiqui oversaw the first proposed federal standards for organics. But when those rules allowed genetically modified organisms, irradiation and toxic sludge, the USDA received 300,000 public comments in protest, and only then tightened the standards.
Last year Siddiqui's appointment stalled when 90,000 people and more than eighty consumer advocacy groups objected to his appointment. This year at least 110 organizations, spearheaded by the Pesticide Action Network and the National Family Farm Coalition, have once again urged the Senate to reject his appointment, in the interest of "family farmers, farmworkers, consumers and the planet."
Personally, if DuPont, Monsanto, Dow and their murdering brethren endorsed fresh air, I'd start living in the basement.
