“I saved Iraq!”

Hoping to rebut criticism that it had lost influence in Iraq and was too passive over the eight months since the March election there, or that its efforts were designed to keep Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in power, the administration offered a detailed written account of previously unreported meetings, visits and calls it said Biden and others had made.

Biden, Obama’s point man on Iraq, telephoned Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, a key figure in the negotiations, as often as several times a week, according to the administration timeline.

“Hello, Massoud? This is Joe Biden!”

“Who?”

“Joe Biden, Vice-President of the United States, and Barack Obama’s point man on Iraq!”

“Okay, if you say so. What have you got for me?”

“Nothing! But me and the President would be really, really happy if you Iraqis could form a government, nine months after the election!”

“Aren’t you the same guy who called yesterday? Give it a rest already!”

Apart from a couple of idiots like Biden and Obama, who the heck would want to claim any influence in Iraq?

Sixteen car bombs and road-side bombs detonated across Baghdad on Tuesday evening, prompting the government to declare a security alert and impose snap bans on vehicles.

More than 70 people were killed and 250 wounded in the blasts on Tuesday. At least 58 people, most of them attending mass, were killed and 75 wounded after a team of gunmen stormed the Catholic church and Iraqi special forces attempted a rescue Sunday.

That’s just in Baghdad, where the so-called “government” has the most control, and elsewhere nobody even counts the bodies.  

Sarah Palin has been bashing QE2, Ben Bernanke’s latest adventure in quantitative easing, and when the Wall Street Journal covered Sarah’s economic pronouncements like straight news, an angry mob of their relatively well-educated readers objected.

But most of their objections were personal, rather than substantial, and Andrew Polacek’s comment was typical.

Palin should stay out of things she doesn’t understand. Regardless, she is right that the Fed’s QE2 along with all the money printing in the world is not going to help us one bit.

Those Ivy-League bankers don’t want no moose-huntin’ hockey-mom to speak for them!

But most of the Journal’s readership hates Bernanke’s team at the Fed just as much as Sarah hates them, and some of their criticism of Bernanke is well-informed. For example, Thomas Dowling wrote that Bernanke’s main intention is “covering up the fact that he knew in 2006 and 2007 that banks like Citibank – and not just Citibank – were making intentionally bad loans.”

Reader Dowling isn’t really smart enough to figure that out for himself, and his comment is actually an unattributed quote from John Hussman, who has some claim to foresight about the collapsing credit bubble which continues to collapse. In 2003 he wrote…

“So the real question is this: why is anybody willing to hold this low interest rate paper if the borrowers issuing it are so vulnerable to default risk? That’s the secret. The borrowers don’t actually issue it directly. Instead, much of the worst credit risk in the U.S. financial system is actually swapped into instruments that end up being partially backed by the U.S. government.”

Now Bernanke is papering over cracks in the foundations of fundamentally unsound banks, and anybody (including Sarah Palin) who objects that QE2 won’t do much good for the rest of us is probably right, but what’s the Republican alternative, except…

More tax-cuts and deregulation!

For tea-baggers and most of the rest of the Republican Party, tax-cuts and deregulation are the magical twins which guarantee freedom and prosperity always and forever, and the only real problem with Sarah Palin as a spokes-person for Magical Republicanism is…

She’s stupid enough to believe their catechism, and usually recites it unadorned with the usual Republican pseudo-economics.

Karl Rove keeps whining about Palin’s lack of “gravitas,” but now that she’s learning some graver lingo, and chattering brightly about the Fed…

Poor old “Turd-Blossom” feels himself sliding into total irrelevance, along with so many other Bush-era confabulators, and good riddance!

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck won the last election, and it’s time for the rest of the GOP to sing their tune.

Among all the progressive and liberal blogs with which I am familiar, and that’s a lot of bloggers, IMHO the bloggers at Citizens for Legitimate Government have incomparably the best instinct for significant news breaking under the radar of most of the rest of us.

Those guys surprise me all the time, and not with trivia!

I decided to blog about them today instead of privately appreciating their constantly outside-the-box newsletter as usual because of a strangely familiar headline in the New York Times.

“D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning”

Where had I heard that before?

And then it came back to me, from the CLG newsletter almost three weeks ago, on October 16.

“Feds Confirm Mumbai Plotter Trained With Terrorists While Working for DEA”

With all due credit to Sebastian Rotella at ProPublica.org, who originally broke the story, I never would have seen it three weeks in advance of the Times if the bloodhounds at CLG hadn’t sniffed it out for me.

CLG would be an outstanding blog if they didn’t do anything else except keep me three jumps ahead of the M$M, but their most useful contribution to politics on the internet is headlining stories that never get covered, or only as the after-thoughts of editors who don’t understand their significance.

Bill would let US government block ‘infringing’ websites worldwide.

Yowza! Shut down anything on the internet, whenever they want to? Is that an important story for you and me and the rest of the blogosphere?

And again all due credit to Dan Goodin at TheRegister.co.uk, who broke the story, but why the heck wasn’t it all over the blogosphere? How did the rest of us miss it?

So I’m chasing that story, and if any other bloggers want to take a break from ranting about the same old shit and chase it, too, you can peruse this malignant threat to freedom on the internet under its innocuous title as S.3804: Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act.

“It’s just a harmless little bill to shut down mp3 pirates, and we would never ever use that incredible power to stifle dissent…”

“…unless we could dream up a really good excuse!”

So thanks again to Michael Rectenwald and Lori Price and the rest of their team at Citizens for Legitimate Government for maybe waking us up before our “benevolent” masters shut us down.

 

I’m not exactly easy to amaze about economic inequality in the USA, but I have to admit that my eyes literally bulged out of my head when I saw this bar graph from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances (via Wolff, 2010).

Median net worth for white households is $143,600.

Median net worth for black households in $9,300.

Median net worth for Latino households is $9,100.

Inequality in net worth dwarfs income inequality, with a ratio between whites and blacks or Latinos of about 15 to 1, and when you leave housing equity out of the mix, as in the third set of bars above, the ratio of financial equity, stocks, bonds, and money in the bank, increases to more than 80 to 1.

You fucking morons!

First it was Obama, the Progressive Hero!

Then it was Obama, the 13-Dimensional Chess-Politician!

And month after month after month you were nothing but brain-dead cheerleaders for that stinking con-man.

On the basis of what?

On the basis of nothing but ridiculous blather that anybody with the brains of a flea could see through in one second.

Weren’t you supposed to be “the reality-based community?”

But you were nothing but a mob of TV-intoxicated morons.

“Behold the charisma of Barack Obama!”

So you shit-eating thugs ganged up and banned anybody who didn’t drink the fucking Koolaid, and erased every comment that questioned your shit-head Messiah.

And now what?

We can all look forward to year after year of paralysis, while thousands species are wiped off the face of the earth and millions of Americans lose their jobs and houses and sink into total destitution, and Obama’s goddamned surge in Afghanistan destroys the lives of thousands of Afghan civilians and makes us hundreds of thousands of new blood-enemies, and citizens of every nation in Southwest Asia are tortured at Bagram, while Obama sucks ass for the banks.

So thanks for everything, you ass-sucking thugs and morons!

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued its monthly jobs report for October, and payrolls increased by 151,000 jobs while the main unemployment index was unchanged at 9.6%.

The index of unemployment remained the same while payrolls increased because the population of the United States also increased, and about the same number of new faces appeared in the labor market as the increase in payrolls.

So the “civilian non-institutional population” increased (in thousands) by 208,000 from 238,322 to 238,530, about what was expected, but…

The “civilian labor force” declined by 254,000 from 154,158 to 153,904, and that isn’t quite as easy to understand.

Likewise the “participation rate” of civilians in the civilian labor force has declined from 64.9% to 64.5% in the last year, from October 2009 to October 2010, and that four tenths of one percent decline on a base of about 238 million people means that about a million Americans are essentially nowhere in the usual measures of unemployment, neither employed or unemployed.

But they exist, and they don’t have jobs.  

So now you know, and remember…

No slapping!

Paul Krugman, October 31, 2010…

They denounce debt relief, calling it a reward for the undeserving. More and more voters, both here and in Europe, are convinced that what we need is not more stimulus but more punishment. Governments must tighten their belts; debtors must pay what they owe.

The irony is that in their determination to punish the undeserving, voters are punishing themselves: by rejecting fiscal stimulus and debt relief, they’re perpetuating high unemployment. They are, in effect, cutting off their own jobs to spite their neighbors.

This is selfishness intensified into morbidity, like gangrene of the soul.

Far East Movement – Like A G6 is sitting at the top of the Billboard 100 right now!

When we drink we do it right gettin slizzard

Sippin sizzurp in my ride, like Three 6

Now I’m feelin so fly like a G6

Like a G6, Like a G6

Now I’m feelin so fly like a G6

FYI of you the uncool, “sizzurp” is a mixed drink mixed with promethazine and codeine, a G6 is a Gulfstream 650, and promethazine is a relatively boring sedative except when used in conjunction with narcotics like codeine, and then it produces euphoria, irritability, dizziness, constipation, and confusion in the elderly, like flying upside-down in a Gulfstream G650 or voting in a fucked-up election.

A flagship-venue for middle-brow intellectuals in America, the Atlantic Monthly is currently exhibiting a pathetic list of big ideas from “Brave Thinkers,” and…

Weep while you puke, America, because the best that your brightest can come up with is a sad little idea by a nauseating shit-head named…

Deborah Gist!

In your first year as the commissioner of education in Rhode Island, you earned headlines for backing a plan to fire all the high-school teachers in the poorly performing district of Central Falls. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and even President Obama chimed in with support.

Fire every teacher in the district! Obama loves that plan!

And Central Falls wants to thank Deborah Gist and her biggest fan Barack Obama for all their help with everything, because…

Central Falls is bankrupt! The entire city is in receivership! And why wouldn’t it be? It’s the smallest, densest, poorest city in Rhode Island, with 18,000 poor people crammed into 1.29 square miles, 800 acres of antequated factories and urban blight, and what can we do to help, asks Barack Obama?

Let’s fire all their fucking teachers!

A gang of Wall Street maggots is currently digesting the bankrupt remnants of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but all MGM really needed to stay alive was one big hit, and there it is, right under their noses, in the board-room!

Take a look at the smug, porcine features of Jay Goffman, Skadden Arp’s restructuring specialist.

Now imagine the monster from Aliens ripping his face off!

Boffo!

But wait! It’s gets even better, because Jay is only one of three evil triplets, and in the second reel Kay Goffman is infected with an extra-terrestrial Super-Plague, and…

Pus explodes out his eye-sockets!

Then ten homeless grandmas capture Ell Goffman and skin him alive! Then they set him on fire and push him into a meat-grinder!

Kowabonga!

That’s what I call entertainment!