Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Honorable Putz

by digby

I’ve had it. McCain corrects some batty Republican on the obvious fact that Obama isn’t an Arab and the gasbags are all hailing the return of the “Real John McCain.” The excuses are flowing all over the place — his campaign failed him by forcing him to go negative when he really didn’t want to, he lost his way temporarily and rediscovered what he was all about, Palin was a loose cannon. He’s hated hearing all this nasty stuff about at his rallies.

This is utter nonsense. McCain has been a prick throughout this campaign and his crowds have been a bunch of jackasses. Remember this?

The man is not a man of honor. He’s an angry jerk who unleashed Sarah W. saying the word terrorist over and over again when criticizing Obama. Here are the two patriots on Hannity just this week:

Did McCain sound reluctant to you?

Here’s a little recap of his honorable behavior from a must read profile in this month’s Rolling Stone:

Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. “If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print,” says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain’s press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an “immature and unprofessional reaction to slights” that is “little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy.”

McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming that he was an “incompetent little shit.” Jon Hinz, the director of the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.

During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain’s wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was “getting a little thin up there.” McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.

In the Senate — where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain has “very few friends” — his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. “Are you calling me stupid?” Grassley demanded. “No, I’m calling you a fucking jerk!” yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was “going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain.” The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son’s case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.

McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party to the right, a “pompous self-serving son of a bitch” who “possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain.” In 1999, he told Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that “only an asshole would put together a budget like this.”

Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. “Wait a second here,” Cornyn said. “I’ve been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You’re out of line.” McCain exploded: “Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room.” The incident foreshadowed McCain’s 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly “suspended” his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.

At least three of McCain’s GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain’s “temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn’t “want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that “the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.”

The man is an ass. He’s always been as ass. He has absolutely no problem in that footage from just a couple of days ago insinuating the Obama was consorting with terrorists, knowing full well that the context of that was

The only reason he’s ever spoken out against such behavior in the past is to promote the completely bogus idea that he is some sort of honorable, patriotic man. And that’s what he did yesterday. The attacks aren’t working and they are destroying McCain’s reputation. That’s the reason he stepped in.

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Friday Night News Dump, Alaska Style

by dday

Sarah Palin abused the power of her office. Why didn’t they read the report she released exonerating herself? Wouldn’t that be the fair and balanced thing to do?

A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state’s public safety commissioner. The investigative report concludes that a family grudge wasn’t the sole reason for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan but says it likely was a contributing factor.

The Republican vice presidential nominee has been accused of firing a commissioner to settle a family dispute. Palin supporters have called the investigation politically motivated.

Monegan says he was dismissed as retribution for resisting pressure to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with the governor’s sister. Palin says Monegan was fired as part of a legitimate budget dispute.

Well, she’s said six or seven different things, that’s just today’s excuse, but that’s besides the point. By the way that “politically motivated” investigation included 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.

The report has been released (by unanimous vote of the Council) and can be found here. The nut graf:

For the reasons explained in Section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) provides

“The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”

The wingnuts will hang their hat on the fact that the report says that Palin’s firing of Walt Monegan was within her statutory authority, but the above paragraph doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room. Her handpicked Attorney General failed to turn over documents in the case, too.

I think the best way for the McCain campaign to spin this is to assert that, by being found guilty of abusing power and obstructing justice, Palin has now shown herself to be perfectly qualified for the office of Vice President as it has been conceived by Dick Cheney.

Or, they can go the route of Palin’s lawyer and claim that the report is incomplete because they never talked to Palin herself, which leaves me to wonder if there’s a word in Eskimo for “chutzpah.”

Perhaps the best, or saddest, part of this is that they tried to stage a replay of the Brooks Brothers riot, this time by dressing up in red noses and rallying against what I guess they’d call a “reindeer court”:

As for the nitty-gritty details, I figure Marcy Wheeler’s better at that than I am.

Business As Usual

by digby

Here’s some chutzpah for you. Eric Umansky and Sharona Coutts report that AIG — your AIG — is still lobbying:

Earlier today, we wondered whether AIG is still lobbying the federal government. After all, taxpayers have lent the failing insurance giant roughly $120 billion and now own 80 percent of the company. We spent days ringing AIG, the Fed and Department of Treasury, none of them could give us an answer. Well, we finally have one. An AIG spokesman, Joseph Norton, told us via e-mail a few minutes ago: “We are not a GSE [government-sponsored entity] and are therefore not restricted. We remain a share-holder owned entity and continue advocacy activities.” In other words, AIG is going to keep lobbying. By contrast Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac immediately shut down their lobbying after the government took them over.

Can you believe it? The government is paying lobbyists to lobby itself.

We shouldn’t be surprised. They treated themselves to spa treatments on the government dime after the bailout, so they haven’t exactly reconciled themselves to their new reality. They think they are still a high flying insurance company making huge bucks for the Big Money Boyz. They haven’t reckoned with the fact that they are now civil servants.

I know there is a certain sense of surreality about all this and that people haven’t really had a chance to catch their breaths and all. But the financial sector had better get a grip right now and recognize that the country has almost no patience with them at the moment and they will be rolling out the metaphorical guillotine if they don’t get some humility right now. I know it’s hard for former masters of the universe to accept that they have lost their magical powers, but well… they have.

Dark Forces

by digby

I’ve been getting some flak for suggesting that the conservatives are building up a racist argument to explain the financial crisis. And, to some degree, that’s fair. They aren’t just blaming racial and ethnic minorities for the problem. They are also blaming their best friends, Wall Street and liberals. You can always count on Ann Coulter to get to the heart of the matter at a time like this:

When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches, political correctness was given a veto over sound business practices.

In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration’s affirmative action lending policies as one of the “hidden success stories” of the Clinton administration, saying that “black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded.”

Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn’t get out of their loans by selling their houses.

A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it’s gone off.

In Bush’s first year in office, the White House chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that the government’s “implicit subsidy” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk for the entire financial system.

Rep. Barney Frank denounced Mankiw, saying he had no “concern about housing.” How dare you oppose suicidal loans to people who can’t repay them! The New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “under heavy assault by the Republicans,” but these entities still had “important political allies” in the Democrats.

Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.

Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.

This would sound like irrelevant raving to me except for the fact that this economic crisis and the fact that we have a person with a “foreign sounding name” running for president seems to have made the right wing come completely unhinged. And I’d worry much less if the Republican establishment, including the Republican candidates for president and vice president, weren’t stoking the free floating anxiety out in the nation instead of trying to calm it.

If you’ve seen these videos and others that are floating around the intertubes, you know what I’m talking about:

Kathy G writes:

I’m trying not to be a drama queen about this stuff, but honest to God, I am very scared for Barack Obama. Just watch those videos again. Look at the faces of those people. Listen to their voices. I don’t know what’s scarier: the ranting hysterics, or the ones who, with cool, calm, unembarrassed certainty, aver that, oh yes, of course they know that Barack Obama is a terrorist who hates America.

Clearly, there are a whole lot of hateful, enraged, and very crazy people out there. No, I don’t think the majority of McCain/Palin supporters are like that, but yes, enough of them are like that, that I think we all should be seriously disturbed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen, or heard of, anything like it. And just a few, or even one, of those people are capable of inflicting incalculable damage.

[…]

Dark forces have been let loose across the land. The rancid rhetoric coming out of the McCain/Palin campaign is but one example. But there ae many more: there’s the Protocols of the Elders of Zion-like attempt of many on the right to blame the financial crisis on greedy, lazy minorities. There’s the conspiracy mongering and rank insanity over at the National Review’s The Corner, where the leading lights of American conservatism seriously debate whether Barack Obama is a Maoist or Stalinist. Ultimately, though, it is the McCain/Palin campaign which is setting the tone here. And they, more than anyone else, are responsible for enabling this horrorshow. Their words feed the madness, and stoke the rage. Overarching ambition and searing hatred have eaten away at them, leaving holes in the places where their souls used to be. I watch and read this stuff, and I despair. It’s not that I think it will actually hurt Obama much at the voting booth. In fact, I’m more convinced than ever that he will win. And not only that: it might not even be close. And he may win with enough of a commanding majority in Congress to actually accomplish something big. But, like Digby, I do worry that a toxic narrative is taking hold that will cause substantial numbers of Americans to see an Obama presidency as something that is illegitimate and must be destroyed. And honest to God, I worry about Barack’s personal safety as well. He and Michelle are two exceedingly brave people. God only knows the thoughts that must go through their heads every day.

read on…

I think what I find most disconcerting about this is that these angry people in the audience keep screaming that they want McCain to take the gloves off and really go after Obama. Apparently, they believe he’s been some kind of a softie. Today, they cable netwroks are showing footage of a man who says that there’s got to be some way to “line up” all of these guys Obama’s been palling around with. The tone is vicious and violent.

And lest you think this is just some rubes with pitchforks out in Jesusland, the alleged intelligentsia of the right wing is no less hysterical:

Second, and relatedly, Obama’s radicalism, beginning with his Alinski/ACORN/community organizer period, is a bottom-up socialism. This, I’d suggest, is why he fits comfortably with Ayers, who (especially now) is more Maoist than Stalinist. What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions in order to change them from within — in essence, using the system to supplant the system. A key requirement of this stealthy approach (very consistent with talking vaporously about “change” but never getting more specific than absolutely necessary) is electability. With an enormous assist from the media, which does not press him for specifics, Obama has walked this line brilliantly. Absent convincing retractions of his prior radical positions, though, we should construe shrewd moves like the ostensibly reasonable Second Amendment position as efforts make him electable.

This is why Ayers is so important: it is a peek behind the curtain of Obama’s rhetoric. When he talks about “education reform,” that sounds admirable and, given the state of the schools, entirely reasonable. But when you look at what the Obama/Ayers program really tried to do to the schools (see, e.g., Stanley’s work on this), it is radical. With a guy who speaks in euphemisms — “change,” “social justice,” “due process,” etc. — it is vital to have concrete examples of how these concepts are put into action.

Ok, so you have the base and you have the wingnut welfare queens growing ever more unhinged. But it’s actually still a bit of a shock to me that the McCain campaign itself is feeding into this fear and anger with nary a thought to the context in which this election is being fought. He is still a US Senator with a reputation and family legacy to protect. And yet he is dangerously close to endorsing the assassination of Barack Obama.

They have a perfect right to fight hard for the election and I wouldn’t expect them to be nice about it. But we are in the midst of a national crisis and people are feeling disoriented and scared. Stoking that free floating anxiety at a time like this with dark suggestions of Obama being part of a terrorist infiltration of the government is beyond the pale.

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ACLUORN

by dday

As the McCain campaign sinks into the fever swamps and goes about as far as you can go before someone cries “racism,” they’ve teamed up their irresponsible behavior and incitement to riot with the project to delegitimize the election itself. They just released a Web video highlighting Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN.

This is all they’ve got left, so they’re going with it. A dark, twisted conspiracy theory based on ignorance and deep-seeded xenophobia and hatred. And the BBQ-stained media is helping them along by highlighting the couple thousand voter registration forms (at MOST, and that’s probably exaggerated) that ACORN alerted election authorities about being fraudulent, instead of the 1.3 million voters they registered accurately, most of them in low- and middle-income communities. This is an attack on people’s right to vote and participate in politics.

In the report, Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found that about half were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed “Johns, Jimmy” using the address of a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar’s offices have come across similar problems in recent days.

What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:

ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. […]

The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.

According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. “It’s certainly true. They did have three batches separated.” she told me this morning. “There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info — like no voter ID number or a missing birthday — and another batch they called ‘suspicious.’ “

Why would ACORN submit registration forms it had deemed “suspicious”? Because under most state laws, voter registration organizations are required to turn in all the forms they receive. In a phone conversation today, ACORN press coordinator Charles Jackson confirmed that this is the case in Indiana.

They turn THEMSELVES in and these idiots on the right think they’re scamming the election. They’re nothing but a scapegoat.

In addition, as Adam Serwer notes there is a dinstinction between registration fraud and voter fraud. To my knowledge Mickey Mouse or Moamar Qadafy or George Jetson has never attempted to vote in a national election, even if their “registrations” got by the eyes of censors, which they wouldn’t, if election officials paid attention to ACORN flagging the bad forms. In fact, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud whatsoever, and this has been verified dozens of times. Josh Marshall explains in a piercing post:

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of ‘voter fraud’ are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don’t remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to.

In the main I would agree that it’s not a good idea to pay people to register voters, especially on a per-registration basis, because it incentivizes employees to falsify forms to keep their numbers up. In the end, the only people harmed by bad voter registration forms are ACORN themselves, because it means they overpaid their workers. I would say the same thing about signature gatherers for ballot initiatives. I would support that legislation if it came up for a vote. But the conservatives never introduce such legislation, even though they yell and carp about this every couple years. They don’t want to fix the problem. They want an organization they can point at and demonize, and ACORN fits the bill. They want to use the power they have through the right-wing media and the Republican National Committee and even the Justice Department to push this narrative of Democratic perfidy and black people stealing elections.

Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That’s the key. What you’re hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

Meanwhile, there’s a very real story about thousands of voter registrations being blocked in swing states, mass purges of the voter rolls, and all kinds of fallout from the 2002 Help America Vote Act, passed by Republicans and signed by George W. Bush. But that doesn’t get mentioned, because there’s no group like ACORN to tar and feather.

If you’re poor, if you’re struggling, if you are a minority, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And furthermore, they don’t care if this backfires. They mean to call into question the election and the office of the Presidency itself under a Democratic Administration. They win either way.

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Greatness

by digby

As I’m watching the Dow tank once again, with footage of George W. Bush blathering incomprehensibly in the background, it occurs to me that I may have been wrong in seeing the Bush administration as the book-end to the Nixon years. All the corruption and arrogance and imperial design made me think this was a phenomenon of the baby boom era.

Now I’m beginning to think it’s the bizarroworld version of Roosevelt. It started with a pearl harbor style attack and ended with an economic crisis. And at each turn, instead of meeting the challenge with creativity and intelligence, Bush exacerbated the problems and made them worse.

Somebody asked me the other day what would have been different if Gore had been allowed to take office. I said that he probably would have been impeached after 9/11 and President Lieberman would have pretty much done exactly what Bush did. The only difference would be that he wouldn’t have politicized the Justice Department, not because he is against it, but because Democrats would never get away with such things even for a second.

Many of us knew that Bush was a disaster. The first time I saw him speak it was incomprehensible to me that the Republicans would try to sell someone this obviously inadequate to the country. It felt like the ultimate insult. And it was. Conservatives had so little respect for government that they sought to prove its irrelevance by installing a functional moron as president. The result is obvious.

I honestly don’t know why anyone would want to be president at this point. But one thing we’ve learned: cataclysmic events may make a president, but there’s no guarantee they are going to make him a great success. It’s just as likely he (or she) will be an epic failure. This isn’t something you want to take chances with. We should not elect incompetent boobs just because our inflated egos tell us that we are qualified to be president ourselves and so the country should elect someone who is “just like us.”

Maybe we should start educating people to see politicians the way they see athletes. They certainly may have lots of opinions about what a team should do. But even the most egotistical drunk screaming obscenities from the stands doesn’t truly believe that he’s a better hitter than Manny Ramirez or that the team should hire a bunch of guys off the streets to play in the outfield. They have more respect for the game than that. It would be nice if citizenship required as much respect for the country.

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Long Arc Of History, Justice, Etc.

by dday

I had heard that Connecticut was going to wait out a decision on same-sex marriage until after the elections to see what happened with California and Prop. 8. But the state Supreme Court couldn’t wait.

HARTFORD, Conn. – Connecticut’s Supreme Court ruled Friday that same-sex couples have the right to marry, making the state the third behind Massachusetts and California to legalize such unions.

The divided court ruled 4-3 that gay and lesbian couples cannot be denied the freedom to marry under the state constitution, and Connecticut’s civil unions law does not provide those couples with the same rights as heterosexual couples.

“I can’t believe it. We’re thrilled, we’re absolutely overjoyed. We’re finally going to be able, after 33 years, to get married,” said Janet Peck of Colchester, who was a plaintiff with her partner, Carole Conklin.

“Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same sex partner of their choice,” Justice Richard N. Palmer wrote in the majority opinion that overturned a lower court finding.

“To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others,” Palmer wrote.

You really can’t claim to promote a freedom agenda while wanting to curtail freedom to select members of society. The concept of freedom isn’t about freedom for everything you LIKE – it’s about diversity and tolerance and mutual respect. This latest civil rights issue allows people of good faith to be as true as the ideals they like to wear on their sleeves.

Otherwise, they can descend to the levels of bigotry.

Over the past 24 hours, we’ve raised over $30,000 to fight the forces of intolerance and maintain equality for all in California. Donate to No on Prop. 8 if you can so we can raise those numbers.

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FYI

by digby

In case you would like an explanation as to why people believe the government should take temporary ownership of the banks, this essay is the most concise explanation I’ve seen for why they believe the move is necessary and what it means.

But it’s important to remember that it’s just a band-aid to stop the bleeding and get things rolling again:

The temporary nationalisation of the banking system and the substitution of private debt by public debt will allow us to reach a new equilibrium. When this happens, a fundamental reform of the banking system will be necessary in order to remain in this benign equilibrium. When this is achieved the governments will be able to privatise the banking system again.

It’s possible that everyone in government and business and on wall street is scared enough to make that happen. But fear fades as fast as it appears. I hope they move quickly.

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No There There

by tristero

WeatherProsecutor:

As the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s (I was then chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of Michigan and took over the Weathermen prosecution in 1972), I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.

Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.

Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.

Game, set, match. And then we get a very interesting final paragraph:

I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of “prosecutorial misconduct.” It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

Got that? The indictment of Weathermen failed because of illegal wiretaps and other corrupt behavior on the part of a Republican administration.

(And for those of you who remember your history, W. Mark Felt is none other than Deep Throat which, since he colluded in this illegal activity, should give you some indication of how seriously lawless Nixon was that he agreed to become the Watergate whistleblower.)

Party Like It’s 1932!

by tristero

Your coffee didn’t wake you up? This will:

With today’s plunge in the stock market, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has now fallen 42 percent over the last year. Just how bad is that?

It’s nearly as bad as one terrible 12-month period from late 1973 to late 1974. Other than that, it’s the worst decline since 1932.

These historical comparisons are best done in real — that is, inflation-adjusted — terms, so that’s what we will use from here. In real terms, the decline since Oct. 9, 2007, has been about 45 percent. From the end of September 1973 to the end of September 1974, the S.&P. 500 dropped 48 percent.

Robert Shiller, an economist, keeps stock-market data going back to 1871. The only other 12-month periods worse than the current one all came in 1932. In the early months of 1932, stocks were trading for about 45 percent to 55 percent less than they had been a year before. And then they kept falling.

The worst 12-month period happened between June 1931 and June 1932, when the stocks fell 62 percent. (Mr. Shiller’s data is monthly, so there was probably a 365-day period that was slightly worse than this.)

Earlier this week, I mentioned that the market was closing in on a dubious milestone: having fallen more than 50 percent from its inflation-adjusted peak, which came in August 2000. This afternoon, it blew through that milestone. It’s now 53 percent lower than its peak.

This is the third great bear market of the last century.

I’m starting to think I should maybe worry about all this.

UPDATE: Fortunately, Paul Krugman has reassuring news… Actually, no.

UPDATE: As of 9:43 Eastern, Dow down 340.