Wonkette
McCain adviser and Krugman-obsessed NRO blogger Donald Luskin has one of his unintentionally hilarious “all economic statistics are a liberal conspiracy by the liberals” things in Sunday’s Washington Post, in which he gives the Obama campaign another Phil Gramm-style gift. “Things today just aren’t that bad,” he writes. And then he proudly quotes the Gramm “mental recession” bit! Is David Plouffe paying this guy?
McCain campaign adviser and former U.S. senator Phil Gramm was right in July when he said that our current state “is a mental recession.” Maybe he was out of line when he added that the United States has become “a nation of whiners.” But when it comes to the economy, we have surely become a nation of exaggerators.
It is hilarious to watch the breaking news ticker over this column, with headlines like “Meltdown shakes up Wall Street’s workers” and “Paulson says prepared to act to ensure stability.”
Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line [Washington Post]
It is completely unfair to connect Donald Luskin to John McCain simply because he is one of his advisers. John McCain has said he is for CHANGE so SHUT UP.
Hopefully, Luskin is heavily into Lehman’s now worthless stock.
To be fair, he wrote that yesterday when those breaking news tickers were about a Russian hurricane.
To all those fucking whiners who keep losing their houses and jobs: GET A FUCKING JOB YOU HOMELESS LOSERS!!!!
Where have I heard this song before?
Oh, Walnuts! It’s not called a “Mental Recession,” It’s called Alzheimers. Now go eat your lime jell-o.
Serolf Divad: perfection
Welcome to the Bush-McCain faith-based economy — your problem is that you don’t believe enough for it to work!
Aww… you know: Moose burger! Lipstick! Maverick!
There… don’t you feel all good about yourself now?
When Donnie Luskin speaks, everyone laughs.
Guess he can see Russia from his front porch.
facehead: Hey, the republicans have to create a class to do their yard work after they’ve kicked all the brown migrants out. Don’t worry, they’ll maintain liquidity.
Anyone who has not been through FIVE AND A HALF YEARS of torture is a whiner, goddammit!
Ask any collections agent or job counselor, these are the best of time. If elected, “Mc-Failin” should have the economy working in FIVE AND A HALF years. Can we just elect her/him now and get the mojo started?
Ken, How did you get that photo of WALNUTZ from the first Wall Street Crash? Resourceful one, aren’t you?
itgetter: Yeah, whatever. We’ve all been through 8 years of torture.
I wonder if this guy is related to Jack Luskin (”The Cheapest Guy in Town”), owner of Luskins discount crap stores of the late 20th century.
Ironically, Luskins went out business.
Someone get that man a Wonkette button and tell him thanks!
SayItWithWookies: That’s it…”The problem is I just didn’t WANT it enough”
I’m going to try this approach with my creditors. When the landlord bitches about me being late on the rent, I’m calling him a fuckin’ whiner and telling him it’s not nearly as bad as he thinks. When I get a cell phone bill, a credit card bill, a heating bill, etc, I’m going to write “Liberal conspiracy - Cheer up, Be happy” on the invoice and send it back.
itgetter: And he lived in a box! That’s way worse than your stupid old house that the bank’s about to take away from you!
itgetter: Anyone who spends FIVE AND A HALF YEARS, ALAN in a POW camp, and then thinks sending our citizens off to THIS war is a good idea needs serious psychological evaluation.
columnv; Don’t be fair damn it! They are ripping us off! Stealing our money and laughing at us for trying to play fair. We need to quit playing games and start kicking ass. Be fair? Bullshit!
Oh WALNUTS. On sunday Karl Rove teabags your campaign ads on Fox and now one of your butt boys is leaking his santorum laced opinion on the WaPo. Don’t worry, you still have the bitters. They maybe too busy working double shifts to vote for you, but at least you still have them.
This Op-Ed reads like he didn’t even realize it was going to be published in a major national newspaper.
Cheap liberal media trick, that is! They take something you write for a newspaper, and they go and publish it all over the country!
When this becomes a real recession, Walnuts and crew are going to buy a new house that they can keep the whiners away from.
LOOKY HERE: You can post comments on the “article” at WP and no one has posted a comment yet. GO!!!!!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/12/AR2008091202415_3.html
John McCain is the Baltic Avenue of presidential candidates.
SuperRounder: Nice reference to santorum, the noun. Points have to be taken away, though, for forcing me to have a mental image of Rove teabagging anything. I have to go drink some bleach now to get that image out of my mind…
OOPS!!! I was wrong. There are a ton of comments, 720 actually, but you have to be logged in to see them. Might be funny.
It simply can’t be quoted enough:
Walter Sobchak: Shut the fuck up, Donny.
It’s not necessarily that WALNUTS! is a bozo as it is that he’s surrounded by a battalion of bozos, a cadre of clowns, and a flock of fools. Possibly a number of nincompoops, as well, but let’s not go overboard as Karl Rove says.
It’s hard to believe Walnuts! could find someone less competent than Mark Penn, but i’m sure glad he hired him.
This brings me to the other odious thing the Republicans do…marketing. They learned through direct marketing thugs and crooks…who we now call lobbyists…that it doesn’t matter how bad the product is, as long as it is markted correctly.
Cheerleading war, clever catch phrases, appeals to emotion…everything that makes us buy all the shit we don’t need makes us vote for shit we don’t need.
It only took us 80 years to go back to square one - 1929.
The rich who got screwed by the New Deal have been chipping away at it ever since and they succeeded in busting it whole in 2000…now we have to start over.
Why is it that when things are going their way it’s all “the wisdom of the markets” and “the market will decide” but when the market is down 20% in the last year and over 2% today alone, all of a sudden we’re a bunch of whiners? The markets spoke… The economy is teh suck.
“Full Disclosure” evidently can now come 8 paragraphs into an article. Good to know.
Sarah Palin is a cunt. Full Disclosure: I am a faggot and do not care for cunts.
WagTehGod: … and he still doesn’t know how many houses he owns.
Everyone now, Google “Stupidest Man Alive”. nuff said.
Goddammit Wonkette, how many times do I have to remind you that John McCain couldn’t watch business news tickers FOR FIVE AND A HALF YEARS!OMG!SERIES!
AfghanVet:
Sam Damon?
You are right. The super rich will manage like they always have, but they lost most of their helper monkeys like the CEOs, analysts, lobbyists and the wannabes are now seriously fucked (see yacht market - anything below 50 ft can’t sell.)
facehead: If we land on him he’ll count them up and we’ll owe a ton in rent
Sounds like someone else has their eyes on that “Ambassador to Belarus” gig! Good luck to the both of you cock-snappers.
So okay, there is maybe a small silver lining in this cloud. No, not that McWalnuts has douchebag economic staff.
If the S&P goes down and stays down in the 90 days preceeding a presidental election, the “out” party usually wins. On 6 August, it closed at 1288. We’re halfway to November 4, and we’re down 78 points total as of five minutes ago.
Go Barry!
Donald Luskin makes perfect sense to me and I’d be happy to explain it to you Libtards but I’ve got to back to work on my perpetual motion machine. I’m almost finished!
Shit. The Dow is going to close over 400 down. Whoops. Bad timing, Mr. Luskin.
This never would have happened if we had just handed over our Social Security savings to these financial whiz kids.
Oh yeah? Well, if everything’s coming up roses, why are the Wall Street bankers fearful of a lowly Wonkette commenter?
To wit, today’s NYT finance headline: “BANKS FEAR NEXT MOVE BY SHORTS”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/business/15short.html?_r=2&src=linkedin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
I’m tellin’ y’all, that little humourist from SF is one powerful mofo and Wonkette’s gonna get a major assfuckin’ as soon as shorts hobbles the last of the major banks.
Which he’ll get to, toot sweet, right after he sobers up from mom’s wedding.
InKnockYouUs: Wow… I guess I hadn’t refreshed in a while… things got really ugly this afternoon. The good news is that the reporters will be invited over to Walnuts house for another BBQ… on the menu: roast Luskin.
Those who exaggerate and whine are the not the liberals.
http://www.mondaymorningeconomist.com/cooking.html
The short version–even though the commentator uses the outmoded “eating dog food” instead of the newer, slicker and Wonkettier “eating dogs”, he still makes sense:
The first problem, the seeming inaccuracy of the unemployment figures, can be traced to the Reagan administration. It was decided that unemployment figures were scary for the new administration so, in 1982, they created new constraints on who could be counted as unemployed. They dropped people who had not looked for a job in the last two weeks. They also dropped teenagers who had been employed but were now unemployed. By some estimates, the real unemployment rate is closer to 10% than it is to 5%.
What we are measuring and publishing as if it were a Consumer Price Index is in fact better characterized as a measure of how people are currently spending money. If that is what you are measuring it is hard to see how the CPI will ever be a statistic that will alarm anyone because people will always be able to spend on something, even if they are living on dog food. I suppose if dog food gets to be too expensive they can live on air. Inflation problem solved at last.
…WoW, pheeeeeeeeew! So you are telling me that my foreclosed home, 29.9% APR credit cards, defaulted student loans, 6% unemployment and $4 a gallon gas is a delusion? Thank you for enlightening me!!! SHIT BAG!
Uh Ken, sorry man…but the image you used today is actually from the “Bank Error in Your Favor” card…not the “Republicans Have Screwed Us ALL!!!1!” card.
The fucking NYSE closed down 500 POINTS. That is 4.3 percent. At 5 percent the automatic trading curbs kick in. I wonder if jail would be better than being homeless?
The good news here is that, historically if the markets are down the 3 months before the election, the incumbent party loses. So keep hoping for those 401(k)’s to take more of a nose dive, and Hopey should be a shoe-in.
donner_froh: Depends on if you like the ghey secks… We should totally found a Wonkette hobo village
Viva la Cynthia: You think you have it bad? I have to get shit done with this mind.
AngryBlakGuy: With that track record, one could be excused for confusing you with an investment bank.
You should give Hank Paulson a call and ask for some cash.
Compared with the four-hour line at the local Food Distribution Center–hoping that the roving hordes of unemployed private-contractor gun nuts don’t ride into port drunk on Weltgeist and seize half of the grain trucks…again (though it’s also fascinating in a way)–”today” is strictly blithe. But still, what will happen to all the laminated frequent shopper cards, and is there a way to work them into some kind of improvised shelter?
If the focus of the election moves away from WALNUTS! and his Unquestionably Patriotic War Heroisms and his Indescribable Code of Moral Honor over to the economy instead, he’s in deeeeep shit. Here’s hoping that his Trickle Down Boyfriends keeping teeing it up for Barry ’til November.
I’m sure that four years from now we’ll all agree that, in retrospect, “things today just aren’t that bad”.
SayItWithWookies: We’re minutes away from being asked to clap if we believe in the economy.
So, I have to sort of concur - besides the housing thing (which sucks), the economy isn’t THAT bad right now. However, it’s going to suck extreme monkey balls in the next two years. The smartest thing that the Repubs could do right now is lose majorly, and then blame everything on Obama four years later.
mccain champion of the little man wants to privatize your social security by investing it in the stock market so you can make some real money. go john mccain. yeeeaaaaa!
I don’t have an umbrella strong enough to stop raining wallstreeters.
The inner ear is a delicate organ controlling balance. As the ship begins to sink, it tilts quite a bit, upsetting the equilibrium of many aboard. People suffering in this manner should not try to write Op-Ed’s, except maybe for Mad magazine.
yes, america is a nation of whiners. I’m only down to 6 houses now that I remember. The 7th was so far the purchase price, I abandoned (but gave the keys to a bunch of Hobo auto workers)
Cape Clod: ooops you beat me to it. ignore my comment above.
now mccain wants to clean up wall st. or does he want to clean up on wall st.
SayItWithWookies: Yes Yes fatalism!! Everything is pre-ordained. Never Question anything, anytime, anywhere. It is God’s will. Praise be Hay-soos. Amen and god bless. SNOWBILLIES 2008!!
Favorite Line: A housing “slump,” a housing “crisis”? A “severe” price decline? According to the latest report from the National Association of Realtors, the median price of an existing home is up 8.5 percent from the low of last February….
hahah! There is nothing wrong with US Automobile Manufacturing! According to The Association of Ford Used Car Salemen, these babies sell themselves… LOL!
I’m moving all of my investments into alcohol and meth futures.
yes, happy days are here again. From The Economist (via Sully)
…Even if markets can be stabilised this week, the pain is far from over—and could yet spread. Worldwide credit-related losses by financial institutions now top $500 billion, of which only $350 billion of equity has been replenished. This $150 billion gap, leveraged 14.5 times (the average gearing for the industry), translates to a $2 trillion reduction in liquidity. Hence the severe shortage of credit and predictions of worse to come. …
$2 trillion? the cat better watch it when I get home.
OzoneTom: and moose jerky.
OzoneTom: I recommend whiskey (half pints), cigarettes, and shotguns. I see real growth in these.
If only the best way to prove how much they have destroyed the economy and how full of shit the republicans are was something besides besides the complete and total meltdown of the world market…
Tawmn: Ever tried making jerky out of a moose? They don’t like it, and when a large animal doesn’t like something they generally let you know. I’m all for relabeling a bit of beef jerky, made from unsuspecting cows, as the moosal variety.
qwerty42: If you’re only drinking your whiskey in half-pints, you aren’t committed enough.
Gopherit v2.0: Touche. And half of the country must be sadists because we might get 4 more.
Best quote from Luskin’s article:
“Full disclosure: I’m an adviser to John McCain’s campaign, though as far as I know, the senator has never taken one word of my advice.”
PoliTacky: Beat me to it.
“Donny, you’re out of your element!”
EnBuenOra: Damn straight! Vote McCain: The 10% Maverick.
In the old days, the stockbrokers who fucked up this royally had the decency to commit suicide.
Gopherit v2.0: but easier to use in the barter economy that will follow. of course, there are always cowrie shells.
The monopoly guy looks just like Charles Ruggles did when he had white hair.
For some reason that little pep-talk does nothing to embolden the prospect of putting food on my family.
I love Bill Clinton
thisainthell.us/blog/?cat=47
tocute2btrue: From that discriminating assessment, I would guess that you like the film “Bambi” as well.