No, seriously!  He’s campaigning on that catchy slogan in Idaho.

Harley Brown eagerly wants to level a continent (the terrorist continent), without so much as breaking a sweat.

Trident…when you care enough to send the very best!

Harley Brown’s frisky desire to go beyond assorted pales, verges, and brinks,

The difficult we do immediately.  The impossible may take longer.

is reminiscent of Henry Kissinger, with less originality and wit, a cynicism apparently more appropriate for an audience of Idaho voters than the New York Times.

Now, because I haven’t given a fair sketch of this “real man for Congress,” you’ll have to hazard a guess about his views on immigration and Obama’s birth certificate.

Then again, once you’ve leveled a continent, what’s left to marvel at?

Via Charlie Davis.

Lloyd “That’$ why they call me, ‘$hine'” Blankfein:

Enjoyed your prowe$$ a$ you begged u$ not to fleece the public.  You $o $a$$y! He $pank$ me, he $pank$ me!!  LOLcat$.

Thank$ a quadrillion!  Hug$ and ki$$e$,

Goldman $ach$

P$: Love$ you!

America is back, baby!

Way to go, America!  Your investment in the future has paid off handsomely!  

But honestly?  This just makes me sad.

75% of young Americans are ineligible to serve their country because they have either failed to graduate high school, engaged in criminal activity, or are physically or mentally unfit.  

William Black, economist, lawyer, white-collar criminologist and senior regulator during the S & L crisis who specializes in financial regulation and financial fraud by elites grabbed the aforementioned financial elites by the lapels and proceeded kicking them in the testicles in a manner unbefitting a gentleman in his testimony before the House  Committee on Financial Services on the issues Lehman’s utterly fraudulent sub-prime and liar’s loans and the abject failures by government to rein in criminal activity.

Black’s relentless boot-job to the groin continues in written testimony (pdf) and includes The Fed, Bubbles Greenspan, Time 2009 Person of the Year Ben Bernanke, Timmy Boombotz G, the SEC, the DOJ, the FBI, and of course, the first-order criminals at Lehman and their subsidiary Aurora, all of whom made this historically gargantuan public rip-off possible.

How about after these criminals stop puking from the blunt trauma and pulverization applied to their gonads we hand out some criminal indictments?

According to Peter Boone and Simon Johnson, the six largest banks currently have assets in excess of 63% of GDP:

The president is absolutely correct that our priority should be to limit the size of our largest banks and to reduce substantially the risks that can be taken by any financial entity that is backed, implicitly or explicitly, by the federal government. As a result of the crisis and various government rescue efforts, the largest six banks in our economy now have total assets in excess of 63 percent of GDP (based on the latest available data). This is a significant increase from even 2006, when the same banks’ assets were around 55 percent of GDP, and a complete transformation compared with the situation in the United States just 15 years ago, when the six largest banks had combined assets of only around 17 percent of GDP. If the status quo persists, we are set up for another round of the boom-bailout-bust cycle that the head of financial stability at the Bank of England now terms a “doom loop.”

In recent decades we have witnessed an ever-growing war-mongering police state merging power with private corporations that increasingly suck the wealth of our nation into fewer and fewer hands and grotesquely warp the political process using secrecy, bribery, extortion, theft, war-profiteering, revolving doors between government and the private sector, and propaganda through concentrated media ownership.  The confluence and concentration of political, financial, media and technological leviathans has transformed us into a self-cannibalizing society.  

Given the massive financialization engorging our economy and political system, and especially in the wake of destruction from the 2008 “financial crisis,”  it remains shocking that the Supreme Court saw fit to decide yet another ideological 5-4 split favoring corporations, with Kennedy again providing the swing vote.  The Citizens United ruling can only hasten the pace of our “doom loop,” which we literally cannot afford.  The replacement Justice Stevens is a critical event that Obama cannot fumble.

Clenis:

April 18 (Bloomberg) — Former President Bill Clinton said he should have pushed for regulation of financial derivatives when he was president, rejecting the advice of top economic advisers Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.

The argument was that derivatives didn’t need transparency because they were “expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of people would buy them,” Clinton said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “The flaw in this argument was that first of all, sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make it without transparency.”

Then I wuz double-punked by W’s lax regulators.

I wuz also punked by NATO on Yugoslavia, punked by Madeleine Albright on Iraq sanctions, punked by the fucking French on Rwanda, punked by an earthquake in Haiti….

Also, Alan Greenspan: Still a lying sociopath after all these years.

Glenn Greenwald opining on civil liberties encroachments by a unitary executive:

As usual, it doesn’t pay to engage Greenwald in a counter-struggle.  Many species of prey simply fall into an autonomic state of hyperarousal and “tonic immobility” when attacked, because any struggle would be merely a further incentive for the predator to finish the kill.  I’m looking forward to his Monday article on alternatives to Elena Kagan.  

Not yet, but Dylan Ratigan’s righteous rant needs to be seen by every American, because he is throwing gas into the strike zone, while keeping it at a level any eight year old can understand.

OMG.  Obama is an Iranian tool!

When Obama was pressed on the question of Israeli nukes at the nuclear summit, he first hemmed, hawed, and balked:

“Initially you were talking about US behavior, and then suddenly we’re talking about Israel. Let me talk about the United States,” the president said. “I do think that as part of the NPT, our obligation, as the largest nuclear power in the world, is to take steps to reducing our nuclear stockpile. And that’s what the START treaty was about, sending a message that we are going to meet our obligations…as far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their program.”

Well, why not comment on their program that they don’t even have?

He went on:

“What I’m going to point to is the fact that consistently we have urged all countries to become members of the NPT. So there’s no contradiction there,” he said. “And so whether we’re talking about Israel or any other country, we think that becoming part of the NPT is important.  And that, by the way, is not a new position. That’s been a consistent position of the United States government, even prior to my administration.”

Kudos to the president.  Wingnut heads will explode.

Update: Israel responds.

“The policy of ambiguity is the foundation of Israel’s security; it has always been and will continue to be. President Obama did not ask to change it in the current period,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told public radio.

Nukes?  What nukes?  Israel who?

Wilkerson’s sworn statement should be the clanging death knell for Obama’s military commissions

Via the Times Online and Truthout‘s Jason Leopold, we have Lt. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson’s sworn affidavit in support of GITMO detainee Adel Hassan Hamad’s lawsuit against Bush, Rumsfeld, et al., for wrongful imprisonment and abuse, that the majority of both GITMO and Abu Ghraib detainees were arbitrarily imprisoned.

With respect to the assertions by Mr. Hamad that he was wrongfully seized and detained, it became apparent to me as early as August 2002, and probably earlier to other State Department personnel who were focused on these issues, that many of the prisoners detained at Guantánamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all. I soon realized from my conversations with military colleagues as well as foreign service officers in the field that many of the detainees were, in fact, victims of incompetent battlefield vetting. There was no meaningful way to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory of another state such as Pakistan.