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Month: April 2009

Making A List And Checking It Twice

by dday

The Albany Project is all over the twists and turns of the NY-20 special election between Scott Murphy and Jim Tedisco. Both candidates have been listed as ahead today, with the latest reversal showing Murphy up by 83 votes. More important, a judge ruled that absentee ballot counting will begin Wednesday, despite a deadline for overseas ballots having been extended to April 13. The Tedisco campaign had been arguing for a delay in the counting, and Phillip Anderson speculates why:

It looks increasingly obvious what the Tedisco/Stone/Ciampoli game plan is. They are trying to delay the counting of absentee votes while they build a list of paper ballots to challenge. It will be much harder for them to challenge those ballots once they are opened and counted, so they are looking to delay that for as long as possible so that they can prepare a list of names to challenge before those ballots ever see the light of day.

Yep, that’s got Roger Stone written all over it.

How are they compiling that list of names to challenge? Through polling.

A friend in Columbia County just got polled (Monday) about how he voted on his absentee.
He quizzed the pollster, and it was done on behalf if Tedisco.

Why poll? I suppose the GOP could claim either pure curiosity or that they’re trying to decide how/where to target resources for their challenge. Or if the result is favorable, to create an impression of victory.

The concern would be if the poll results are NOT truly anonymous and become a basis for challenging ballots before they’re opened.

Any other reports? This was in Columbia County.

UPDATE: Looks like plenty of folks have been polled about their absentee ballots. Since I posted this originally, I’ve received confirmations from about half a dozen folks. This message from a reader in Saratoga County is a representative example:

“I got a call on Thursday of last week about my father’s absentee ballot. My father uses my address for mailing but actually lives in a memory care facility.

Anyway they asked for my father and when I told them he wasn’t there but I was quite sure he had voted, they asked me if I knew for whom he had voted. I told them I couldn’t disclose that (I actually don’t know) but I could tell them I voted for Murphy.”

So this has actually been going on since right after election day.

UPDATE: From another reader in Dutchess County:

“Funny you should mention that poll – I got polled a few nights ago.

Poll – Hi ***** how are you? We are conducting an exit poll in the 20th CD to see how people voted. Do you have a few minutes.

Me – Sure

Poll – Did you vote in the 20th CD?

Me- Yes

Poll- Did you vote in person or by absentee?

Me – Absentee.

Poll – Did you vote for James Tedisco, Scott Murphy, or Eric Sundwall?

Me – Wait – The order of your question neither makes sense alphabetically, or in order of how they appear on the ballot. You must be from Tedisco’s camp

Poll – Ummmm ummmmm.

I voted for Murphy. Click.”

It’s possible, I suppose, that Tedisco and our pal Roger Stone have all the data they need to start challenging voters on Wednesday. I’ll give them points for innovation in voter suppression, at the least.

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Dirty, Dirty

by digby

I’m not crazy about Ed Shultz, so I can’t say I’m thrilled that he will be taking Shuster’s place on MSNBC. The Limbaugh style, no matter what is actually being said, just doesn’t work for me. However, while I appreciate the fact that Shuster is a good journalist and very popular among liberals these days, he has a bitchy tabloid streak that I won’t be sorry to see him leave behind if he goes back to straight reporting.

Here’s an example from today’s Hardball. (Shuster is subbing for Matthews.) After yukking it up over the teen-age sex lives of Levi and Bristol for the thousandth time, he came out with this:

Now we move on to another tabloid staple — Eliot Spitzer! He been making the rounds. The former governor is hoping to emerge as a Wall Street expert in the financial crisis. The problem is, he’s having to answer about the prostitute scandal that forced him out of office.

On the Today show this morning, Matt Lauer pressed Spitzer on just how long he’d been frequenting high priced prostitutes.

Lauer: I just wonder if you could give me some ballpark of how long this went on and how frequently it went on?

Spitzer: Not frequently, not long in the grand context of my life. It was an egregious violation of behavior that I fell into, for many reasons, but none of them an excuse or justifiable.

[end video]

Shuster: You FELL INTO IT!?? Like falling into a trap or a pothole! Governor, you paid four thousand dollars for that activity. Per hour! You chose to spend it that way! You didn’t just .. fall into it.

I think we know what Spitzer meant by “fall into it,” but Shuster just wanted an excuse to talk about Spitzer’s zipper so he reached hard for some reason to show it. It was not his finest moment.

More importantly, it’s disgusting that Spitzer “has to” answer questions about his sex life at this point. They didn’t file any charges, he’s resigned from office and I don’t think the public really gives a damn. Certainly, they could acknowledge the scandal and then move on rather than insisting on grilling him about the details. It is gratuitous and embarrassing to everyone watching as well as the man himself. But it is typical juvenile media behavior, replete with the usual nauseating spectacle of middle aged men giggling over some other man’s sexual foibles. Ugh.

Eliot Spitzer is an expert on the financial crisis and he shouldn’t have to subject himself to the media’s puerile curiosity in order to share that expertise with the public. In a sane world, he would be working in an official capacity to straighten out this mess, but because he had unsanctioned sex he is now relegated to the sidelines — mostly because the press can’t seem to stop acting like a bunch of Jonas Brothers fangirls whenever a story makes them feel funny down there.

Exhibit Tby digby
One wonders if this might not be one of the reasons John Brennan and the Republicans are so adamant about not releasing the torture memos. They’re evidence:

It is hard to predict what will happen next, but, if arrest warrants are issued, the Obama Administration may be forced either to extradite the former officials or to start its own investigation. Sands, who admires Obama, said, “I regret that I have added to his in-box when he has so much else to sort out. But I hope he does the right thing. There’s not much dispute anymore: torture happened, and the law is clear—torture must be punished.”

Afghanistan: Up The Escalator To Nowhere

by dday

Today, several bloggers are engaging in a day of discussion and debate about Administration policy in Afghanistan. Now that the President has announced his Afghanistan strategy and shared it with the world, we can begin to assess the policy. Europe has reacted to a call for more involvement with a show of support but few troops to offer to the effort, most of them temporary for security around the Afghan elections. And US commanders are already calling for 10,000 more additional US troops on top of the 17,000 combat forces and 4,000 trainers already pledged. Increasingly, this is becoming an American war.

Petraeus acknowledged that the ratio of coalition and Afghan security forces to the population is projected through 2011 to be significantly lower than the 20 troops per 1,000 people prescribed by the Army counterinsurgency manual he helped write.

“If you assume there is an insurgency throughout the country . . . you need more forces,” Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as head of U.S. Central Command, said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said the Pentagon has not yet forwarded the troop request to the White House.

Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, testified that the new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan is based on a plan to concentrate forces in “the insurgency belt in the south and east,” rather than throughout Afghanistan.

Obama “doesn’t have to make a decision until the fall, so the troops would arrive, as planned, in 2010,” she said.

The U.S. military has 38,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the number is projected to rise to 68,000 with deployments scheduled for this year. Those deployments include a 4,000-strong contingent of trainers from the 4th brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, 17,000 other combat troops, a 2,800-strong combat aviation brigade and thousands of support forces whose placement was not publicly announced, the Pentagon said.

Yes, the Administration snuck another 9,000 troops into the country when our heads were turned.

Clearly our commitment to the region in physical troops and treasure is escalating, and I fail to see how it could be de-escalated without the key goals being met. In other words, Plans A, B and C involve more and more troops to a part of the world that has not known peace in more than a generation, to carry out a policy that entrenches us in the region and with the governments there while publicly stating a desire to limit its focus.

If the Obama Administration sticks to these goals, of dismantling and disrupting Al Qaeda safe havens, I would be fine with it. But most of them don’t even exist inside Afghanistan but in Pakistan, where we are engaged in the same kind of “war at 30,000 feet” through unmanned drone strikes that failed to work in Afghanistan and necessitated the call for additional troops. In Pakistan, estimates of one million people have been displaced due to these airstrikes, and they have inflamed the local Taliban, who specifically cited the bombings as responsible for their run of suicide attacks deep inside their own country. We have succeeded in turning a national problem into a regional one, without the ability to mount a ground offensive inside Pakistan where the threat originates. In this sense, it can be said that the Taliban’s strength is directly proportional to US involvement.

As for Afghanistan, I basically agree with Juan Cole. Obama expresses a latter-day domino theory to justify occupation in Afghanistan, yet while a failed state would certainly have consequences for Al Qaeda, the threat of that failure has been largely overstated (in both Afghanistan and Pakistan), and there are certainly means to contain a terrorist threat without the need for military occupation. And, “when a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.”

In a later piece, Cole details how Afghanistan is turning into Iraq, with its large military bases, use of private military contractors, unrealistic talk of an imminent decision point, and worst, the rise of a fundamentalist cental government:

The US has actually only managed to install a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan, which is rolling back rights of women and prosecuting blasphemy cases. In a play for the Shiite vote (22% or so of the population), President Hamid Karzai put through civilly legislated Shiite personal status law, which affects Shiite women in that country. The wife will need the husband’s permission to go out of the house, and can’t refuse a demand for sex. (Since the 1990s there has been a movement in 50 or more countries to abandon the idea that spouses cannot rape one another, though admittedly this idea is new and was rejected in US law until recently).

No one seems to have noted that the Shiite regime in Baghdad is more or less doing the same thing. In Iraq, the US switched out the secular Baath Party for Shiite fundamentalist parties. Everyone keeps saying the US improved the status of women in both countries. Actually, in Iraq the US invasion set women back about 30 years. In Afghanistan, the socialist government of the 1980s, for all its brutality in other spheres, did implement policies substantially improving women’s rights, including aiming at universal education, making a place for them in the professions, and so forth. There were socialist Afghan women soldiers fighting the Muslim fundamentalist guerrillas that Reagan called “freedom fighters” and to whom he gave billions to turn the country into a conservative theocracy. I can never get American audiences to concede that Afghan women had it way better in the 1980s, and that it has been downhill ever since, mainly because of US favoritism toward patriarchal and anti-progressive forces.

After criticism, Hamid Karzai has vowed to review the spousal rape law, and elsewhere the Taliban has actually relaxed their policies on burqas and beards in their negotiations with the Afghan government. Yes negotiations:

…preliminary talks between President Hamid Karzai’s government and Taliban insurgents are already under way, and appear to have yielded a significant shift away from the Taliban’s past obsession with repressive rules and punishments governing personal behaviour. The Taliban are now prepared to commit themselves to refraining from banning girls’ education, beating up taxi drivers for listening to Bollywood music, or measuring the length of mens’ beards, according to representatives of the Islamist movement. Burqas worn by women in public would be “strongly recommended” but not compulsory. The undertakings have been confirmed by Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, who was the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan in the late 1990s, and who has been part of a Saudi-sponsored peace initiative.

According to Christoph Hörstel, a German analyst of Afghan affairs, Mullah Zaeef has confirmed that the Taliban are no longer insisting that their members should form the government. Instead, they would agree to rule by religious scholars and technocrats who meet with their approval following a national loya jirga, or community meeting, attended by public figures. The demand for a loya jirga could be met as early as next month if President Karzai convenes a meeting of elders to determine who should rule when his term officially ends on 21 May.

I sincerely believe the Administration would rather have the governments inside Pakistan and Afghanistan settle this danger themselves. That’s what’s behind the economic development and improving intergovernmental communication lines at the heart of the strategy. But the focus on “safe havens” betrays a rather antiquated thinking about where militant extremists can communicate and coordinate, namely anywhere. And the ability of Pakistan’s government to help the United States through destroying their homegrown threat, or even to govern themselves, must be in serious question at this point.

Neoconservatives have thus far been quite supportive of the Administration’s escalation policy in Afghanistan, and I agree that they pretty much pick their piece of imperialist policy that practically every President supports and latch themselves to it to maintain a certain legitimacy. In this case, I don’t view it as neocons clinging to a Democratic President’s policy, but the other way around, as they adhere to worn-out arguments to intensify a failed policy based on the continued fear of not wanting to lose a war.

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Lucky Waitress Redux

by digby

Over the week-end I wrote this post about CNN’s unbelievable report about the 84 year old waitress who was lucky to have a job and be able to survive because her house is paid off.

Anyway, Crooks and Liars captured the video and it’s really worth seeing so that you can actually see this woman waiting tables and hear her talk about how she thought she could “relax a little bit” but that “it’s not that way.” And then listen to the totally inane discussion by the journalists.

They don’t even mention the sad necessity for this 84 year old woman to still be doing manual labor.

Blackmail

by digby

It’s the Republican way. First the banksters strap an economic IED to their chests and demand that the government does it their way or else. Now, it appears the Senate has taken Dawn Johnsen and Harold Koh hostage and are threatening to go nuclear if the president doesn’t agree to hide Cheney’s torture secrets.

Here’s
Scott Horton:

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

Excuse me, but who the hell do they think they are? These are the people who put the Starr report on the internet. And now they are all about protecting privacy? I guess it makes some sense. What happens between consenting adults is everyone’s business as far as they are concerned. War crimes, however, are private matters between the criminals and the people who ordered them.

As dday points out below, the pressure on these memos is also coming from within the administration, led by none other than John Brennan. So, Obama has Republicans on his own team agitating for the Cheney gang. Love that bipartisanship. (I wonder if he’s helping out his allies in the senate at all?)

Let’s hope Obama stands up to them. If he shows weakness with the Republicans on this, there will be no end to it when it comes to judicial nominees. And it is vitally important that Obama balances out the courts after the past 25 years of centrist to far right appointments.

That Mighty Liberal Blog Power Made Manifest

by dday

A couple weeks ago, the Justice Department had planned to release a set of internal DoJ memos that, perhaps more than anything previously released, describe in great detail the exact types of interrogation procedures that were approved for use in secret CIA prisons. We know what was done, of course, but the memos would further provide evidence to the authorization and direction of torture at the highest levels. Some inside the White House would rather not see that happen.

As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. “Holy hell has broken loose over this,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities […]

Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National Security Council, argued that release of the memos could embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA, either by participating in overseas “extraordinary renditions” of high-level detainees or housing them in overseas “black site” prisons.

Brennan succeeded in persuading CIA Director Leon Panetta to become “engaged” in his efforts to block release, according to the senior official. Their joint arguments stalled plans to declassify the memos even though White House counsel Gregory Craig had already signed off on Holder’s recommendation that they should be disclosed, according to an official and another government source familiar with the debate. No final decision has been made, and it is likely Obama will have to resolve the matter, according to the sources who spoke to NEWSWEEK.

Brennan, Brennan, hmm, I can’t put my finger on where I’ve heard that name… oh, wait, he was the guy who “liberal bloggers” supposedly defeated for the post of CIA Director. Here was part of his withdrawal letter:

“It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration such as the pre-emptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding,” he wrote. “It is with profound regret that I respectfully ask that my name be withdrawn from consideration for a position within the intelligence community. The challenges ahead of our nation are too daunting, and the role of the CIA too critical, for there to be any distraction from the vital work that lays ahead,” Brennan wrote.

Yes, and those credentials as a “strong opponent” are certainly showing now. And it’s fantastic that he’s not proving a “distraction” in his role as a national security aide, by, say, pitching a fit and using institutional allies to undermine Justice Department directives.

Forget about Brennan’s specific views, which are problematic enough. Clearly he’s protecting his friends in the intelligence community and sparing them the embarrassment of having to face up to their actions, to say nothing of the criminal liability. The cover story that Brennan wants to protect foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA is ridiculous, as Hilzoy notes:

Fear of embarrassing countries who cooperated with us cannot possibly be the reason for not releasing the memos. The solution is too simple: just redact their names and any identifying details. Are we supposed to believe that this has not occurred to Panetta or Holder? Or that there is some identifying detail that is so thoroughly intertwined with the legal arguments that it cannot possibly be edited out?

Give me a break.

If foreign countries are so embarrassed by participating in torture, naming and shaming them would maybe stop them from doing it in the future?

Clearly, Brennan wants to keep open the option of torturing in secret, or at the least save his pals some heartburn.

Boy, I know I’m sure glad liberal bloggers fought the good fight and denied Brennan an important voice inside the Administration. We sure showed him, right?

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Laserium

by digby

Apparently, US soldiers are being injured with friendly laser fire in Iraq:

An American soldier was blinded in one eye and three others required medical evacuation out of Iraq in a series of laser “friendly fire” incidents, the U.S. military has disclosed. These injuries are caused by the misuse of dangerous green-laser dazzlers. Since November 2008, a single unit in Iraq “has experienced 12 green-laser incidents involving 14 soldiers and varying degrees of injury. Three soldiers required medical evacuation out of Iraq and one soldier is now blind in one eye,” writes Sgt. Crystal Reidy, from the 3rd Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), or ESC. Captain Russell Harris, a Troop Commander with 3rd ESC reports that his troops have suffered “temporary blindness, headaches and blurred vision,” as a result of laser incidents. Others describe severe, 48-hour migraines after lasing. These types of laser injuries appear to be common when units first deploy to Iraq, and may be the result of inadequate training; soldiers may assume that the lasers are harmless and use them without due caution.[…]
“We are all U.S. soldiers, you would never point your rifle at another soldier, don’t point your laser,” says a Sergeant in the 3rd ESC who experienced a laser incident.

Absolutely. These things are obviously really dangerous when shined in someone’s face. So what are they used for?

In 2006, the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force reportedly acquired 2,000 green lasers for use at checkpoints, as a tool to warn oncoming drivers to stop. Although they are said to be safe for eyes, the unspecified lasers are also described as being fifty times the power of normal red-laser pointers. (Green light is far more effective than red for dazzling.) MSNBC noted in 2006 that troops were trained not to use the laser closer than 75 yards, as this “would cause eye damage.”

You’d better hope you don’t take a wrong turn in Iraq, that’s for sure. But hey, if they didn’t want to be blinded, they shouldn’t be living in a country that the US had to invade for no good reason. They only have themselves to blame.

No Country For Old Newt

by digby

If there’s one thing the conservatives are good at, it’s rewriting history. Already we see them hard at work pressing the lie that conservative Republicans were opposed to Bush’s free spending ways. C&L reports on Newtie’s latest:

“If the Republicans can’t break out of being the right wing party of big government, then I think you would see a third party movement in 2012,” Newt Gingrich said during a Wednesday speech in Missouri. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the former Speaker of the House expanded on why conservatives might turn away from the Republican Party. “Republicans need to understand that there’s a country which did not like the big spending of the last administration, didn’t like the interventionist policies of the last administration and the country at large would like to see a genuine alternative to the Obama strategy of basically trying to run the entire economy from the white house and basically trying to increase government, I think, by 36% this year, which is the largest single increase outside of war in American history,” said Gingrich.

Oh please. Sure, there’s a “country” out there that didn’t like any of Bush’s policies and it’s called “America.” Contrary to his other assertion, they aren’t upset about Obama running the economy from the White House because that’s a load of bs that only addled dittoheads actually think is happening. And if there is a country of people who hate both Bush’s and Obama’s policies, they are pretty likely to be lefties who have a whole set of concerns that have absolutely nothing to do with concerns about too much intrusion into the private sector.
The right wing stuck with that mess Bush all the way to the bitter end and didn’t seem to be agitated at all about his big spending ways which were obvious from the first few months of his presidency when he started passing out thousand dollar bills to his millionaire friends. Here’s the beginning of Bush’s slide in the polls right after the 2004 election, from Gallup:

There have been double-digit decreases in Bush approval ratings among pure independents (those who are independent and do not “lean” toward either party) and moderate and liberal Republicans. Pure independents’ support has fallen from 42% to 28%, while moderate and liberal Republicans’ support has dropped from 83% to 69%. Conservative Republicans remain overwhelmingly likely to approve of Bush, but his support among this group has fallen below 90% in the past 11 months.

Here’s where he ended up in November of 2008:

Views of President Bush’s popularity are highly partisan. Only 6% of Democrats approve [and 18% of Independents] of the job he has done as president, while 57% of Republicans approve.

That 57% were the conservatives. It was the moderates Bush lost and contrary to Newties wet dream, they haven’t yet been brainwashed into believing that Obama is the second coming of Hugo Chavez. This “country” of Bush and Obama hating fiscal conservatives that he fantasizes about, can fit into his corner office at AEI.

Didn’t Tom Brokaw Call This “The Fleecing Of America”?

by dday

I don’t know that I have much to say about the dysfunction in the Obama economic team that wouldn’t just be a rewrite of Glenn Greenwald’s piece, but it may be worth it to just disseminate the information. Here’s the story so far:

Banks lost a ton of money by making terrible bets based on fanciful notions that housing prices would go up 20% year over year approximately forever. All the while the executives sat on each other’s boards and handed out giant bonuses and compensation packages to each other while the financial sector grew essentially out of control. In the process, they used their money and power to effectively buy Capitol Hill and make sure their portion of the economy could keep growing, whether through usurious interest rates, a total lack of oversight (including by some of the same people now charged with overseeing the banks) or just massive wealth transfers. When everything came crashing down, the very last thing these banking interests wanted to do was admit defeat or give back any of their money and power. At the same time, the entire country was furious at them. So they set to work bribing who they knew would be top officials in the next government, people like Larry Summers, who honestly didn’t even need to be bribed. And every time Congress or the executive branch threatened to end their party and put limits on their power, they found in Summers and other officials a willing partner in subverting the rules that would make them give back their bonuses and excessive compensation, which by the way the taxpayer is funding. We, the taxpayers, are told that this is necessary to ensure financial sector participation in the program to rid the banks of all of their bad assets at a potentially massive taxpayer expense. However, left unsaid is the fact that the same banks are planning to game the system by passing the same bad assets back and forth among each other at high prices, and using tricky accounting tactics to pretend that the assets on their books have value.

I think we can go to Greenwald now:

Rubin, Summers and Greenspan succeeded in inducing Congress — funded, of course, by these same financial firms — to enact legislation blocking the CFTC from regulating these derivative markets. More amazingly still, the CFTC, headed back then by Born, is now headed by Obama appointee Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive (naturally) who was as instrumental as anyone in blocking any regulations of those derivative markets (and then enriched himself by feeding on those unregulated markets).

Just think about how this works. People like Rubin, Summers and Gensler shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting. When in government, they ensure that the laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall St. firms, literally abolishing all safeguards and allowing them to pillage and steal. Then, when out of government, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented when in government. Then, when their party returns to power, they return back to government, where they continue to use their influence to ensure that the oligarchical circle that rewards them so massively is protected and advanced. This corruption is so tawdry and transparent — and it has fueled and continues to fuel a fraud so enormous and destructive as to be unprecedented in both size and audacity — that it is mystifying that it is not provoking more mass public rage.

At the same time, the exact same banks which the government has propped up to the tune of trillions of dollars will not lift a finger to help out industries that produce tangible goods, further crumbling them and increasing the financial sector share of the economy.

And the lesson we have to learn here is that the financial sector bought government and has thus far gotten what they paid for.

I think I’ll watch some basketball. Go Cavs! Don’t worry, your government is in control. You are free… to do as we tell you

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