- Last week everybody was calling for the head of Tim Geithner, but President Obama will almost definitely not fire him just because Geithner has already been embarrassing enough. [Reuters]
- South Africa decided to bar the Dalai Lama from a peace conference there because really, what has that no-good layabout ever done for peace? [New York Times]
- David Letterman is an unfaithful husband because he was flirting onstage with a famous actress two days before he got married. [New York Daily News]
- Two American reporters arrested by North Korean border guards have been taken to Pyongyang for interrogation. [Reuters]
- Eat red meat and die young. [Washington Post]
- The president has embarked on a gradual but noteworthy process of capitulating to the bankers who refused to help resolve the financial crisis until it was clear that their bonuses weren’t in danger. [Wall Street Journal]
DAILY BRIEFING 9:02 am March 24, 2009
Not Even Obama Can Stand Up To Wall Street
Hola wonkerados.
To improve site performance, we did a thing. It could be up to three minutes before your comment appears. DON'T KEEP RETRYING, OKAY?
Also, if you are a new commenter, your comment may never appear. This is probably because we hate you.
Previous post: Is Andrew Cuomo, Dare We Say, A Competent Public Official?
Next post: Next Post
blog advertising is good for you
{ 27 comments }
There’s nothing wrong with sending starbursts and flirting every once and a while.
Eat red meat and die young.
You forgot: “…leave a fat corpse.”
I give Timmy 2 more months.
[re=271684]Bruno[/re]: Sadly, I think we have him for the duration. From Naked Capitalism:
In my view, the Obama Administration, through its actions to date, has already politically cast its lot with the monied class. On Obama’s watch, we have the Citigroup situation, the Bank of America bailout, the Merrill Lynch bonus scandal, the AIG bailout and bonus scandal, the furore over golf tournaments and the backdoor bailouts under TALF and the Public-Private Partnership. All of these events demonstrate a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the monied interests of the financial sector. Yes, none of these events individually is a fatal problem. However, taken as a collective, the preponderance of evidence points toward an Administration which will increasingly be seen as more aligned with Wall Street than Main Street. This is a catastrophe for a man who campaigned on “Change you can believe in.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/03/guest-post-can-geithners-public-private.html
So we libtards and Obamatards will rally around our guy, because the Republicans would be worse. I’m going to throw up now.
I’m actually having that inscribed on my tombstone someday:
Ate red meat, died young. [Washington Post]
I’m a horrible populist. I really don’t care about Obama not beheading derivatives traders on the Mall or sending executives to the spice mines of Kessel in lieu of a bonus. Frankly, no one seems to know what the hell to do, no matter what Krugman insists, so just DO something and then we can have the proletarian revolution if/when it all goes to even more shit than it already is. Plus, I believe in karma; let them make millions in bonuses for destroying the world economy. They’ll still have tiny dicks and their children will despise them and the contempt of their nubile Russian escort-mistresses will only get more and more transparent as the years go on, until their bitter, delusional old men yelling “get off my lawn!” to the tacky marble statues of twinks peeing they have strewn about their faux-French “chateau” as they wheeze from the emphysema cause by the thousands of cigars they lit with hundred dollar bills on their Third World sex tours.
[re=271685]NewAlgier[/re]: Y’all didn’t see this coming? The man’s a neoliberal through and through. We chose Obama basically out of brand preference: we like his form of late capital better than McCain’s form of late capital. The Marxists (all twelve of us) were the ones hanging back, sipping tequila out of a jelly jar, and saying… “Well yeah, yes we can, but it’s still capitalism.”
You keep telling us about stuff that will kill us slowly and painfully Wonkette. How about something that leads to a quick, happy death.
It’s a choice between dying a lingering death of a thousand Katrinas/Timmehs/AIGs/Sarah Palins or a quick one through the consumption of red meat.
“Waiter? Get me the 72 ounce Gut Buster Steak, pronto!”
Um I had my kids later than average but there’s really nothing endearing about some 62 year old hosebag raising a small child. Especially when he insists on “trying out” his opening monologue on the poor kid every night, or no ice cream.
The first rule of North Korea is stay the fuck away from North Korea.
According to that red meat study, if I eat a steak dinner and then walk outside and get hit by a fucking bus, CLEARLY the red meat contributed to my demise. Study: 1 Me: FAIL
But hopefully I’d had a couple glasses of wine with my steak to allow me to live forever, at least according to the last few studies on wine I’ve read.
Would that negate my flattening by the bus? Maybe we should do a study!
[re=271692]ForTheTurnstiles[/re]: Y’all didn’t see this coming?
Amen, FTT. I tried to tell my wife this before she poured perfectly good drug money down the drain of the Obama campaign. I told her “look at his top contributors and tell me you expect someone other than Wall Street to be catered to come January.” This ain’t no revolution yet still it is televised. Marxism may have failed in its imperfectly-implemented attempts at nation management, but it’s still the best tool for analyzing capitalism.
/TELEPROMTERZ ACORN BUTTSECKS UH-BAMA
South Africa decided to bar the Dalai Lama from a peace conference there because really, what has that no-good layabout ever done for peace?
Well, this is what happens when you let China get superpower status. And it’s all YOUR fault, yes YOU, you American with your insatiable thirst for LCD TVs and basketball shoes and fancy lead-based toys. Have fun with your new overlord..
Ah, South Africa, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Who will be the white Nelson Mandela, emerging from a lifetime in prison, 40 years hence?
Who jarked off in my frakkin coffee?
[re=271685]NewAlgier[/re]: With all due deference to the Naked Capitalism site and its cogently argued POV, the great Canuckstani economist JK Galbraith [see JFK & others], observed that “In the stock market, there are those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.” Please understand that the real reason they call it the dismal science is that it ain’t scientific, and is no different than any other faith-based philosophies. Ah yes, economists, who successfully predicted twelve of the last three recessions and freely toss about terms like “irrational exuberance.”
While heeding economists can lead to good [see Keynes] or evil [see Friedman], economists can never seem to reach a consensus on a single gawddamned thing. For ever Naked Capitalism you can cite, I can provide a contrary Galbraith Jr. [a noted econ in his own right], but doing so doesn’t change the game.
Knowing that nobody has a real clue and that they’re all just inkblotting the shapes of tea leaves, it comes down to having faith that the person elected to lead picked his people well, listens to them when they makes sense and overrules them when they don’t.
Did you elect such a guy or didn’t you? Unlike his recent predecessors, this guy ain’t afraid to surround himself with the best and the brightest. If y’all know more and can do better, why ain’t YOU in the cabinet?
These problems grew over 96-plus months of deliberate Republican incompetence. Expecting a solution in 60 days is naive. Claiming an ability to foretell the future – while ignoring decent stock market gains, increases in housing figures and stablization of job losses transpiring IN THE HERE AND NOW – only serves to take your eye off the ball when focus is required.
Same shit got said by the moneyed classes back in the early 30s when they tried to get General Smedley Butler to figurehead the overthrow of FDR. Their children didn’t become fiscal slaves, and yours won’t either, unless y’all breath the same bad air too long.
Which some of you seem only too willing to do.
Obligatory dick joke. And buttsecks. Also.
What [re=271737]Canuckledragger[/re] said.
Also, GO MEAT. Also.
/Moronic Hillshire Farms commercial
[re=271737]Canuckledragger[/re]: Actually, Galbraith Jr. hates this plan too:
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-james-galbraith-geithner-plan-extremely-dangerous-banks-massively-corrupted-2009-3
[re=271749]jagorev[/re]: Yeah, I know. But he also thinks the CBO’s warning pronouncements are full of shit, too.
You’ll NEVER find an economic Goldilocks who thinks the plan is “just right,” because it contains something to offend EVERY sensibility. Even the authors acknowledge it’s painfully stinky to those who must pay for it, and won’t be a perfect solution to what ails us all. Just like the New Deal wasn’t perfect and didn’t sit well with those who had to pay for it. Trouble is, for all its warts and imperfections, the ND served the intended purpose and saved the world economy.
If Timmeh Da G’s plan is showing modest signs of working within a day of its announcement, I think it’s a tad premature to reach for the torches and pitchforks. [Keep 'em handy, mind... just not yet.] The fact that Hopey’s economic approval numbers keep rising will thin out the opposition over time.
Lest anyone think this is the plan that I would have crafted, it ain’t. I’m way to the left of all these clowns. But given that Hopey must preside over and fix a market-based economy, he’s crafted a plan that allows the market to gauge the value of the toxics, and earn a reward by taking some minimized risk. Which it ain’t been doing too well under Bush.
Those who worry so much about the cost and means of fixing this crisis might ask themselves a single question: WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN THE LAST EIGHT YEARS WHILE THIS WAS HAPPENING? Oh, you DIDN’T see it coming, but NOW you have ALL the solutions?????
When times are good, everyone wants their piece of the fatted calf. When they’re bad, nobody wants to contribute to fattening the calf.
As for me, when times are good I drink to celebrate. When they’re not, I drink to forget.
Um, where was I?
[re=271737]Canuckledragger[/re]: Too true, but I am intriqued by the notion of sipping Tequila from old jelly jars.
[re=271774]Mr Blifil[/re]: Come on down to the People’s Republic of Portland. We got books, we got coffee… our women have really hairy vaginas.
[re=271737]Canuckledragger[/re]: Basically, your argument boils down to, “Some say there’s WMDs in Iraq; some say not. Let’s teach the controversy.” Smart, independent voices are nearly unanimous that this plan is suboptimal and gives too much away to Wall Street.
Yes, it was 20 years of stupidity that got us here. That doesn’t change the fact that we need to see the Obama administration making the right moves directionally. Gitmo isn’t closed yet, but it will be. America’s not out of Iraq yet, but it will be. Torture hasn’t stopped yet, but it will. All the right moves and announcements.
Except on the economy, where Obama has caved to the experts who fucked us all.
We indeed did survive the Great Depression, but at an astronomical cost. To invoke the Children, there are kids who won’t get a good meal for an additional year because of all this screwing around. There is no time. Soon, this two-year recession will become a three-year, then a four-year. Then it’s President Palin.
Last week everybody was calling for the fivehead of Tim Geithner,
/fixed
[re=271686]Godless Liberal[/re]: Actually to paraphase an AA slogan: You don’t really live longer when you stop eating the things you love. It just seems that way.
Finally, someone has the balls to call out that mother fucking robe wearing hippie, his Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Fuck him and his peaceful chanting.
Geithner is here to stay now that he’s turned into a wacky black-jack dealer who rewards banks for busted hands. It’ win win with his new toxic asset plan designed to enable more lending. Is this not what led to the meltdown in the first place ? > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nay4VbUJl3E
Comments on this entry are closed.