On the Senate floor for a photo session in 2004, Dick Cheney had a run-in with Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). After the two argued over Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and President Bush’s judicial nominees, the then-vice president told the senator “f–k yourself.”
Cheney, who has never regretted the incident, appeared on Thursday’s “Dennis Miller Show” and took a compliment about it from the host.
“I love that move,” Miller said while thanking Cheney for going after Leahy. “One of my favorite stories — muttering that.”
Cheney responded that a lot of people liked the comment. “That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.”
I completely agree.
In the sense that it was less despicable to tell someone to go fuck themselves than to authorize llegal invasions, murder, torture, and surveillance, not to mention arrange payoffs to cronies in the energy business, not to mention [fill this space with the truly endless list of Cheney’s crimes and ethical lapses].
Y’gotta love the guy. Reading Krugman is like reading everything that blogging should be, but rarely is: Informed, compelling, documented, provocative, pithy, witty, sometimes snarky and angry commentary by someone who knows exactly what s/he’s talking about. And Krugman is sly as a fox – but not the newsy kind of fox, of course.
I suppose I could quote this in context, but why bother? Heaven knows, the rightwing won’t:
[W]hat’s bad for Wall Street would be good for America.
Krugman’s riffing, of course, on the infamous, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” (which was also taken out of context, although from what I can tell, the context barely helps). He’s cruisin’ for a bruisin’, baiting his hook with rhetorical flies for Newts and other slimy critters. I can hear the howls of horror, that a Nobel Prize Winner would dare to assert so, so… crudely that the financial industry, one of the great engines of American economic prosperity – one third of total domestic profits in 2008!* – are working at exact cross-purposes with US interests. That is, Wall Street is traitorous scum.**
It will be interesting to see if he is called on this by the usual suspects. And even more interesting to see how he reacts and handles them. All of us would learn a lot. Or maybe they’ll ignore him. It doesn’t matter. Sooner or later Krugman will succeed in saying something equally “outrageous” at a time when the right will judge it is politically appropriate to attack him. Krugman’s throwing down the gauntlet – he not only welcomes their hatred, he is courting it.
Thanks, Professor K. You made my morning. I’m still chuckling.
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*My God, is something that dangerously, insanely unstable possible? But that’s what Krugman says. Could an economist-type verify this, please, for the ignoramuses amongst us (starting with the present author)?
** I know, I know, that’s not what Krugman said, unless you squint really hard, twist yourself into knots, and really hate the fellow’s guts. In other words, that’s exactly how the rightwing and the media will hear it.
Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.
The SEC’s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.
The staffers’ behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says.
It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
• A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as “Sex” or “Pornography.” Yet he still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC’s internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
• Seventeen of the employees were “at a senior level,” earning salaries of up to $222,418.
This was happening between 2007 and 2008. That’s very clarifying.
Following up on tristero’s post from this morning about “foodie elites” I thought I’d throw out this fascinating documentary that appeared last night on PBS called “Food Inc.” (You can watch the whole thing online at the link.)
I think the part that struck me the most (after the horror shows of animal cruelty and killing, as always) was the news that Monsanto patented a genetically modified soy bean seed and since the 1990s has pretty much taken over all soybean cultivation in the US. The problem is that since they “own” the patent, they also own the seeds and so farmers aren’t allowed to keep them and use them for next years crops anymore. Those that Monsanto suspects of doing this are tracked down by private detectives and sued by the company, often losing tens of thousands of dollars in the process, just trying to defend themselves. They interviewed a bunch of farmers, some of whom had never even used the Monsanto seeds but ended up with some through that high tech method called pollination, who were so ground down they just gave in. It was something out of a dystopian novel.
And that’s just one small segment of the problems with our food supply. The biggest is that we are all subsidizing the growing of the crops that are making us the most unhealthy, almost to the exclusion of anything that is. It explains a lot.
BTW:I’m privileged to live just blocks away from a world class Farmer’s Market,so buying tasty, just picked produce in season is easy and cheap. (I don’t know what this guy is talking about.) We’re lucky that way. If that makes me a foodie, then I’ll wear the label (dripping with Chandler strawberries and heirloom Brandywine tomato juice)proudly.
Chris Matthews asked Brian Bilbray how the Arizona police would know how to target potential “illegal” immigrants without resorting to racial profiling:
Chris Matthews: …like what, like what? Give me a non-ethnic aspect that would tell you to pick up somebody.
Rep. Bilbray: They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of …right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes. But mostly by behavior it’s mostly behavior, just as the law enforcement people here in Washington, DC does it based on certain criminal activity there is behavior things that professionals are trained in across the board and this group shouldn’t be exempt from those observations as much as anybody else.
Oh, he’s absolutely right about that. They’re usually wearing a big sombrero and a pair of bandoliers across their chests. If the cops see anyone who looks and acts like this, they should probably flag him down and demand his papers:
Gallup highlights what seems to be a contradiction in its polling on financial reform:
When Wall Street is not mentioned, net public support (percentage in favor minus percentage opposed) for banking reform legislation is +3 points, but when it is mentioned, net support is +14. […]
On both questions, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support banking reform. Seven in 10 Democrats favor the proposed new federal regulatory powers, regardless of the wording. By contrast, Republicans show greater support for reform when “Wall Street” is invoked than when it is not (35% vs. 22%).
Yglesias wonders what the cause of this strange difference could be and hypothesizes that it might be a hostility to New York. Krugman says:
I think what it really tells us is how little voters — and, I dare say, Republican voters in particular — understand the issues. My bet is that a lot of people really don’t realize that when we use the shorthand of referring to Wall Street, we’re actually talking about high finance in general. Scary — and it’s a lack of understanding that the likes of Mitch McConnell are happy to exploit.
I think there’s a simpler explanation: Republicans associate Wall Street with bailouts and bailouts with Democrats. That’s an effect of not understanding the issues, but I think it’s more a result of very powerful conservative propaganda which has succeeded in tying the Democrats to the unpopular Wall Street while keeping all those nice “other” big banks firmly in the Real American camp.
One of the consequences of letting this right wing populist swill ferment over the past year is that it’s now become an incomprehensible toxic cocktail of anti-socialism, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist cronyism all aimed at the left. It doesn’t make any sense, but they’ve managed to mix every evil symbol of the 20th century into their critique of the Democrats so that they no longer have to defend anything that’s unpopular.
Update: Uhm — I should note that packing the administration with Feddie Boyz and other Dear Friends of the Masters Of The Universe undoubtedly contributed to this perception. The Republicans are only half wrong — both parties are compromised.
I was watching a tedious debate on Hardball about the meltdown and financial reform, marveling at the faceless wingnut gasbag’s blithe statements that everything would be great if the government just stayed out of things in the event of a crisis. I shouted some epithet at the TV and then muttered, “they actually want another great depression.”
Mr digby said, “it worked for Hitler.”
Of course. I just haven’t been looking at all this from the right angle.
In case you were wondering about next steps, Robert Reich says there are three things that the new financial reform bill doesn’t do that it needs to do:
1. Require that trading of all derivatives be done on open exchanges where parties have to disclose what they’re buying and selling and have enough capital to pay up if their bets go wrong. The exception in the current bill for so-called “unique” derivatives opens up a loophole big enough for bankers to drive their Ferrari’s through.
2. Resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act in its entirety so commercial banks are separated from investment banks. The current bill doesn’t go nearly far enough. Commercial banks should take deposits and lend money. Investment banks should be limited to the casino we call the stock market, helping companies issue new issues and making bets. Nothing good comes of mixing the two. We learned this after the Great Crash of 1929, and then forgot it in 1999 when Congress allowed financial supermarkets to do both.
3. Cap the size of big banks at $100 billion in assets. The current bill doesn’t limit the size of banks at all. It creates a process for winding down the operations of any bank that gets into trouble. But if several big banks are threatened, as they were when the housing bubble burst, their failure would pose a risk to the whole financial system, and Congress and the Fed would surely have to bail them out. The only way to ensure no bank is too big to fail is to make sure no bank is too big, period. Nobody has been able to show any scale efficiencies over $100 billion in assets, so that should be the limit.
Wall Street doesn’t want these three major reforms because they’d cut deeply into profits, and it’s using its formidable lobbying clout with both parties to prevent these reforms from even from surfacing.
Update: This bodes well:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said a vote today in the Senate Budget Committee showed the potential for legislation to break up financial institutions considered “too big to fail.”
In a strong signal of the growing momentum behind proposals to dismantle financial institutions that dominate the U.S. economy, the budget panel narrowly voted 12 to 10 against a Sanders’ amendment.
“While we didn’t quite win today’s vote, we took a major step forward in showing there is a great deal of support for breaking up huge financial institutions,” Sanders said. “We must break up these behemoths not only because they are a burden on taxpayers but because of the incredible economic power they exert on the economy through their monopolistic practices. The enormous concentration of ownership in the financial sector has led to higher bank fees, usurious interest rates on credit cards, and fewer choices for consumers.”
Sanders said the four major U.S. banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Well Fargo – issue two-thirds of the credit cards in the country, write half the mortgages and collectively hold $7.4 trillion in assets, about 52 percent of the nation’s estimated total output last year.
“Incredibly, despite all of them being bailed out during the Wall Street meltdown because they were ‘too big to fail,’ three of them are now bigger than before the bailout,” Sanders said. Since the 2008 taxpayer bailout of big banks, Wells Fargo has grown 43 percent bigger; JP Morgan Chase has grown 51 percent bigger; and Bank of America is now 138 percent bigger than before the financial crisis began.
Sanders said there is a wide and growing spectrum of support for breaking up big banks. Three Federal Reserve bank presidents – James Bullard, president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ Kansas City Fed President Thomas M. Hoenig, and Dallas Fed President Richard W. Fisher – all support breaking up too-big-to-fail banks.
To find a “better”– in every sense of the term– House Speaker than Nancy Pelosi, you either have to go back in history from way before my time or you have to take some mighty powerful psychedelics. The idea of replacing the most progressive Speaker in any of our lifetimes with one as reactionary– not to mention corrupt– as John Boehner is… well, just unthinkable. But when you look at the DCCC Front Line list of their most vulnerable incumbents… well, with a few exceptions– Alan Grayson (D-FL), Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH), Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH), Dan Maffei (D-NY), Mark Schauer (D-MI), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Gary Peters (D-MI), Steve Kagen (D-WI), Jim Himes (D-CT)– who could even root for this motley crew of Blue Dogs and aisle-crossing cowards?
So… the best thing would be to play offense and help elect some progressives in open red seats, beat some Blue Dogs in primaries and then make sure they win in the general election in November, and, best of all, take on some Republicans and beat them outright. Blue America has been trying to help with all three tactics. Our main GOP incumbents so far have been Virginia Foxx (NC) and Ken Calvert (CA), where we have excellent progressive challengers in Billy Kennedy and Bill Hedrick. This week we added a third candidate, in the toughest race of all: Justin Coussoule, taking on the would-be Speaker, John Boehner, in western Ohio.
Justin will join us today (at 1pm, EST) at Crooks and Liars for a live session. You’ll find an exceptional young man, a West Point graduate and former Army officer, married for 10 years and the father of two young children. An attorney, he worked as a legislative assistant for outstanding progressive Rep. Maurice Hinchey, started and ran a small business and currently works for Procter & Gamble.
On Monday he did a guest post about John Boehner’s role in trying to make sure we can’t ever hold Wall Street accountable. Read it; it’ll give you some background about how he thinks and where he’s coming from.
And read the rest of Howie’s post to see just what a great candidate he is. As he points out, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he could win. And God knows it’s worth having somebody challenge him and ask some of those touchy questions he doesn’t want asked. Keep in mind that in an anti-incumbent year very strange things can happen. It’s not like Boehner’s popular or anything:
Boehner received the lowest favorability rating (just 12%) of any elected official evaluated by respondents. Boehner’s favorable rating was lower than the President, Congress in general, the Democratic leadership, the Senate minority leader and even the IRS. And the poll was conducted by none other than Fox News. The poll results only confirm 8th District voters’ frustration with Boehner’s now legendary rants, emotional outbursts, degrading remarks and unprofessional conduct.
A reflection of that is that Boehner is facing two mainstream conservatives in a primary challenge and two teabaggers in the general, one a Libertarian and one the Constitutional Party nominee. The Tea Party itself is a big deal in western Ohio and the one thing they all remember about Boehner is that he voted for the bank bailout twice and twisted other Republicans’ arms to vote for it after it failed to pass the first time. Without Boehner, the bill would never have passed. Teabaggers– basically angry Republican activists– voting for the third-party candidates or staying away, or even voting for Justin, could help defeat Boehner.
Join us at 1PM at C&L and chat with Blue America candidate for congress Justin Coussoule.
Update: Alan grays sez:
Dear Ohio:
You have a choice.
You can elect a Congressman who spent five years as a West Point graduate in the service of our country, or you can elect a Congressman who spent eight weeks in the military and then quit.
You can elect a Congressman who will fight the lobbyists, or you can elect a Congressman who handed out tobacco lobby checks on the Floor of the House, when the House was voting on a tobacco bill.
You can elect a Congressman who will prevent bailouts, or you can elect a Congressman who bailed out of the stock market minutes after he attended an emergency meeting with the Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
You can elect a Congressman who will work hard to create jobs, or you can elect a Congressman who works hard on his tan.
You can elect a Congressman who will spend his time working hard to improve your lives, or you can elect a Congressman who will spend his time playing golf.
It’s your choice. I know whom I’d choose. And it ain’t the guy in the white shorts:
