So Rick Sanchez was fired from CNN, and Steve Benen highlights the following:
Postscript: Just as an aside, Josh Marshall raised a good point last night: "Rick Sanchez's mistake was not being a Tea Party candidate. Then there wouldn't be any problem." That sounds about right.
No, his mistake was not sticking to shitting on Muslims or black people. You fuck with Christians and Jews and you get fired. You fuck with Muslims and blacks, you're given an honorarium at Harvard.
And if you think I'm wrong that picking on Muslims is the route to follow, I'll remind you all that CNN just shitcanned Octavia Nasr, a reporter with 20 years experience, for PRAISING a Muslim.
When we were all getting worked up over whether the House and Senate would take up tax breaks for those making more than $250K and turn it into a great populist issue for the election, why wasn't anyone talking about the carried interest exemption for hedge fund managers?
But then they went a step further and created the "carried interest" tax break. In this insane scenario, the income earned by managers of things like hedge funds, venture capital funds, gas partnerships and real estate partnerships would henceforth be taxed not as income but as "carried interest," and "carried interest" legally would be taxed at the same rate as capital gains. The professional gamblers who manage things like hedge funds, people like John Paulson (you'll remember him as the guy who worked with Goldman Sachs to cook up a toxic package of mortgages to dump on unsuspecting Dutch and German banks), typically get paid via something called the "two-and-twenty" arrangement. They get a two percent management fee (i.e., two percent of the big chunk of Other Peoples' Money in their funds) plus 20% of whatever profits they make.
Dan Savage goes off on someone who "loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage" but was "heartbroken" to hear about the male Rutgers student who committed suicide after his sexual encounter with another male student was livestreamed over a webcam by some other students.
###
Via Ezra, here's a sample of what the taxes of someone making $34,140 a year go to pay for:
###
Ball's in your court, Bibi. "The Palestinian leadership has said it will not continue peace talks with Israel unless a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank resumes. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met political leaders after settlement building resumed this week. "The leadership confirms that the resumption of talks requires tangible steps, the first of them a freeze on settlements," said senior Palestinian official Yasser Abed Rabbo. Israel said the talks should continue."
###
Another clip of Christine O'Donnell - courtesy of Bill Maher: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_517bU9To_g&feature=player_embedded
###
It's difficult to describe how awful this is.
A partial list of Republican candidates running for US Congress in this year's mid-term elections shows that at least 78 of them have professed to oppose abortion in all cases, including where rape or incest are involved.
So these Republicans are telling rape victims that they really have zero options after being brutally victimized -- other than to be lawfully mandated to carry the chromosomes of their rapist attacker for nine months, then to birth that human into the world. It's a horror story. And too many Republicans are proudly in favor of it.
###
Worst Persons in the World
The South Fulton, Tennessee Fire Department for this:
OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.
The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.
Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.
An entire house and everything in it is burned to the ground over $75. An atrocity.
It's actually a terrible glimpse into what privatized public services would look like.
###
This chart via Jon Chait illustrates everything you need to know about the ultimate impact of Reaganomics. In short: the working and middle classes were totally hosed.
Chait: "The remedy, of course, is to cut tax rates for the highest-earning 2%."
###
Rahm Emanuel's Farewell
Tim Fernholz at American Prospect looks at the Rahm Emanuel legacy.
[Progressives] blame Emanuel for most of President Barack Obama's governing compromises and give him little credit for the administration's hard-won accomplishments. His mutually antagonistic relationship with progressive activists, dating back to the Democrats' struggle to regain a majority in Congress, has come to define him, but [...] remember: For all his debatable realism, Emanuel brought mainstream Democrats a toughness and discipline that will be missed when he goes.
[...]
Emanuel's most significant contribution to the Democratic Party as a staffer, legislator, and operative wasn't his pragmatism but his will to win and his organizational capacity. Some forget it now, but after years of stereotypical Democratic fecklessness, Emanuel brought a ruthless, programmatic partisanship to Democratic politics that, early in his tenure as DCCC chair, even won him begrudging respect among the netroots. He's the only Democratic operative — aside, perhaps from Michael Whouley — who has ever made Republicans nervous.
And a word of advice for President Obama.
Emanuel was never, according to a source familiar with his thinking, able to convince the president to be a party leader as well as an officeholder, someone who had to be a partisan and a pragmatist at the same time… The president's post-partisan emphasis hurt his clout and that of his staffers, so there's no one to play "Rahmbo," to knock heads together and get Democrats on the same page. It's doubtful that Emanuel's successors will be more effective until Obama decides he's a politician as well as a president. While progressives may not miss his policy advice, we'll come to miss Rahm's politics.
